The Benetton clothing company withdrew an ad Wednesday featuring a fake photo of Pope Benedict XVI kissing a top Egyptian imam on the lips after the Vatican denounced it as an unacceptable provocation.
Benetton had said its “Unhate” campaign launched Wednesday was aimed at fostering tolerance and “global love.”
The campaign’s fake photos feature a half-dozen purported political nemeses in lip-locked embraces, including President Barack Obama and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.
The photo of the pope kissing Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb of Cairo’s al-Azhar institute, the pre-eminent theological school of Sunni Islam, had been on Benetton’s website all day but was pulled about an hour after the Vatican’s protest.
Al-Azhar suspended interfaith talks with the Vatican earlier this year after Benedict called for greater protections for Egypt’s minority Christians.
A Benetton spokesman confirmed to The Associated Press that the pope-imam ad was no longer part of the campaign.
It wasn’t clear if the ad had been published anywhere; on Wednesday images from the campaign were unfurled briefly in Milan, New York, Paris, Tel Aviv and Rome but were quickly taken away.
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi called the ad an “unacceptable” manipulation of the pope’s likeness that offended the religious sentiments of the faithful.
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