World Leaders Kiss in New ‘Unhate’ Campaign [Video]

Barack Obama and Hugo Chaves sitting in a tree… A new campaign by the United Colors of Benetton shows world leaders like President Obama, Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, Angela Merkel, and Nicolas Sarkozy locking lips in order to promote the idea of “unhate.”

The Benetton Group hopes that the “unhate” campaign can contribute to a culture of tolerance.

Alessandro Benetton said:

“While global love is still a utopia, albeit a worthy one, the invitation ‘not to hate’, to combat the ‘culture of hatred’, is an ambitious but realistic objective… At this moment in history, so full of major upheavals and equally large hopes, we have decided, through this campaign, to give widespread visibility to an ideal notion of tolerance and invite the citizens of every country to reflect on how hatred arises particularly from fear of ‘the other’ and of what is unfamiliar to us…”

The group plans says that they will have young people post the photo-shopped images of kissing world leaders at symbolic locations around the world, like Tel Aviv, New York, Rome, Milan, Paris.

The group is also releasing a film, UNHATE, by French director Laurent Chanez. The film will center on the “precarious balance and complex interweaving between the drive to hate and the reasons to love.”

Here’s a trailer for the UNHATE movie. (Warning, the video contains, well, a lot of kissing.)

If you want to get in on the kissing action, the Unhate website features a kiss wall. You can upload a picture of a kiss (one person) and you’ll be randomly paired up with another kisser.

What do you think of Benetton’s UNHATE campaign?