“Nicole Kidman has made a public stand against terrorism,” reports the Herald Sun. “The actress, joined by 84 other high-profile Hollywood stars, directors, studio bosses and media moguls, has taken out a powerfully-worded full page advertisement in today’s Los Angeles Times newspaper.”

It specifically targets “terrorist organizations” such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

“We the undersigned are pained and devastated by the civilian casualties in Israel and Lebanon caused by terrorist actions initiated by terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” the ad reads.

“If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world, chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die.

“We need to support democratic societies and stop terrorism at all costs.”

In addition to Kidman, Michael Douglas, Dennis Hopper, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Danny De Vito, Don Johnson, James Woods, Kelly Preston, Patricia Heaton and William Hurt signed the ad, as did directors Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Dick Donner and Sam Raimi. “Other Hollywood powerplayers supporting the ad included Sumner Redstone, the chairman and majority owner of Paramount Pictures, and billionaire mogul, Haim Saban.”

Of course, we cannot expect pampered Hollywood actors, directors, and studio moguls to know jack about the situation in Lebanon or Palestine, not anymore than the average American, tuned in to Fox News and CNN, knows anything about the facts behind Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.

As we know, that is if we pay attention, Israel’s invasion was planned over a year ago, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail.”

As Seymour Hersh writes in the current issue of the New Yorker, the “Bush Administration … was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.”

In other words, Israel’s brutal invasion was deemed a dry run for a future attack against Iran, no matter that, in essence, Hezbollah defeated Israel and, obviously, Iran would resist any such shock and awe campaign rather successfully and make big trouble for the U.S. occupation in Iraq.

“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told Hersh. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”

Kidman, Willis, Douglas, Hopper, and the rest cannot be expected to understand the true nature of Hezbollah, a nature diametrically opposed to the corporate media version of the resistance group. For instance, we can assume with a great degree of accuracy that Nicole Kidman does not know that Israel repeatedly crossed the Blue Line—that is to say, it violated Lebanese sovereignty hundreds, if not more than a thousand times—as it is obvious, by her signature on this advert, she does not bother to read beyond corporate media headlines, if that. On the other hand, she may be an ardent supporter of Zionist crimes against humanity.

“Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored ‘blue line’ on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports,” writes Anders Strindberg for the Christian Science Monitor. “Hizbullah’s military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah’s leadership; this indeed has been the pattern.”

In the process of its violations, Israel has terrorized the general population, destroyed private property, and killed numerous civilians. This past February, for instance, 15-year-old shepherd Yusuf Rahil was killed by unprovoked Israeli cross-border fire as he tended his flock in southern Lebanon. Israel has assassinated its enemies in the streets of Lebanese cities and continues to occupy Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms area, while refusing to hand over the maps of mine fields that continue to kill and cripple civilians in southern Lebanon more than six years after the war supposedly ended. What peace did Hizbullah shatter?

It is amazing the Christian Science Monitor, usually up there with the worst of the corporate media, published Strindberg’s article. “Once the Arabs had rejected the UN’s right to give away their land and to force them to pay the price for European pogroms and the Holocaust, the creation of Israel in 1948 was made possible only by ethnic cleansing and annexation,” he continues. “This is historical fact and has been documented by Israeli historians, such as Benny Morris. Yet Israel continues to contend that it had nothing to do with the Palestinian exodus, and consequently has no moral duty to offer redress.”

But then the pampered elite of Hollywood, far too busy shelling out mindless pablum for multinational “entertainment” corporations, cannot be bothered with historical facts. “Western discourse seems unable to accommodate a serious, as opposed to cosmetic concern for Palestinians’ rights and liberties: The Palestinians are the Indians who refuse to live on the reservation; the Negroes who refuse to sit in the back of the bus,” writes Strindberg.

The fundamental obstacle to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict is that we have given up on asking what is right and wrong, instead asking what is “practical” and “realistic.” Yet reality is that Israel is a profoundly racist state, the existence of which is buttressed by a seemingly endless succession of punitive measures, assassinations, and wars against its victims and their allies.

A realistic understanding of the conflict, therefore, is one that recognizes that the crux is not in this or that incident or policy, but in Israel’s foundational and persistent refusal to recognize the humanity of its Palestinian victims. Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas are driven by a desire to “wipe out Jews,” as is so often claimed, but by a fundamental sense of injustice that they will not allow to be forgotten.

“If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world, chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die. We need to support democratic societies and stop terrorism at all costs,” aver Kidman, DeVito, Don Johnson, and 81 others.

Translation: if Israel and the United States do not endeavor mightily to snuff out resistance to their diabolical plan to turn the Middle East into a slave plantation and huge open-air prison, where millions of Arabs and Muslims are reduced to pauperized “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” innocent people will continue to die by way of depleted uranium, white phosphorus and cluster bombs, and other illegal weapons. Obviously, Kidman and crew are full square behind Israel’s ethnic cleansing and the neocon push to kill thousands, if not millions of Iranians and Syrians.

If this is not a reason to never again visit a multiplex cinema or rent a DVD, I don’t know what is.