In an interview with Hello! magazine, Angelina Jolie casually mentions that she’s selected a career for megacute tot Zahara:
Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie is planning to build an AIDS clinic in Ethiopia for her daughter Zahara to manage when she grows up.
Jolie will make a trip to her adopted daughter’s native country to discuss building the clinic as part of the work of the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, a charity she set up with her husband Brad Pitt in 2006 for humanitarian aid around the world.
“We will be building a Tuberculosis/AIDS clinic in Ethiopia. The one we plan for Zahara to take over when she is older,” Jolie told Britain’s Hello magazine.
Zahara could very well grow up to want to become a philanthropist like her mum. But Angelina seems to have forgotten that era when she resented her father for pushing her into show business, even dropping his name so she wouldn’t be associated with him.
And as a teenager, she didn’t even want to be an actress; she considered a career as a funeral director instead.
Perhaps she ought to remember that not everyone grows up to be what they wanted to be when they were three years old. (Except for me, I’ve always wanted to dish dirt on really good-looking people.)
“Perhaps she ought to remember that not everyone grows up to be what they wanted to be when they were three years old.”
Nicely put.
As if her daughter will even want to go back to the cess pool that is Ethiopia after she has grown up in a priviliged life with two movie stars as parents.
Er…Philanth-R-opist?
Nobody said that a wanna-be funeral director would be a good parent
There’s so much wrong here it’s hard to begin. First of all, how often is Zahara in Ethiopia? How connected does she even feel to Africa? The Jolie-Pitt traveling circus hasn’t landed on Africa since the birth of Shiloh - in a private compound away from the hordes.
Second, Zahara has lived a designer life from the get go. I still marvel at the thousand dollar purse that Jolie bought for Zahara. I think she was closer to two at the time, she and Ange had matching designer bags. Meanwhile, Angie was rail thin. The reason she wasn’t eating? Because observing kids starving made it too difficult to eat a bowl of soup. Food bad/designer purses good for ending poverty?
Thirdly, yeah, it seems pretty condescending to assume that Zahara will want to leave her mansion dwelling, designer self behind to manage a clinic. Real aid workers love that kind of shit. When people who aren’t really educated in aid work, haven’t experienced what it is like to endure such horrible conditions - the kind Zahara has escaped - come in and “manage” things, it feels the real workers with such joy. That should be a real treat for the people who have been putting in work because it is their calling. Gee, the person who has been running the show for years can just step aside when Zahara’s rich parents give the word.
I wonder what Maddox and Pax are being shoe horned into? Will Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne have the same kind of work chosen for them?
Angaelina isn’t making a career choice for Zahara - she’s teaching all her children that along with privilege comes responsibility. Inasmuch as the children are also being taught to learn about, and love their birth countries, itt follows that she and Pitt would create a clinic to address the two greatest problems facing Ethiopia - tuberculois and aids, and that the daughter they are raising to be socially responsible is expected to continue their workv.
Deceiver is deceptive whsn it misleads with with that “micromanaging” garbage.
Long live the Jolie Pitts.
Planning to does not equate forcing someone. It is better to plan and fail than not plan at all. I’m sure somebody else will do the work if Zee does not want. She’s hoping to teach her to be responsible and to give back to where she came from.
I applaud the hopes that Brad and Angelina have for their child(ren), but considering what kind of an affect living a life of luxury tends to have on people, especially children in Southern California, my glib expectations for the kid are set much closer to “Paris Hilton” than “Mother Theresa”. A happy medium, I suppose, would be if she’d followed the way most Hollywood pseudo-activists go, and simply raise concern for a cause or two as a way of attention whoring. My guess is this is the best outcome we can reasonably expect.
One of these days though, I’d love to hear about a celebrity going and doing aid work in a third-world country without massive tax-breaks, media coverage or an entrouage. Until then, none of these guys are really impressing me…
@ Appacorn - I think Deceiver’s simply trying to highlight the hypocrisy that while Jolie hated her father trying to drive her career so much, the Pitts are already planning on making their adotive daughter an aid-clinic manager. There is something to that, and it’s none-too deceptive at all…
appacom/planning … speaking of volunteer work, how nice of you both to shill for them for free, apparently
You need to quit assuming Jolie is choosing Zahara’s “career” because that is NOT the case at all. Jolie has said all along that her intent was for her children to always maintain a connection to their roots - their culture and heritage. She has someone who teaches Maddox Khmer, Pax gets lessons to maintain his Vietnamese language skills and they want Z to learn Americ, which is spoken in Ethiopia. You’re forgetting that Jolie has had the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Project (MJPP) in Cambodia for the last 6 years and last year, with the help of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs and the UN, it became the first Millenium Village project outside of Africa and is helping the citizens in Maddox home region to overcome poverty, demine the land, reserve forestry, and creating microbusinesses for the people to be able to sustain their community and their lives as a whole. Their intent is for Maddox to MANAGE the project when he’s old enough in the same way they do now. That is to say, they’re not spending every day in Cambodia. They have lives and careers that FUND the project. Pitt has said he’d like to see Maddox become an engineer or an architect, but as long as he’s happy his future career choices come second. The same is true of Zahara. They don’t intend for this to necessarily be her life’s work, but that she takes over managing the program and overseeing the fundraising just as they do.
If Jolie & Pitt weren’t making an effort to keep these children connected to the countries they were adopted from, then you’d be complaining about that. They can’t win with judgmental hypocrites like you.
As someone who frequents a couple entertainment sites, it never ceases to amaze me how many whack-jobs come pouring out of the woodwork to defend a couple celebs that wouldn’t deign to look down on them if they’d stepped on their head.
You buy that these people REALLY care about third world refugees as much as they’d like you to believe they do? You REALLY believe that Angelina Jolie ‘can’t eat soup because she witnessed how people there can’t even get food’. Yeah right (imagine a masturbatory gesture here). But she sure doesn’t feel guilty owning more property than some of the countries she visits. Or blowing millions on unnecessary fashion accessories. Or chartering private jets to bound around to all her do-gooding.
I call . I know people who REALLY care. The middle school teacher 3 houses down that makes 30 grand a year and still manages to pay for her way every summer to go to Africa or South America and dig wells with her own hands. The volunteers I met serving in Iraq. People who dodged bombs and bullets just to bring electricity and running water to hospitals and orphanages. These are people that truly couldn’t handle going to sleep with a full stomach while those around them were starving. These are people who would give away 2 of their 3 daily MREs to children they ran into, because “It’s only been 12 hours since I’ve eaten, and this little girl hadn’t had solid food in 4 days.”
I’m not saying celebrities have to be Saints, but when you really seem to be bucking for the title of your own volition, you’d better be willing to live within reasonable means. When you’re flying to help starving people on your private jet, eating caviar - you’re just the worst kind of hypocrite.
“If Jolie & Pitt weren’t making an effort to keep these children connected to the countries they were adopted from, then you’d be complaining about that.”
Quit assuming, ‘QuitAssuming’. And quit putting words in other people’s mouths/posts that they didn’t in fact say or write. While that makes it easier for you to ‘win’ your arguments, you’re just arguing with yourself.
I don’t understand the fuss.
Parents ALWAYS micromanage their kids life…just by putting them in schools, teaching them certain things at home, they influence, oriente their kids life.
Hell parents DO SAVE money for their kids future studies in college without knowing if they ever will study a specific subject.
You have to start somewhere and parents have hopes, dreams about what they want their kids to become. It’s all natural. That doesn’t means they force them but they certainly influence theme like the rest of their environment, wether it’s school, TV, cultural background, ect…
Oh puh-leeeeeeze… how many parents have their kids’s lives mapped out for them even before they leave the womb? “He’s going to be a doctor.” “He’s going to be a lawyer.” “He’s going to be a CEO.” Then they raise heaven and earth to get them into the classiest preschool in town and then into whichever private school has the highest ratio of graduates accepted into the Ivies. Angelina and Brad have set up a clinic for Z to run it if she wants to. If she doesn’t want to, they’ll find someone else to run it. Damn, talk about hypocrites… you idiots are the nit-pickiest hypocrites I ever saw in my life. Next thing you know you’ll want to call protective services because Pax is barefoot in one of the photos in People and you’ll claim that is evidence of child neglect.
Janet- yeah, a lot of parents micromanage their kids lives, but not parents who have made a really huge point about hating having had that kind of expectation hanging over their head. If they did, they’d be…hypocrites!
This isn’t a “this celebrity is worse than everyone you know” site but a “hey, this celebrity is saying one thing and doing another” site. Remember? Pointing out celebrity hypocrisy does not equal burning them in effigy, guys, so you can chill a little.
Again, everybody who’s screaming that deceiver is idiotic and the couple in question are saint’s, the reason this is a deceiver article is because Jolie resented her father’s interference in her life to the point of dropping his name. You’d think that she would then be like those parents who encourage their children to explore options (which they do, which is good) but doesn’t make a point of telling magazine interviewers what they expect the child to grow up to do. When she’s 3.
And yeah, methinks giving her a $1000 purse when she’s 2 means that despite language lessons, she might not actually be connected to her homeland and it’s miseries. ‘Cause, you know, they took her out of it. To avoid those miseries.
Do the people who get all passionate about and spend a lot of time making long posts about the sanctity of ANY celebrities’ philanthropic ventures actually support those charities by donating money or time?
Is it possible that Angelina simply meant that Zahara will manage the charity itself in the same way she has said that Maddox is meant to eventually take over management of the Maddox Jolie-Pitt project? The Maddox Jolie Pitt project is a conservation and community development organization in rural Cambodia that she and Brad Pitt set up to provide direct support to the local villages, endangered wildlife and habitats. They are the co-Presidents of the organization and fund it, but the charity itself is actually run by someone else as executive director.
I would imagine she doesn’t mean for her children to move to the countries of their birth to become charity workers; I simply took her words to mean that she is creating charitable foundations for her children in their birth countries that they can eventually become active with, and also to give them a sense of attachment to those same countries. It’s not really any different than Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones asking their friends to forgo presents for their son in lieu of donations to a charitable foundation they set up in his name.
I guess I’m struggling to understand why everyone is so quick on the offensive with Angelina here.
I have to admit I am not a regular deceiver reader, but I absolutely love the way this piece was written. I am so glad that someone had the balls to call AJ out on her hypocrisy, which there is much of. Anyone who buys into this philanthropy bull that those two have been shoveling is truly naive. They have stiffed charities in the past and never do anything without publicizing it. I can guarantee this orphanage will never be built. They are both vile. I am also tired of their silly little fangirls who jump at any chance to defend them. Take note, they wouldn’t give you the time of day if you were ever 2 feet away.
What I want to know is what breed of mother *doesn’t* micro-manage their kid’s life. Heck, my mother wanted me to be a veterinarian. But still, being expected to run a clinic for AIDS victims is a lot of responsibility for a kid who isn’t even in kindergarten yet.
blithe- the reason a lot of us have gone on the offensive is that Jolie makes such a huge, huge deal about how charitable she is, which raises her profile and forces people to take note. The consequence of doing that is people are going to look at you a lot closer. Hence, celebrity. Which is how people will notice if you talk about planning your kids future just like you hated your dad doing to you. Hence, hypocrite.
That’s why she deserves the post, but as for a lot of the posters more virulent anti-jolie content…well, you have to admit that if Jolie was truly distressed about the conditions in these countries the way she claims to be, she might skip the $1000 purse for a 2 year old and instead feed a whole lot more two year olds. Is it unfair to think a celeb would devote everything to their cause? You betcha. Most of us wouldn’t either. But it does make them human, and flawed, and not nearly as devoted as they would like us to believe they are. Places like this are a nice reality check if anything. It’s not that the work these guys do is necessarily bad- it’s just not as selfless and shiny perfect as everyone wants us to think.
When Zahara grows up, she’ll probably get to chose whether she actually wants to be responsible for it or not. If she chooses not to, they will simply have to choose someone else to run it, be it another kid or someone experienced. Think of it like the person you know who got into the air conditioning business because that’s what their parents do. They could leave, go to college and pursue some other career. It’s simply a choice.
And hey, either way Ethiopia wins. That’s a new hospital either way. So what’s the fuss?
I can’t stand this over -rated wh8re
There’s nothing wrong with setting up a clinic. It’s the expectation that this is what little Zahara is going to do with her life by her parents’ design, after Ange resented the expectation she had to go into showbiz. Maybe Zahara will want to be a fashion designer or a photographer or a cop or a forest ranger. Who knows? I realize running an AIDS clinic sounds like a loftier career path than acting, but why not just set up the clinic and see what pans out with the kids as they get older? They may not be cut out for charity management.
*applauds StrawberryGirl*
Exactly. Nobody is protesting building a clinic here. Just…pointing out the hypocrisy.
I’d love to know how some of you came to the conclusion that Jon Voight pushed Jolie into acting. You do realise that’s about as far from the truth as you can get, right? Your arguments might be a little more viable if they were based off factual information.
I hope some of you aren’t as naive as you’re coming across. You make it sound like Zahara will have to move out to Etiopia the minute she turns 16 and manage the whole thing while she bunks down in the desert with the locals.
im so sick of brad and angelina and i really do feel sorry for their kids. they’ll probably be foreced into i-don’t-even-know-what! and like someone said, i highly doubt zahara will want to go back to that after living with brad and angelina, sheesh.