Her headscarf hangs long down at the brink of her bum and subject to occasional sweeps of wind. Her eyes, glinting perfect blue, are focused with womanly temperament.

Half-way up her mass-consumed thigh, shielded as it momentarily is from the world, stands a quorum of child refugees who are saying god-knows-what to her. Whatever it is, she’s heard it before, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Africa, and now here, at an obsolete Tobacco factory on the Turkish-Syrian border. Jolie went to bequeath some goodwill to the Northern Syrians who have fled the indiscriminate attrition of their own Syrian security forces. (Click here for Human Rights Watch’s overview of the conflict)

Angelina Jolie is arguably the world’s most successful woman, if not the apex of feminine beauty. She has been touted for her humanitarianism when away from the picture shows.

Yet showbiz has always spawned that particular icon who’s a deceptive mix of crowd-pleasing morals and backstage phony. Perhaps this smokescreen character is not so much the fault of the actors themselves as it is the credulous consumers who build the pedestals upon which their heroes are then placed.

Take the Lady Diana as a case in point. Every public figure does charity work, its part of being a celebrity. For Diana, to her great fortune, her work did not have the appearance of being a mere fashion accessory. In between Princessly getaways to zones of the world her followers (subjects?) will never have heard of, Diana would dawn a pair of slacks and do a photo-op in a sad part of Africa. This charming stopover in, say, Angola, was a rewarding one for the Diana Spenser for it had the effect of making her fans feel that she cared for them individually. The, however, many millions of unemployed Brits need some sparkle in their lives I suppose.

Jolie’s image is more well-groomed than a Hollywood pedicure and this fact alone should trigger the varying but innate capacity to detect bullshit that I believe all sane people possess.

When Jolie was researching for her forgettable shit movie, Beyond Borders, she got a glimpse of the obscene world of warfare that infects most of this shiny blue marble. In her post-revelation state, Jolie undertook the respectable task to try to end the conditions she saw.

Most currently, last week to be precise, Jolie was conversing with refugees on the Syrian-Turkish border, a place where souls in search of safety find only the opposite.

Is this U.N. sponsored voyage another blip on her CV? A genuine imperative? Both (which it certainly can be)?

Jolie, to her great credit, met with the women of Bosnia a bit over a year ago. The Bosnians were the latest European minority subjected to a campaign of ethnic cleansing – ‘ethnic cleansing’, to be sure, was coined by those Serbians and Croatians who fancied themselves as the cleansers, its what they called what they were doing. These women were raped by Serbian forces who razed whole towns like Srebenica and Zvordnik. Jolie went to hear their story (which is a greater day’s work than I could ever have said to accomplish).

But Jolie’s visit was negated if not tarnished when she took the tales she traveled to hear and rendered them into her directorial debut, a story about a Bosnia woman in an internment camp who falls in a paradoxical love for her Serbian aggressor.

The head of Bosnia’s Association of Women Victims of War said, “Crimes were committed here, in Bosnia, and we want to meet her here. We wanted to talk woman to woman. She should have asked after the victims, come [to Bosnia] before the shooting to hear our voice. As far as we are concerned a love story could not have existed in a camp. Such an interpretation is causing us mental suffering.”

After her meeting, Jolie sent her cameras and production squad to shoot some Bosnian scenery and said if Bosnia women have concerns, well, they could meet her in Hungary and pitch them to her.

Now Jolie’s film contains no explicit mention of sexual imposition or assault, but some are crying whitewash. Whether a misunderstanding or a foul use of an even more foul set of events, the woman of Bosnia who met Jolie feel scorned and hoaxed.

Jolie too has strode the scorched fields of Cambodia, where she came across Maddox, her adopted child. In a place known gracelessly as ‘the killing fields’, Jolie thought it to be the most perfect atmosphere to hawk LV handbags from a miserable raft. Her fee was transfered to charities of her choosing. Some people disapprove of this type of marketing. I myself am indifferent. The photo seems ridiculous to me at any rate.

Angelina Jolie has a supple mind and has been described as ‘scary smart’. If the cameras are going to be on her, at least she will take the trail of flashes to the forsaken ends of the earth. Good on her. But let’s hope, unlike in Bosnia, she continues to do so with a tincture of class that is unfortunately so easy to fake these days.