Pro-Palestinian group slammed over photo
TWO months after being caught out using a photo of children killed in Syria and portraying them as Palestinian victims in Gaza, the Australians for Palestine (AFP) group is at it again.
This time, the group’s Facebook page has linked to an article on Falastin News containing an image of a Palestinian child missing his arms and legs, with the heading “Hundred of Gaza children permanently disabled by this summer’s conflict”.
As reported in The Australian, the child in the Associated Press image lost his limbs due to a rare genetic disease and is being cared for in an Israeli hospital, a fact pointed out below the article a day before AFP shared it.
Responding via Facebook to the article in The Australian, AFP editor Sonja Karkar acknowledged “the picture used to illustrate the story was wrong”.
But she said her group was no more responsible than “hundreds of thousands of social media users” who had circulated a BBC story about a Syrian massacre with an accompanying photo of an Iraqi massacre.
“The BBC had to apologise for the error not the social media users,” she said.
She went on to accuse journalist Christian Kerr of deliberately trying to discredit AFP instead of exposing and condemning “Israel’s recent atrocities against the Palestinian people in Gaza”.
Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) director of international and community affairs Jeremy Jones said with the “explanation” for their latest “mistake”, “the arrogance and self-righteousness of Australians for Palestine is now as transparent as their lack of knowledge of the matters on which they purport to influence Australian policies”.
“If they replaced their invective with investigation and sought to understand, rather than undermine moves to a peaceful and fair resolution of the competing claims of the peoples in the Middle East, they could have credibility – but it appears they prefer to remain as self-appointed sabre-rattlers rather than campaigners for justice.”
GARETH NARUNSKY
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