We are all by now thoroughly accustomed to fake news, false narratives pushed by elements within the mainstream media elite, to skew, shape and mold public opinion. But this past week, we were introduced to a new variation of the fake news paradigm — fake refugees. On May 29, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) featured a photo on its social media pages and website of what it described was an 11-year-old Gazan girl named Aya, pictured against the backdrop of strewn rubble and a destroyed building, like reported by frontpagemag.com. Alongside Aya’s photo was the following emotive, heart-wrenching narrative designed to channel dollars and euros from unwitting donors to UNRWA’s already overstuffed coffers;
“Imagine being cut off from the world – for your whole life. That’s reality for children like Aya. The blockade of Gaza began when she was a baby, the occupation in the West Bank before her parents were born. Now she is eleven, and the blockade goes on.
Aya’s childhood memories are of conflict and hardship, walls she cannot escape, and the fear that the only home she knows, however tiny, could be gone when she returns from school.
This Ramadan, please help support children like Aya who have known nothing but conflict and hardship.
There was one major problem with UNRWA’s photo and accompanying story. It was entirely fabricated. As revealed by the watchdog organization UN Watch, Aya’s photo was a 3-year-old photo lifted from the Syrian theater. In fact, UNRWA tweeted the original image in January 2015 with the caption, “A year in #Syria: http://goo.gl/5cBaOv.” UNRWA transformed little Aya, if she even exists, into a fake refugee who jet sets between Syria and Gaza in her spare time.
UNRWA is a bloated bureaucratic organization – it employs over 30,000 people – with a checkered history. Its schools have served as Hamas weapons storage facilities and staging grounds. Its textbooks have featured anti-Semitic canards and some its employees have actively aided and abetted terrorism. So it’s hardly surprising that this organization would resort to lies and deceit in an effort to solicit donations.
UNRWA belatedly apologized for the falsified picture claiming that the posting was a mistake. “As soon as issues relating to a photograph in our Ramadan campaign were brought to our attention, we looked into the matter. We had mistakenly posted an image from our archive of a child in Syria and had said that the child was in Gaza,” UNRWA said.
Mistakes of course can and do happen but given UNRWA’s rather sordid history, its explanation rings hollow. In fact, the tactic of photo manipulation and falsification has been a trademark of the Palestinians and those who shill for them for quite some time.
In December 2014, the celebrity conspiracy theorist and 9/11 truther, Rosie O’Donnell, tried to peddle what she described as her “artwork” through her website. The so-called artwork featured a man carrying an injured baby alongside the caption, “Israel Begins Bombing Gaza; This man carries a baby about the same age as the one I sit next to, watching Frozen.”
Fortunately, the blogger Aussie Dave from the blog Israellycool exposed O’Donnell’s photo and accompanying caption as a fraud. The photograph was that of a Syrian child taken in Aleppo with absolutely no nexus to Gaza. Once exposed, O’Donnell the fraudster and wacko conspiracy theorist was forced to pull the rancid goods from her website.
Perhaps one of the most egregious cases of photo fraud involved a Palestinian “journalist” named Mohammed Omer. In May 2015 Omer, who has written for fake news media outlets like the New York Times and Al Jazeera, tweeted a photo of an armless and legless Arab child with the caption “One of the last #Gaza war victims #RememberThoseChildren.”
In fact, the photo was of Mohammed al-Farra, who was suffering from a rare genetic disease which required amputation of his limbs. The Palestinian Authority refused to pay for the boy’s medical treatment and his parents abandoned him. Out of sheer desperation, al-Farra’s grandfather assumed the role of parent and managed to get the child to Israel’s Tel Hashomer hospital where al-Farra received premium medical care covered by Israeli fundraising activity.
Omer’s case of photo fraud is particularly insidious because the Palestinian journalist almost certainly lifted the photo from the hospital’s website, where it had been featured. Even if he hadn’t, Omer had an obligation as a journalist to ascertain the context of the photo, which he did not. Omer’s nefarious goal was to vilify, defame and to spread fake news. Those who challenged his fake news story (including this author) were promptly blocked by the unscrupulous propagandist. Omer ultimately removed the post but like his partner in crime O’Donnell, offered no apologies for the deliberate fabrication.
