The South African Zionist Federation has exposed as fraudulent an advertisement widely published in South Africa last month alleging Israeli brutality toward Palestinian children.
The ad, which appeared in major dailies throughout the republic, offered awards totaling 2,000 rand (about $800) in prizes for the best caption to a photograph that purported to be that of an Arab mother snatching her child from “the clutches of soldiers in Israel.”
The ad was sponsored by the Islamic Propagation Center in Durban. It contained a statement criticizing Jews for thinking “of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Jewish terms only.”
The statement was by Leopold Weiss, described as an “Austrian German Jew” and identified as “a special correspondent of the Frank-furter Zeitung.”
The South African Zionist Federation said it discovered on investigation that “the photograph used was not an original, but was a combination of two photographs”, the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper “has not been in print since 1933”, and that Leopold Weiss “converted to Islam some 50 years ago.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
