Facebook post claiming to show Palestinian girl who grew up to be a lecturer not what it seems

By | October 21, 2021

A post on Facebook shows a picture of a young girl in distress alongside an image of a woman. 

It claims the young girl was a Palestinian called Sarah whose house was “demolished by the Israeli occupation” in 2003, and has grown up to be the woman pictured, a lecturer at a Canadian university.

This isn’t true.

The woman pictured is not a Palestinian woman named Sarah but an Iraqi woman named Suzan Hameed Majeed. Her photograph comes from a TED talk she gave in Baghdad in 2013, where she is described as a “daughter of Basra”. 

Rather than a lecturer at a Canadian university, the caption of her TED talk video says she is “a licensed trainer in human capital development and founder of an organization dedicated to human development and generation of social values.”

And the photo of the young girl was taken in 2014 according to Agence France-Presse, not 2003, by photographer Fadi Thabet in Gaza, one year after the TED talk took place.

Source