Editorial: Unicef shifted the posts on Sonny

Anna Wallis PHOTO/FILE

THERE has been some discussion about the photos of dead children which Sonny Bill Williams posted after his Unicef-sponsored trip to Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon. In some quarters he has been vilified.
The photos of the children are alarming. They are dead children. How could they be anything different?
Unicef says the photos contradict privacy rules, while others were upset there was no warning about the content when Sonny Bill tweeted the images.
However, surely the photograph of 3-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkish beach changed those protocols. We can't blame Sonny Bill Williams for thinking the world is no longer prepared to hide from the realities of war and carnage, and that the settling of old scores by proxy in Syria is killing children.
Let's be honest - much of the discussion is not about the rugby star posting photos of dead children; it is about Sonny Bill becoming a Muslim, being friends with Anthony Mundine and switching codes. For daring to be different. He will always have to put up with this malarkey because, no matter what good he does on or off the field, he has become a figure people love to hate, usually anonymously through social media.
I assume he couldn't care less. But on this day when people are being honoured - many for just doing their day job - Sonny Bill's work should be honoured. Unicef may have condemned his tweets, but that was hypocritical. He is there for his celebrity and his honest reactions, and when he expresses them he shouldn't be thrown under the bus. In fact, it is refreshing to see outrage and grief that cannot be PR-managed. His blunt message for 2016: we can do much, much better than this.