Paul Thomas: SBW makes innocent stand on behalf of innocent

The message here seems to be: stick to playing games, Sonny Bill, and leave the serious stuff to Rachel Smalley. Photo / Christine Spring

Sonny Bill Williams has often tested our patience: the serial code-hopping and attendant "will he go or will he stay?" dramas; the heavily hyped forays into boxing; the close associations with Anthony Mundine, who manages to be simultaneously angry at the world and pleased with himself, and the man we love to hate, Quade Cooper.

There was even a school of thought - perhaps classroom would be more accurate - that viewed his post-World Cup final medal giveaway as attention-seeking and disrespectful.

But this time he's gone too far. It will take more than a few endearing selfies and on-field pyrotechnics to repair the damage done by his latest stunt: during the festive season of all times, SBW has pointed out that children are being killed in the Syrian civil war.

This week he tweeted photos of Syrian children apparently killed in a Russian air strike (Take that, Isis), and asked, "What did these children do to deserve this? This summer spare a thought for the innocent lives lost every day in war."

Well, we weren't going to take that lying down. Unicef, which only a few days ago was happy to bask in the media attention generated by Williams' trip to a refugee camp in Lebanon in his capacity as a Unicef ambassador, denounced it as "a fundamental infringement of those children's rights".

You might wonder: what rights? Those children's lives were short, fearful, wretched and violently terminated. It seems the height of legalistic pedantry and a particularly jarring example of our sentimental treatment of death to insist that, having been denied the right to life, the children's corpses have rights that must be respected.

You might also wonder what's the difference between Williams tweeting photos of children killed in an air strike and the world's media running photos of the 3-year-old Syrian boy who drowned off a Turkish beach in September. Rather than trigger a chorus of condemnation, that infringement of a dead child's rights galvanised the international community into a race for the moral high ground and launched a thousand live crosses to our moist-eyed, choked-up reporter on the ground.

The message here seems to be: stick to playing games, Sonny Bill, and leave the serious stuff to Rachel Smalley.

One Unicef spokesperson said "getting stuck in a cycle of fear and terror and shock wouldn't help", another that the organisation was trying to "create a positive framework for people to respond". If the implication is that tweeting pictures of dead kids won't encourage people to donate money, Williams could point out that, before he tweeted the contentious images, he posted a number of heart-warming pictures of live children in the refugee camp.

Once again Unicef comes across as both controlling and ungrateful.

A social media "expert" harrumphed that the pictures of dead children would "just make people switch off". SBW was charged with gratuitousness. "We know it's awful when children get killed," said a commentator on media matters. "We don't need a picture to know that."

There are degrees of awfulness and our reaction to it. Our knowledge that children are being killed in Syria is a bit like our knowledge that trees are falling deep in the forest: we know it's happening but it doesn't affect us so why dwell on it?

Williams has been accused of being disrespectful but given the scale of the Syrian tragedy it seems disrespectful to make a fuss over a photo, however confronting. Out of sight is out of mind and clearly some of us would prefer to keep it that way.

We're a strange bunch. We complain about or snigger at the shallowness and self-absorption of celebrities and entertainers, yet when they do venture out of their bubbles to take up causes, we ask "who do you think you are?"

Williams has asked us to spare a thought for the innocent victims of the Syrian conflict. That doesn't seem too much to ask. Those criticising him for the way he's gone about it are effectively saying: "Only if you ask nicely."