Julian Assangeâs father met with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria during a visit to Damascus last week as a member of âa solidarity delegation,â The Australian reported on Monday.
A photograph of the meeting, posted on the Syrian presidencyâs Twitter feed and released by the state news agency, showed Mr. Assangeâs biological father, John Shipton, seated two places away from Mr. Assad.
A spokesman for the Wikileaks Party, set up earlier this year to support Mr. Assangeâs failed bid for a seat in the Australian Senate, confirmed on Monday that its chief executive, Mr. Shipton, had traveled to Syria with two members of the partyâs national council.
A Syrian state television report on the delegationâs meetings with senior officials featured comments from Mr. Shipton, who said the visit was intended âto show the solidarity of the Australian people and Wikileaks Party with the difficulties that Syria is ⦠having at the moment.â
Mr. Assangeâs father, who bears a striking physical resemblance to his son, also called the courage of the Syrian people âan example to the rest of the world in how to resist this plague of terrorism which is sweeping the Middle East and Central Asia.â He added that the Wikileaks Party planned to lend Mr. Assadâs government a hand in getting its message out. âWeâll continue to expose the truth to the Australian people and to our international audience, and next year we will set up an office in Damascus,â Mr. Shipton said.
Another member of the delegation, Gail Malone, wrote during the visit that the group had come âto promote peace and transparency.â She also reminded readers that the Wikileaks Party had warned against Western military intervention in Syria âbased on unsubstantiated reports of the Syrian Armyâs use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.â
Jamal Daoud, a Palestinian-Australian who is also a leader of the Wikileaks Party, reported on Twitter that before leaving Syria the group had traveled to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the scene of one of the first large demonstrations against Mr. Assadâs dynastic rule in the Syrian capital in 2011.
Responding to reports of the delegationâs visit, the Syrian activist Razan Ghazzawi accused Wikileaks of hypocrisy for exposing the abuses of Western democracies but seeming to have less to say about autocratic governments.