Not an isolated incident, but airsoft communities around the world should be very vigilant about photos of their games, especially with "terrorist" or "jihadi" themes should not be used by unscrupulous media practictioners to generate alarm, ratings, or eyeballs for their stories. With the recent attacks in Paris by Islamic extremists and raids in Belgium on suspected terrorist hideouts, such misrepresentation would just worsen the problem, and will deeply affect even airsoft communities.

Lucid Mind writes about their efforts to combat such media mispractice:

Following the recent and extremely tragic events that occured in Paris and unfortunately our own country, where 2 terrorists got killed during a police raid, national media has been looking for ways to give color to their news broadcasts.

Today, our whole airsoft community was shocked to see that old pictures from a Skirm [airsoft skirmish] appeared on the news to show people that Belgium has "Jihadist training camps".

To give you an idea: a couple of months ago, a journalist needed to write a story about something, went on Facebook, saw a couple of pictures of a skirm with a guy that just happened to be a muslim and the journalist created this fictional story about illegal training camps for extremists.

This article was taken over by nearly any major news agency in the world and nobody checked the sources.

As a community, we went all out to show everybody that the report was false and most of the newspapers printed rectifications.

Yet today, THE SAME PICTURES appeared again to boost the massive terrorist-paranoia that is dominating our country.

Every airsoft player in Belgium and The Netherlands - obviously - is repulsed by the death and tragedy that has been created by some extremist punks BUT we would like to point out that :

• Airsofters are A-politic ... we play a game, we don't do politics.
• Airsofters play a GAME with TOYS ... we do not play nor train with real weapons
• Airsofters are NON religious ... what you believe is your personal business, we just play a game
• Airsoft is a sport for EVERYBODY, we do not discriminate and we do NOT tolerate racism!

Please help us in our cause, by sharing this message internationally ... so that the complete community can distantiate itself from any form of extremism.