Anat Schwartz was one of three contributors to the New York Times article Screams Without Words, a thoughtful and thorough account of the Hamas use of rape as a weapon of war. It received wide publicity, and its lead writer was the Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Gettleman.
Wikipedia's swarms of anti-Israel activist-editors hate Screams Without Words, because it impedes their efforts to whitewash Hamas. Every single reference to Screams Without Words on Wikipedia is designed to discredit it, using anti-Israel sources for that purpose.
As part of their campaign against Screams Without Words, they have used Wikipedia to smear Schwartz.
In addition to creating an article on "Screams" for the sole purpose of attacking it, an article was created on Schwartz for the sole purpose of attacking her.
The article was created in late February, two months after Screams Without Words appeared, as a translation of an innocuous article in the Hebrew Wikipedia. Schwartz got her article before the Wiki article on "Screams" was created. That's how anxious they were to discredit and punish her. She was clearly viewed as a weak link in the authorship chain.
Here is how the Hebrew version appeared at the time. There is a brief, innocuous reference to Screams Without Words. It has changed little since then.
The English Wikipedia article (here is how it initially appeared) cut short the description of her long career in the Hebrew article. Over half of the English Wikipedia article was an attack on her work on Screams Without Words, saying the "Screams" article
reportedly caused a "furious internal debate" about the strength of its reporting. [5] In February 2024, analysis of Schwartz' social media activity found that she had liked posts calling Palestinians 'human animals' and advocating to "turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse," leading to allegations of bias and violations of editorial policies.[6]
Nowhere does it point out that the Times has stood by the article, calling it "rigorously reported, sourced and edited" and sent an email to The Intercept seeking corrections.
Footnotes 6&7 in the passage quoted above go to The Intercept, a grossly anti-Israel publication, and Mondoweiss, a blog that is an apologist for Hamas. As a self-published blog, Mondoweiss is not supposed to be used for biographies. But Wikipedia's activist-editors regularly disregard that rule, and fight fiercely against editors seeking to enforce the rules.
Since it was created, the Schwartz article has been made longer and worse. As it appears today, it still relies on Mondoweiss and The Intercept, and now Al Jazeera as well. There is still, after all these months, nothing on how the Times says it stands by the story.
1 comment:
It's a major flaw of Wikipedia, this ability of editors with strong bias to create hugely negative biographies on those who have displeased them. In theory Wikipedia doesn't allow such "attack pages", biographies that exist merely to "coatrack" negative coverage, but there is huge grey area between a blatant attack page and a neutral biography. It is in this area of subjectivity that Wikipedia's bad actors thrive, taking advantage of the inherent flaw that deeply committed editors will always have more time, energy and interest, than well meaning passers by. This is why Wikipedia needs an editorial board or even a regulator, someone to whom people like Schwartz can appeal when the standard processes have clearly not ensured Wikipedia's rules have been respected in the editorial process.
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