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| The Aleppo pogrom of 1947 is sanitized by pro-Hamas editor 'Smallangryplanet' |
As I've documented in this blog, every article dealing even remotely with Israel and "Palestine" is twisted into pro-Hamas propaganda, and articles on Jewish suffering in the Middle East are censored to remove language, however justified, that tends to make the Arab and Muslim world look bad.
That brings us to the article on the pogrom that massacred Jews in Aleppo, Syria, in 1947, or as Wikipedia tepidly puts it the "1947 anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo."
The Aleppo pogrom was just that. "Pogrom" is defined as "an organized massacre of helpless people,
specifically such a massacre of Jews." It's a simple concept, and the Aleppo pogrom clearly fits the definition. Seventy-five Jews were murdered and hundreds were injured. The Syrian Jewish community fled en masse in its aftermath and it was not unique. Similar massacres spread throughout the Arab world on the eve of the creation of the State of Israel.
The pogrom is described as just that by numerous scholars, among them the respected Israeli scholar Benny Morris in his book "1948." Morris is noted for his independent and even iconoclastic view of the conflict.
But for the Wikipedia Flood, that will not do. Whenever massacres of Jews in the Arab world are described, antisemitic editors descend on the articles to police the language. Words like "massacre" and "pogrom" are reserved only for Arabs in the Middle East.
So it was with the Aleppo pogrom. Even though the article on the pogrom has called it that for a long time, making it the "stable" version of the article, a member of the thought police made sure that it no longer did. The anti-Israel editor "Smallangryplanet" swooped down in two edits recently to remove every single reference to "pogrom," turning the slaughter into "riots."
In so doing, "Smallangryplanet" removed categories and lists putting the Aleppo pogrom in the same league as other pogroms and massacres.
Inclusion in a list of "Anti-Jewish pogroms during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War"? Now way. Not only is the Aleppo pogrom not included on the list, but the list itself is no longer at the bottom of the article.
The same for a list of "Massacres or pogroms against Jews." Aleppo is not there either because this was, after all not a massacre or a pogrom. A mere 75 Jews dead. Just a rounding error. And besides, they're Jews. When Palestinians are killed by accident by Israeli forces, that is always, always termed a "massacre" on Wikipedia.
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| Two listings of massacres and pogroms—gone. |
The same fate was meted out to inclusion of the Aleppo pogrom in the categories "Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Middle East" and "Massacres in 1947."
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| 'Massacre' and 'pogrom' categories? No way. |
So wait a moment, you ask. Given his blatant prejudice, wasn't this "POV-pusher" (as such editors are called on Wikipedia) swept up in the supposed dragnet of anti-Israel editors by the so-called "Arbitration Committee late in 2024? That arbitration "case" received ample publicity despite its paucity of results, and was widely cited (though not by this blog) as a sign of improvement at Wikipedia.
Nope. The editor in question was not named as a party and was not sanctioned. In fact, Smallangryplanet actually gave evidence to the feckless, inept "arbitrators." He targeted two editors viewed as enemies by the Flood.
His lawfare worked. Both editors were indefinitely banned from articles on "Israel and Palestine," broadly construed, by the arbitrators.
As for Smallangryplanet, he's working the system just fine.
A few months later, there was evidence that he was engaged in "sockpuppeting" (creating phony accounts) as well as blatant "POV-pushing." Yet he escaped action by the Arbitration Committee, which in April defeated a motion to indefinitely topic ban him. Arguing in favor of topic-banning, one arb pointed out that he consistently agitated in favor of naming killings of Palestinians as "massacres."
Despite overwhelming evidence of one-sided (not to mention hypocritical) editing, the Arbitration Committee let "Smallangryplanet" off the hook, as it usually does with pro-Hamas editors.
That's not the end of the road for "Smallangryplanet" or the article. His edits may be changed, and he may be disciplined. But what of it? There are plenty of other Hamas operatives to take his place.
3 comments:
One sided editing has been accepted as the norm on Wikipedia ever since Trump was first elected. You have to do far worse to even get noticed, much less banned, these days.
Some so called academics have even ret-conned a theory that it is the warring between two sides of consistently biased editors, which brings Wikipedia articles closer to the neutral point of view over time. In reality, before the rise of Trump, it was commonly accepted that one sided editing was incompatible with Wikipedia.
All editors have bias, but with the help of Wikipedia policy, they were supposed to be actively working to remove it from their efforts to edit as neutral parties. In its original conception, under the NPOV formulation of Larry Sanger, editors would set aside their own biases and weigh the opinions of all reliable sources.
Sources would not be deemed unreliable or be given less weight just because they held politically unpopular views. Back then, "fake news" literally meant just that, faked facts, not "opinions I disagree with".
The "neutral point of view" of any article in the original concept of Wikipedia was to be the aim of the first draft by the first editor. And since nobody is perfect, a collective of editors would then work together to refine it, through respectful, rational debate.
Battling each other in "edit wars" to defend your obvious and persistent one sided view across the whole of Wikipedia, was considered proof positive you were not even remotely aligned with Wikipedia's purpose. The rise of Trump changed all that.
Specifically the sight of Jimmy Wales declaring Trump to be evil incarnate, co-opting the phrase "fake news". Clearly arguing Wikipedia should join the battle for the truth, while still paying lip service to neutrality. As he must.
This went against the previous policy, where editors aren't supposed to have an opinion at all. Wikipedia content isn't even supposed to know what a truth is. It sufficed for Wikipedia to neutrally describe events factually, eschewing labels and value judgements, and let the reader decide.
To this day, Adolf Hitler isn't introduced on Wikipedia as an evil man. The facts in the article speaks for themselves. The conclusion he was evil is quite an easy one for the reader to reach. Efforts to nullify the facts with opinion or just plain lies, are unsuccessful.
Sadly, thanks to Jimmy Wales' reaction to Trump, that article is just about the only part of Wikipedia left where the original approach to NPOV holds firm.
In all other areas, with far less editors and far fewer people watching, it's become easier for the persistently biased editors and thus "edit war" model to thrive. So one sided editors/ing feels normalised.
And in all such wars, where there is a numerically superior element, with better tactical knowledge and stronger ideological commitment to the goal of winning, they do win in the end. Nowadays, scarily easily.
Collegiate respect for writing a neutral reference work, is now the exception. If not absent entirely.
The only winning move is not to play, and instead highlight that the game is rigged. Defund Wikipedia. Make it socially unacceptable to defend it. Educate people what happened, how Wikipedia has been changed since Trump. Turned into a vehicle of bias, not the bulwark against it. (1 of 2)
All of this basic history of Wikipedia used to be common knowledge among critics. Websites like Wikipediocracy, small as they were, existed to educate the masses about such things. And so hopefully, one day, reduce Wikipedia's unwarranted dominance in search results.
Alas, even Wikipediocracy, which is run by the Wikipedia user Stanistani (Zoloft on Wikipediocracy), succumbed to the powerful thought that if you're not against Trump in everything you do, including how you edit Wikipedia, you're evil. So even they no longer call out one sided editing for what it is, if it's the right side.
That's the clearest proof yet, that Wikipedia is a failed experiment. It was thought humans could rise above their biases without the need for the checks and balances seen in the professional world. They were wrong.
It is Wikipedia's entirely amateur approach which means it has a readily identifiable house bias. And so as a collective, a so called community, it does little to nothing to sanction those working to get this bias accepted as the NPOV.
A lot more notice should have been paid when Wikipedia banned the Daily Mail as unreliable, all the way back in 2007. That was another thing that basically came down to Jimmy Wales' personal opinion. His upset that people could hold right wing views without Wikipedia's permission.
People should have asked the question - if what the Wikipedia editors collectively decided is the hallmark of the Daily Mail's journalism (100% unreliable trash) is remotely something that can be defended as unbiased truth, then why doesn't Wikipedia's own article on the Daily Mail get even close to that finding? Not even close.
The Mail hating editors have tried, sure. But the limitation of a one-sided editor's lot on Wikipedia is that if you have absolutely no reliable sources supporting your view at all, there's not much you can do.
The Mail doesn't habitually write fake articles for clicks. It is not a sustainable business model in the UK, specifically the legal environment. True factual errors are acknowledged and corrected, as Wikipedia expects of a reliable source. All others are usually matters of opinion or disputed fact.
This matters not to Wikipedia. 100% of the Mail's articles, no matter the context, are presumed fake. So now Wikipedia can't (won't) correct articles like Marek Kukula. Ideology over truth. Hold the line.
Ergo, it is quite clear the Daily Mail was banned for politically motivated reasons. They literally cannot stand the fact it is (still) the most widely read and also most right wing mass market newspaper in the UK. The result is a biased encyclopedia on matters like immigration and antisemitism.
The Mail is itself editorially biased, for sure, as is the norm in UK print media. But attempts to compare it to Fox News or even the National Enquirer, as Wikipedia editors have been known to do, have always been obviously unsupported by the evidence. Hence the mismatch between the editors view and their encyclopedia's view.
If you bring that curiosity up on Wikipedia, the mismatch between their supposedly unbaised editor's opinion of the Mail, and what Wikipedia's own article presents, you get banned. But if you bring it up on Wikipediocracy, you also get banned. Zoloft hates the Mail because, in his own words, he is "to the left of" Katherine Maher (one time CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, hosts of Wikipedia). (2 of 2)
The house of cards might be about to fall sooner than expected.
Since early this month Roblox is mired in major controversy when they falsely banned a predator hunter named "Schlep" which caused Streisand effect and resulting in several lawsuits against Roblox along with congressional attention where congressman Ro Khanna launched a petition urging Roblox to fix their issues.
You're looking at something at least ten times bigger than the outrage regarding the Schlep ban controversy if Ron Merkle and others managed to find a way to get Jennsaurus' findings about Wikipedia's #MeToo scandals published on the media. In a way or more the Roblox controversy is redpilling the public about Big Tech issues and could be a foreboding of what's to come in the next few months.
Since a lot of people across the world are more resistant to the even idea that Wikipedia has problems than let's say, Meta or Roblox, it'd be wise for healthcare providers to stock up as many mental health resources as they can from now on.
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