Mick Hartley

Shlomit Aharoni Lir at the JC – How Wikipedia is warping the world’s view of Israel:

[T]he site has become a hotbed of antisemitism, as anti-Israeli editors flocked to the platform. What happened after October 7 therefore, shouldn’t have been a surprise: when Hamas attacked Israel, the group’s online supporters were ready to pounce.

Over the following weeks and months, the fallout became clear. On English Wikipedia, a series of articles were rewritten in a tone that demonised Israel. In a report I submitted to the World Jewish Congress and presented at the United Nations last year, I highlighted how Israel has been vilified and targeted disproportionately, with entries such as “Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany”, how article titles were changed — from "massacre" to "attack" — and how Hamas’s acts of terrorism had been sanitised on the platform. It was evident that thousands of articles had been re-edited to demonise and destabilise Israel’s right to exist. At the time, however, I didn’t realise these edits were part of a larger, calculated effort to undermine the country’s right to exist….

That all changed a sometime later when a list of editors, whose usernames had repeatedly appeared in anti-Israeli editing for years, was revealed. Examining the list, I found that some of these editors were behind the decision that editing subjects related to the conflict would be restricted to users with at least 500 edits and 30 days of registered activity. Others were involved in the community decision to approve Al Jazeera as a reliable source and proclaim that Fox News and the Anti-Defamation League were not.

Most prominently, they were very involved in the framing of articles and their content. On the page for “Hamas”, for example, you’ll see a list of ideologies associated with the terror group, such as “anti-Zionism” and “anti-imperialism”. It also used to include “antisemitism,” — but that was deleted in January 2024. According to the editors, there weren’t enough scholarly sources to list antisemitism as a “central ideological tenet” of Hamas; they claimed the terror group revised its charter in 2017 to state that their problem was with Zionists rather than Jews. 

Of course. That's now the standard defence: it's Zionism we're against, not Jews. But Hamas??

And the LSE just hosted a book launch for “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters”. There's a lot of people very keen to defend a genocidal Islamist group against the only democracy in the Middle East.