By Sam Lee
Wikipedia organizes its article topics into categories, which assists the reader in locating articles related to a general field of interest… or, it helps propagandists to consolidate their preferred bias over a broad topic area, depending on your point of view. If you look at Category:Murdered Israeli children (T–H–L) you will note that all the listed 32 articles in this category have one thing in common: they were killed by Arabs, or, in a case where the killer has not been apprehended; were suspected of being killed by an Arab.
Now this is strange, as it is a sad fact that in the industrialised world, the majority of murdered children are killed by a parent, or other next of kin. Take the US, for example, where more than half of all infanticides (killing of children less than the age of 5) are committed by a parent, while only 10-20% are committed by a stranger, or by parties unknown.
Alas, if you follow the Israeli media, you will soon find that there is no lack of children being killed by a family member there, either. A study in 2010 showed that 40 Israeli children had been killed by a parent in the previous 7 years.
And after that, we have had:
2010: Omer, 10 years old, Roni, 8, and Or, 5, killed by their father, Itay Ben Dror
2013: Yahav, 5 and Eden, 3, killed by their father, Eli Gur
2013: Igor, 7, and Mira, 5 , killed by their mother, Karina Brill
2014: Yishai, 11, and Sara, 10, killed by their father, Avi Levy
Alas, these children will never get their own pages on Wikipedia.
They were not killed by Arabs.
Almost the same goes for Category:Israeli murder victims (T–H–L): 27 out of 29 murdered Israelis were murdered by Arabs. Does that reflect reality? Not a chance. But people like Noa Eyal, or her killer, Daniel Nachmani, will never get a Wikipedia article, (in spite of extensive media coverage)…
…as the perpetrator was… Jewish.
What about Palestinian murder victims? The category Category:Murdered Palestinian children (T–H–L) does not exist, but Category:Palestinian children (T–H–L) does, and 4 out of 5 articles there are about children who have been killed. All have been killed by the Israeli military. 3 out of these 4 articles have survived a “deletion request,” a bureaucratic procedure at Wikipedia where Wikipedians may propose that an article be deleted, typically due to lack of “notability”. Like any other Wikipedia policy, the “deletion request” is often an arena of combat for contending teams of propagandists.
We can note that there are almost ten times as many articles about murdered Israeli children, as there are articles about murdered Palestinian children. Does this reflect the numbers killed?
Absolutely not.
The Israeli non-governmental organization B’Tselem (T–H–L) calculates that for the period 2009-2014, ten times as many Palestinian children were killed by Israeli forces, as there were Israeli citizens killed by Palestinians. And this does not include those killed during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict (T–H–L). Rememberthesechildren.org gives about the same proportions; since year 2000, 1656 Palestinian vs. 131 Israeli children have been killed.
If Wikipedia were to reflect reality, then there should be 10 times as many articles about killed Palestinian children as that of Israeli. Instead, it is the other way around.
Wikipedia does not reflect reality; instead it acts as a distorting mirror (T–H–L) of reality; reflecting 10+ years of activism and bias.
Why is this?
Over the years that Wikipedia has existed, countless recruitment drives have been made to encourage pro-Israeli editors to edit Wikipedia. Some have been noted in the press:
The right’s latest weapon: ‘Zionist editing’ on Wikipedia, Haaretz
Wikipedia Editing for Zionists, New York Times
Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups, The Guardian
Zionist Internet Struggle to Hit Wikipedia, Israel National News,
Wikipedia: A New Battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, The Daily Beast
West Bank Settlers Take To Wikipedia, Haaretz
Aligning text to the right: Is a political organization editing Wikipedia to suit its interests? Haaretz
To the best of our knowledge, no similar active recruitment effort has been made to get pro-Palestinian editors to edit Wikipedia.
In one of the more infamous recruitment drives, the so called CAMERA affair, editor Zeq (T–C–L) stated the goal clearly: any time a “Hamas person” says something stupid, start a Wikipedia article about him. He might have further suggested that any time a Palestinian/Muslim person does something bad, or is even suspected of doing something bad, start an article about him.
And so they have done, year after year. And while editors like Zeq (T–C–L) and CltFn (T–C–L) may get banned in the end, the articles they started remain.
Besides creating articles about “Hamas people saying something stupid”, propagandists are also very active in every AfD (Article for Deletion) debate, making sure that articles about killed Palestinians get deleted. So we have Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rania Siam (T–H–L) (deleted); Rania Iyad Aram (T–H–L) (deleted); Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jihad Shaar (T–H–L) (deleted); and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ghadeer Jaber Mkheemar (T–H–L) (deleted). Killed Palestinian children should remain faceless and nameless, and Wikipedia editors are here just continuing the censorship from elsewhere; see this Guardian article: Israel bans radio advert listing names of children killed in Gaza (and here is a link to the B’Tselem press release.)
The co-founder of Wikipedia claims that ”every Wikipedia editor has a responsibility to try to be neutral”, and that “the community” enforces this. Anyone with a familiarity with the Israel/Palestine area on Wikipedia knows that this is complete rubbish. Over at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement (T–H–L) it is taken for granted that editors are there to promote their POV (point of view), rather than to seek neutrality.
Jimmy Wales has an almost religious conviction that “crowd-sourcing” works, even for contentious subjects. The reality on the ground shows he might just as well believe in magic pixies, spreading their magic pixie dust all over Wikipedia, making it an objective reflection of the world.
Image credits: Flickr/wackystuff, Eric Barbour ~ licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Let’s check a few facts:
1.Here’s some statistics about mothers murdering their kids in USA http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/16/mother-kill-children-society-_n_850094.html
But mothers kill their children in this country much more often than most people would realize by simply reading the headlines; by conservative estimates it happens every few days, at least 100 times a year.
There are less than 400 murdered American children listed in the category Category:Murdered American children and many of these were killed by strangers.
So the author complaining about missing articles on Jewish kids murdered by their parents is all but ridiculous.
2. The author complains there’s no category for murdered Arab children. First there should be distinguish between murdered children and children killed in wars. The category of murdered Arab children should be created and there are a few articles to start it with
Kidnapping and murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir
Ali al-Asghar ibn Husayn
Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi
Hadeel Qasim Hamza
Death of Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb
And many more more murdered Arab children should be added there:
Please do not forger to add honor killings to that category. According to this http://hbv-awareness.com/ there are 5000 honor killings internationally per year!, and do not forget that Gaza is a very closed regime. The world would never find out how many kids in Gaza are killed by their parents.
If the author is upset that there’s no category for Arab children killed in war (different from murdered), I am afraid it would be all but impossible to maintain because way too many children are killed by ISIS, and in Syria by Arabs themselves.
3. The author complains about a few articles about murdered Palestinian children that were deleted. I looked into one of these: Rania Siam was not murdered. The girl was killed in a war. It is very, very sad, but people get killed in wars, and Hamas is probably more to blame than IDF in the girl’s death. So deleting of this article has absolutely nothing to do with an imaginary pro-Israeli basis. I assume there’s similar situation with other depleted articles.
Conclusion: This article was written by some one with an extreme anti-Israeli views, and it very disappointing that a site that suppose to fight POV in Wikipedia articles published such POV on its own.
The fact is that in 32 out of 32 articles about murdered Israeli children and 27 out of 29 articles about Israeli murder victims the perpetrator was Palestinian.
Does this reflect reality? Does anyone even claim that this reflects reality?
Wikipedia works like this: Take the case of a raped and murdered 17 year old israeli girl Noa Eyal: if she had been raped and killed by a Palestinian, the chances of someone starting a Wikipedia article about her would be close to 100%. As the (alleged) murderer was Jewish; the chances of a Wikipedia article about her is close to zero.
This blog is just pointing out some obvious facts.
Though I’m loathe to assign sides to children. If these deaths are the result of a war (is that admitted by both sides at present) then a neutral position would be to list the deaths of both sides with equal prominence. Currently one group have what amounts to memorial pages.
Well, sure, let’s list all of them, but let’s make sure that the articles would explain why children and civilians on that matter on both sides get killed.
1. Israel does more that any army in the world does to prevent civilian casualties. Please watch the video http://www.unwatch.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=bdKKISNqEmG&b=1313923&ct=7536409 I hope you’d agree that, if nothing else, it is not in Israel’s interests to kill Palestinian civilians.
Hamas on the other hand targets Israeli civilians in purpose, and if there are not so many people killed on Israeli side, it is not from lack of trying by hamas.
2. Hamas fires its rockets from schools, and kindergartens. Israel responds and civilians get killed.
3.Israel left Gaza a long time ago. Instead of building infrastructures and creating work places, hamas is busy digging tunnels to Israel. What country would allow something like that? Would you allow a murderer to build a tunnel to your house in order to terrorize and kill your kids and your women? I am sure, no Palestinian kid would be killed, if hamas is to stop firing rockets from school, and starting their tunnels from homes of civilians.
4.And of course this list should include Arab children killed by Arabs themselves.
In the UK the IRA for 30 years bombed civilian targets, killing men, women, and children. I don’t recall the Army bulldozing the Falls Road in Belfast. When they did shoot 26 unarmed protesters in Derry in 1972, killing 14, there was an international outcry that goes on today. In 1998 when terrorist detonated a bomb in Omagh killing 29 people, including 3 twelve year olds I don’t recall helicopter gunships machine gunning people coming out of the Catholic church on the grounds that the leader of the Real IRA was in the crowd.
A bad example I am afraid.
IRA has never had a goal to destroy Great Britain.
hamas’s goal is to destroy Israel.
Besides you really cannot compare a few very tragic terrorists attacks to firing thousands of rockets into Israel, and digging tunnels into Israel.
Nobody since the World War 2 threatened Great Britain as Israel has been treated ever since she was created
They didn’t dig tunnels as there wasn’t a wall hemming them in.
Oh and …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_republicanism
And about the graph of so called religious bias. First I’m not sure how it it is related to the topic of the article. Second it is not surprising, if Judaism is mentioned more often that Christianity and Islam. Both Christianity and Islam came out of Judaism, which means that a scholar could talk about Judaism with no mention of either Christianity or Islam, but he could not talk about Christianity and Islam without mentioning Judaism.
Mila, your:
->”4.And of course this list should include Arab children killed by Arabs themselves.”
Ok, like we list Jewish children killed by Jews themselves?
Except: Wikipedia does not do that.
Not once.
See, there’s a difference again.
A murder of an innocent child is always a tragedy.
Yet wikipedia does not list and should not list every such case.
Israel is a small country with a very, very low crime rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate.
It will not represent a neutral point of view, if you’re to list even one Jewish kid murdered by a Jew without listing many, many more kids murdered in every other countries because even, if we’re to talk not numbers but percentage Israel is still at a low side.
Sadly every country has cases of parents who murder their kids. Only very, very few of these cases have wikipedia entries.
These cases are tragedies that could happen in any country, in any religious community. BTW does wikipedia has any article about Palestinian kids murdered by their parents? I am sure there are some. I know it does have some articles about so called honor killing, but it is different. This kind of killing are carried out only by Muslims, it is a part of the culture, and that’s why such cases are much more notable than others.
This kind of killing are carried out only by Muslims, it is a part of the culture, and that’s why such cases are much more notable than others.
Your bias is showing.
Not bias, just ignorance. Sorry about that.
Fair enough.
Further discussion of this blog post can be found here: https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=5838
Here’s another egregious AfD example. On August 10, 2012, Huldra nominates The Murder of Yehuda Shoham for deletion, stating (correctly) that
and less than three hours later Crystalfile, whose contributions bear the distinctive mark of the CAMERA trouper, nominates Khalil al-Mughrabi for deletion, mirroring Huldra’s language:
and how do Crystalfile’s compatriots see this? Why look:
Exx8 was canvassed to the AfD by Crystalfile, and reading the history of Exx8’s talk page one can see advice from indefatigable Israeli-POV-warrior Shrike. You just keep falling cause there ain’t no bottom.
I’m astonished that Yochanan Gordon doesn’t have an article. A long-time newspaper publisher and heir, which undoubtedly makes him a public figure in the English-speaking USA, is famous for saying in words what the collective editorial judgement of Wikipedia editors reflect in the actions of their long-running conflicts. But the larger truths must be left unsaid, and those who breach the social compact and speak them out loud must be shunned, because in doing so they take political capital from those who fight to suppress the enemy.
This article is hilarious. The truth is that Wikipedia is controlled by the Muslims and far-left Europeans. Wikipedia is deeply Israelophobic and all articles about Jewish villages in Judea and Samaria contain anti-Semitic Arab and UN propaganda.
Ha ha. Grawp snarls again.
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