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Anti-Semitism

Watchdog identifies Wikipedia, with Google’s help, as the most active spreader of anti-Semitism on the planet.

By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel

Search engines, especially Google, send tens of millions of people around the world to the Wikipedia website every day, where they are fed a diet of blatant anti-Semitism, a prominent British activist and watchdog reported Sunday.

David Collier has studied the popular website for years. He says the bias and false information about Israel and the Jews is getting worse, with millions of people using Wikipedia’s biased information to help spread anti-Semitism.

“I do not believe that most people fully understand the damage that Wikipedia is doing nor the fact that action must be taken to challenge it,” said Collier, noting that despite its claim of openness, key pages about Jews and Israel are closely guarded by specific anti-Semitic editors who block people from correcting their lies.

Collier says it is critical that people understand that Google, the world’s leading search engine, “literally treats [Wikipedia] as the best source in the world,” but that means that tens of millions of people are getting distorted information from Wikipedia where the “facts and arguments have been airbrushed out.”

“It isn’t just about Jews or Israel and it is not enough to sit idly by. Wikipedia is damaging truth and promoting an anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel narrative,” Collier said. “This cannot be stated often or hard enough; When it comes to spreading disinformation – Wikipedia is the biggest fake news distributor on the planet.”

“Wikipedia today is a central conduit in the spread of anti-Semitism. The lies, propaganda and distortion are visible on every relevant page,” Collier found.

In his report, Collier gives glaring examples of blatant anti-Jewish bias where Wikipedia pages with Jewish or Israeli themes are full of criticism, while sections on Palestinian or Islamic themes lack any censure or contain meager negative content.

Collier calls this “a subtle, but brutally effective strategy in psychological warfare.”

“The bias is on every page. Sometimes obvious, but more often than not, it only becomes apparent when you compare the way different groups are treated,” Collier explains.

Collier says there are literally hundreds of examples of blatant and inexplicable anti-Semitism and bias, but as a Brit he noted there is a Wikipedia page called the “Israel lobby in the United Kingdom” that is “a page about (allegedly) well-funded Jews, who try to ‘influence politicians and foreign policy.

But when it comes to the Palestinians, there is no corresponding page for a “Palestinian lobby in the United Kingdom,” he discovered.

“Yet if we look at the endless activity of groups [in England] like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Friends of Al Aqsa, the Palestine Return Centre and the Islamic Human Rights Commission, we can see exactly what they are doing as well. These groups all lobby,” Collier says.

However, instead of being called lobbyists, the largest British pro-Palestinian group is described on Wikipedia as ‘raising awareness’, ‘educating’ and ‘promoting a greater understanding,’ while Jewish groups are all described using conspiratorial tones.

They are all about influencing, lobbying and billionaire funding, he maintains.

“This is clear evidence of Wikipedia’s anti-Semitism problem,” Collier continues. “Language, history, truth – all of it is under attack from one of the most popular websites in the world, and along with anti-Semitism, it has a distinct anti-Western feel. There is a page for ‘Criticism of the U.S. Government’, but there does not seem to be one for Iran, Russia, China or Pakistan.”

“In fact, the only other country that appears to have a government criticism page is ‘Israel’ – and its page is *five times larger* than its U.S. counterpart. The ‘criticism of Israel’ page is highly toxic and even promotes the anti-Semitic Nazi analogy,” Collier says.

His bottom line: “This website promotes anti-Semitism. It is not enough that we ignore Wikipedia, we should be actively fighting against it.”