Pro-Israel Activists Declare War on Wikipedia’s ‘Anti-Israel Bias’

These cyberwarriors are ready to battle the Israel-haters,anti-Semites, and lie-peddlers polluting Wikipedia with conspiracies, falsehoods, and blood libels.

By Arye Green, TPS

The Israel Group has launched a campaign to battle Wikipedia’s “anti-Israel bias,” while exposing the identities of top Wikipedia editors who use the popular online platform to promote hostility towards the Jewish state.

The Israel Group’s initiative will include a dedicated website that shows how “anti-Israel editors smear Israel—both subtly and overtly—across hundreds of articles, and how the pro-Israel community can stop it.”

The Israel Group is a nonprofit that aims to protect Israel in the Diaspora by developing and launching initiatives to cripple the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The organization has been working for many years on the confidential “Wiki-Israel” initiative against anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia.

Ahead of the website’s full launch next month, the Israel Group exposed the identities of five of Wikipedia’s top anti-Israeli editors. According to the organization, the editors “have been active for more than a decade totaling more than 325,000 Wikipedia edits, with the majority targeting Israel.”

The Israel Group says these editors are acting as “a cabal of virulently anti-Israel anonymous editors” and are “responsible for decimating virtually the entire pro-Israel editing community.”

Examples of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli edits made by the editors are detailed on the site, including both deleting credible content that is favorable towards Israel or Jews as well as creating original false anti-Semitic content.

“‘Volunteer administrators’ (with lifetime positions), responsible for overseeing the editing process of Wikipedia, have not only allowed anti-Israel editors freedom to take over Wikipedia, they have participated by blocking and banning predominantly Jewish and pro-Israel editors,” the Israel Group explained.

The editors often use deceitful tactics to promote slander against Israel on Wikipedia. One such tactic is a type of editing called “citogenesis,” a circular process through which an editor creates a term, which is then reported in news outlets and afterward used on Wikipedia, quoting the “credible” news sources that cited the original Wikipedia entry.

According to the Israel Group, an anti-Israeli editor called Nableezy made use of citogenesis to coin the term “Gaza Massacre” to describe Israel’s counter-terrorism Operation Cast Led in 2008.

“Nableezy (and others) simply took obscure references from unreliable sources, then pushed his term until some reputable news sources picked up that term from Wikipedia and reported it. Then Nableezy eventually used those reports as ‘reliable sources.’ The term ‘Gaza Massacre’ is in the first sentence in the Wikipedia article and has become an internationally accepted name for that war,” they wrote.

The Israel Group emphasized the importance of the project to the anti-BDS efforts, as “Wikipedia is now the number one global source that actively substantiates the lies and false propaganda being disseminated about Israel.”