#hamas corruption

[eretzyisrael]

source

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Voices from Gaza - Episode 1

Regarding humanitarian aid that arrives and is administered by Hamas, unfortunately, this aid isn't distributed fairly. It's distributed in a partisan way: only Hamas members get the aid.

We've even witnessed this aid being sold in the market - though it arrives in boxes marked "not for sale." This aid comes to us for free from sources that want to help the Palestinian people. How can you put it up for sale?

When you ask the shopkeepers, they say, "No, we bought it from Hamas. We paid them for it. We're just trying to recoup the money we paid Hamas."

With respect to healthcare, Hamas families get preferential treatment. They get medical attention before everyone else. If someone else needs an operation, it could be delayed for a long time so that Hamas loyalists are treated first. A lot of people suffer from this.

To be candid, Hamas has utterly wrecked the Palestinian people. They even practice extortion.

So we call on the outside world: if you want to help the Palestinian people, do so through international channels that do not in any way run through Hamas, which caused our people to be besieged and deeply troubled.

I hope our voice will reach the outside world.

==

Stop sending booty to terrorists.

[reality-detective]

Pro-Hamas insurrectionists have infiltrated the Cannon House Office Building once again. Why are these people not being prosecuted the same way J6 protestors have been? 🤔

[jangillman]

IF THE WESTERN WORLD DOESN'T PREPARE FOR THIS, THEY'RE DELUDED! And don't expect the transgenders, gays and greenies to help protect the country! 🙏 for the Police and Military in the Western World!

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Bassam Tawil

Hamas and Egypt were quick to issue statements denouncing the capture of the Rafah border crossing, claiming that the move would "threaten" the lives of the Palestinians and hinder the entry of humanitarian and relief aid into the Gaza Strip.

The Egyptians and Hamas have good reason to be angry with the presence of the IDF at the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing. For several years, Palestinians who wanted to exit the Gaza Strip via the terminal have alleged that they had to bribe Hamas and officials. Hamas and Egypt are now afraid of losing the Palestinian milk-cow.

"It is our right to travel without bribes and without corruption. We are living under a [Hamas] dictatorship." Abu Amr was later arrested by Hamas security officers, who confiscated her mobile phone and ordered her to delete the Facebook post. — Noha Abu Amr, Palestinian journalist, 24.ae, January 24, 2024

[A] Palestinian man in the US [said] he paid $9,000 to get his wife and children on the list. On the day of travel, he was told his children's names were not listed and he would have to pay an extra $3,000. He said the brokers were "trying to trade in the blood of Gazans".

[T]he company [Hala Consulting and Tourism Services] owned by an influential Egyptian businessman and ally of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi] is estimated to have made a minimum of $118 million from desperate Palestinians trying to leave the Gaza Strip. "By the end of this year, if the April average continues, the company may earn well over half a billion dollars from the so-called VIP list of people Hala is transferring across the Gaza-Egypt border. " — Middle East Eye, May 1, 2024.

An international charity [that does not want to be named] with extensive experience in providing emergency aid in wars...is also being forced to pay $5,000 per truck to a company linked to Egypt's General Intelligence Service (GIS) to get aid into the Gaza Strip. — Middle East Eye, January 30, 2024.

The Palestinians actually owe Israel a huge debt of gratitude for finally driving Hamas out of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing.

Egypt and Hamas are, it seems, indifferent to the pain endured by the Palestinians they are effectively imprisoning. All that matters to them is making more money off anyone desperate to leave the Gaza Strip.

[kosmic-apothecary]

Even the far right has turned against Israel. Their brutality and inhumanity is undeniable.

Alex Jones defended Israel for months, but last week after the video of unarmed civilians being blown up with a drone went viral he finally admitted it was a genocide. The left and right are now both vocally opposing the genocide. Only establishment shills paid by AIPAC remain.

*his claim that Israel has killed 30 times the number Hamas did is a big underestimate. He’s using the 30,000 figure which has been stagnant for week as bombings and starvations escalate. Human rights groups are estimating the true number of dead is likely 100,000 or more.

**he’s also using the claim the Hamas killed 1,000 Israeli civilians which has been revised to be between 200 and 300, as the majority killed by Hamas were police and military and the IDF killed hundreds of civilians as per of their Hannibal directive.

[the-ships-to-rule-them-all]

I don’t think people realize how all consuming October 7, the war and the rising antisemitism is to most Jews right now. I was just on a five day family trip and nearly every single conversation ended up circling back to what’s going on in Israel, across the world and at home. My mom knew Vivian Silver, an incredible peace activist thought to be held hostage and I had to sit there and watch her realize that not only was Vivian murdered at her home 38 days before but that she was likely burned if it took this long for her body to be identified. I was forced to sit there and watch my mom, my favorite woman in the world, watch her face crumple. We were sharing updates, accounts to follow, venting and releasing frustrations. It is a constant unbreakable struggle right now for me and most Jews I know to not be glued to our phones, to not pay attention. Because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t. Because we can’t afford to turn our backs on what’s going on. And there’s a deep ever present grief not only for the victims of October 7th, the innocent citizens of Gaza, the hostages and also for my own personal sense of safety and security. I am also grieving what is a shattering beyond measure of my present and future trust in people as I’ve witnessed how easily well intentioned kind hearted people have decided to say nothing, publicly or privately, or who have quickly fallen into vicious antisemitic rhetoric. I’m just sharing into the void at this point but it’s been unimaginably hard on a personal level. I’m not the same person I was when I went to bed on October 6. It’s as though I’m a shadow, made of grief and anger and tiny fractured bits of hope. Every piece of joy feels as though it’s been muted because of how quickly it fades. And even the moments that last are related to my Jewish identity somehow. I am not sure where I go from here.

Have a cat gif for reading all of that

[carsonjonesfiance]

My favorite thing is when well meaning Westerners are like “oh well that homophobic/sexist/bigoted law was from the British Colonial era so it’s actually Europe’s fault it’s still in effect to this day.” Like as an American I can tell you when you get rid of the British you can also get rid of their laws! I’ve never paid a special tax on tea in my life.

[seleneprince]

Hamas member gives details of their fight for Palestine's freedom and against the zionists in IDF interrogation video

The brave tale from this amazing fighter has left me speechless. I distrusted them as first and pinned them as terrorists, since that's what all my favourite zionist activist in Tiktok told me, and you know the people in this platform are very well informed about these conflicts. Seriously, I'm amazed by the level of courage and love for the country this man represents in his words and attitude. Expected no less from a man that follows the Islam, a religion that values human life above everything else.

But out of all his heart-wrenching lines, this one struck me the most:

"We heard sounds of young children crying, we shot at the door, we didn't hear them anymore,"

If you even DARE to come at me to defend these MONSTERS, save those words for other braindead people like you. Get the fuck out of my blog and block me, or I'll block you, I don't care. But I won't tolerate people supporting terrorists that kill children in my blog.

[eretzyisrael]

by Andrew Bernard

The UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees on Monday said that it had received reports that Hamas had seized humanitarian supplies from a UN compound in Gaza City before backtracking and deleting all references to the accusation.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in a statement said that fuel and medical supplies were seized from the compound, which they had evacuated on 13 Oct.

“UNRWA received reports this morning that yesterday a group of people with trucks, purporting to be from the Ministry of Health of the de facto authorities (DFA) in Gaza, removed fuel and medical equipment from the Agency’s compound in Gaza City,” UNRWA said. “UNRWA’s fuel and other types of material are kept for strictly humanitarian purposes, and any use of such assets for any other purposes is strongly condemned.”

“De facto authorities” is a term frequently used by the UN to refer to the Hamas terrorist group that controls the Gaza strip. The Gaza-based Palestinian Ministry of Health is likewise controlled by Hamas.

After posting the statement on their website and on social media on Monday, UNRWA then deleted the statement without explanation.

UNRWA’s deleted statement charging Hamas with seizing aid from its Gaza City compound.

UNRWA did not immediately respond to The Algemeiner’s request for comment about why they withdrew the statement.

A social media account run by Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday called out the deletion as an example of UNRWA’s overly-close relationship with the terrorist group responsible for the 7 Oct. massacre of more than 1,400 people in Israel.

“Wait UNRWA – Did Hamas also break into your Twitter account?  Or are you just scared of disappointing your terrorist friends?” the @Israel account posted on X/Twitter.

Past UNRWA statements about Hamas’ violations of the agency’s facilities have shown indications that the agency is unwilling to risk Hamas’ ire. In November, UNRWA issued a statement saying it found a “man-made cavity” under one of its schools in Gaza, which it had “protested strongly to the relevant authorities in Gaza” without saying who exactly those authorities might be or what they might have intended to do with their terror tunnel. In 2021 UNRWA’s Gaza director, Matthias Schmale, was replaced after he conceded that Israel’s airstrikes were “very precise” and they did not hit civilian targets, albeit with “some exceptions.” In a meeting with Hamas’ Yahya Sinwar, Schmale’s replacement called those comments “indefensible” and “affirmed her solidarity with the Palestinians.” Israel has named Sinwar as one of the chief architects of the 7 Oct. slaughter.

In past conflicts in Gaza, Hamas has been regularly accused by Israel and by human rights groups of illegally exploiting UNRWA facilities, including schools, to launch rockets, store munitions, and to otherwise shield the terrorist group.

UNRWA itself has been accused of enabling Hamas materially by providing humanitarian services that the terrorist group itself would otherwise have to provide, as well as ideologically by supporting school curricula that demonizes Israel and is rife with antisemitic content. Those criticisms contributed to the Trump administration suspending aid to the Agency in 2018. President Joe Biden restored aid to UNRWA after taking office in 2021.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Ashley Rindsberg

Published: Oct 25, 2024

a powerful group of editors is hijacking wikipedia, pushing pro-palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about hamas, and reshaping the narrative around israel with alarming influence

A coordinated campaign led by around 40 Wikipedia editors has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years, intensifying after the October 7 attack

Six weeks after October 7, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article on Hamas

The group also appeared to attempt to promote the interests of the Iranian government across a number of articles, including deleting “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials”

A group called Tech For Palestine launched a separate but complementary campaign after October 7, which violated Wikipedia policies by coordinating to edit Israel-Palestine articles on the group 8,000 member Discord

Tech For Palestine abandoned its efforts and its members went into a panic after a blog discovered what they were doing; the group deleted all its Wiki Talk pages and Sandboxes they had been using to coordinate their editing efforts, and the main editor deleted all her chats from the group’s Discord channel

On everything from American politics to corporate brands, Wikipedia plays host to a smoldering battle of ideas and values that occasionally erupts into white-hot, internecine edit wars. But no fire burns hotter than the Israel-Palestine topic area. The topic is such a flashpoint that the Palestine-Israel Articles (PIA) designation is used synonymously with its own dispute resolution abbreviation — Requests for arbitration/Palestine-Israel Articles, known as ARBPIA in Wiki-speak.

While always contentious, over roughly the past four years, and intensifying since October 7, PIA has been subject to a highly coordinated, sustained and remarkably effective campaign to radically alter public perception of the conflict. Led by around 40 mostly veteran editors, the campaign has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream.

A separate but complementary campaign, launched after October 7 and staged from an 8,000 member-strong Discord group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), employed common tech modalities — ticket creation, strategy planning sessions, group audio “office hour” chats — to alter over 100 articles. Operating from February 6 to September 3 of this year, TFP became a well-oiled operation, going so far as to attempt to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British members of parliament into changing their positions on Israel and the Gaza War.

These efforts are remarkably successful. Type “Zionism” into Wikipedia’s search box and, aside from the main article on Zionism (and a disambiguation page), the auto-fill returns: “Zionism as settler colonialism,” “Zionism in the Age of the Dictators” (a book by a pro-Palestinian Trotskyite), “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” and “Racism in Israel.”

The aggregate effect of these efforts is a wholesale shift to the landscape of the Palestine-Israel topic online. As I reported in a previous Pirate Wires investigation, this is largely thanks to Google, which grants Wikipedia a “most favored nation” status with articles automatically given the first spot on any topic-related search result. If you Google “Zionism and settler colonialism,” for example, what you get is a Wikipedia article automatically anchored to the very top of the Google search results, with its own knowledge panel to the right. A fringe concept that would have only shown a smattering of unfocused articles just two years ago — before the article was created — now has its own primetime Internet stage.

“The recent issue with the ‘Zionism’ Wikipedia page is fundamentally a Google problem,” says someone familiar with the matter. “Wikipedia articles act as an unprotected back door to top Google search results, with the article's introduction often populating the knowledge panel, giving the impression Google has vetted this content — when it hasn’t. Malicious editors exploit this vulnerability, platforming fringe views and giving them priority over more reliable sources.”

The kind of coordination carried out by these groups violates many of Wikipedia’s most fundamental policies, including one of its core content policies, Neutral Point of View (NPOV), which states that, “Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them.” The practice also violates the Gaming the System guideline, which prohibits editors from “engineering ‘victory’ in a content dispute.” It runs afoul of the broader Wikipedia ethos discouraging Tag teaming, when “editors coordinate their actions to circumvent the normal process of consensus.” Most flagrantly, it violates a guideline called Canvassing, which prohibits secret coordination with the “intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.”

To skirt this, the pro-Palestine group leverages deep Wikipedia know-how to coordinate efforts without raising red flags. They work in small clusters, with only two or three active in the same article at any given time. On their own, many of these edits appear minor, even trivial. But together, their scope is staggering, with two million edits made to more than 10,000 articles, a majority of which are PIA or topically associated. In dozens of cases, the group’s edits account for upwards of 90% of the content on an article, giving them complete control of the topics.

One of the most prominent members of the pro-Palestine group is the user Iskandar323, a prolific editor whose nuanced approach to historical and even esoteric articles is representative of the larger effort. In the article on “Jews,” for example, he removed the “Land of Israel” from a key sentence on the origin of Jewish people. He changed the article’s short description (a condensed summary that appears on Wikipedia’s mobile version and on site search results) from “Ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant” to “Ethnoreligious group and cultural community.” Though subtle, the implication is significant: unlike nations, “cultural communities” don’t require, or warrant, their own states.

Iskandar also worked to sanitize articles on Hamas, in one case removing mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article “Hamas.” (The edit remains intact today.) He removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter in at least three other articles.

To expand his reach, Iskandar also goes on editing rampages, or “speedruns.” Last August, he removed 22,000 characters from the article on Amnesty International that were critical of the organization, in one case wholesale deleting a 1,000-word long passage related to criticism of its stance on Israel. On the “History of Israel” article, Iskandar deleted a paragraph critical of the Iranian government; removed an account of 16th century Jewish immigration to Israel; excised a mention of the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler; and made dozens of similar edits — all in a matter of minutes.

Far from a lone wolf, however, Iskandar is part of a group of editors that uses coordinated “swarm” tactics that, taken together, invert Wikipedia’s founding vision, turning the site's perceived neutrality and authority into an attack vector that can be hijacked to advance ideological aims at a mass scale.

In August, an analysis of the intensity of editing in PIA between January 2022 and September 2024 found that the top contributor to PIA by number of edits, a user called Selfstudier, made over 15,000 edits in the space in that period. Iskandar323 contributed over 12,000 edits to PIA articles in the same period. Other members of the pro-Palestine group are equally prolific, with top contributors including CarmenEsparzaAmoux (8,353), Makeandtoss (8,074), Nableezy (6,414), Nishidani (5,879), Onceinawhile (4,760) and an admin called Zero0000 (2,561).

The 15,000 edits by Selfstudier and the 12,000 by Iskandar323 put those two users in the top 99.975% of editors by number of edits — solely for their PIA edits made in under three years. The other pro-Palestine group members’ PIA edits from this period place them among the top 99.9% of Wikipedia editors. All together, the top 20 editors of this group made over 850,000 edits to more than 10,500 articles, the majority of them in the Palestine-Israel topic area, or topically connected historical articles.

It’s not just the raw number of edits that matters. The same analysis shows that fully 90% of total edits by Selfstudier in that period were made to Palestine-Israel articles. Other members of the group clock in at 90% (sean.hoyland), 86% (CarmenEsparzaAmoux), 82% (Makeandross), 64% (Nishidani), and 43% (Onceinawhile). After October 7 the intensity increased, with Selfstudier peaking at 99% in October 2023, while others got to 97%, 98% and even 100% of their total monthly edits dedicated to PIA.

To evade detection, the group works in pairs or trios, an approach that veils them from detection. They also appear to rotate their groupings for the same reason. Likewise, one or more of the group’s editors can come to the aid of another in the case of pushback. In many instances, editing by the group is made to articles focused on historical issues, where a single editor might be patrolling for this kind of abuse, making it easy for two dedicated users to overwhelm or exhaust the lone editor.

A separate analysis shows the number of instances in which two members of the group edited the same article to be extraordinarily high. As of time of publication, Nableezy and Onceinawhile have co-edited 1,418 articles. Nableezy and Iskandar323 1,429 co-edited articles. Onceinawhile and Zero0000 have co-edited 2,119 articles. Zero000 and Nableezy have co-edited 1,754 articles. Onceinawhile and Iskandar323 have 1,594 co-edited. Huldra and Onceinawhile have co-edited articles 2,493 times. Nableezy and Huldra have co-edited 1,764 times.

[ Incidences of co-edited articles amongst top 30 members of this group. Cells in purple indicate instances of two editors co-editing more than 150 articles. ]

One of the articles targeted most intensively by the group is the one for Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from the 1920s to the 1950s, a pivotal figure in Palestinian history. While Iskandar323 worked to remove negative content from the Al-Husseini article, it was two other members of the group — Zero0000 and Nishidani — who would have the greatest impact, together making over 1,000 edits to the article, often in an attempt to erase or downplay Al-Husseini’s well-documented collaboration with Hitler.

In one instance in April 2021, Zero0000 and Nishidani worked together to keep a photo of Al-Husseini touring a Nazi concentration camp out of the article. While a single editor, Shane (a newbie), advocated for its inclusion, a trio of veterans including Zero0000, Nishidani and Selfstudier fought back. After Selfstudier accused Shane of being a troll for arguing for the photo’s inclusion, Zero0000, days later, “objected” to its inclusion, citing issues of provenance. Nishidani stepped in to back up Zero0000, prompting a response by Shane. The following day, Zero0000 pushed back against Shane, who responded. The day after, Nishidani returned with his own pushback. The tag-team effort proved too much for Shane, who simply gave up, and the effort succeeded: the photo remains absent. To date, Nishidani’s contributions to the article on Al-Husseini comprise 56.4% of its content.

In another case, Nishidani worked with a member of the pro-Palestine group editors, Onceinawhile to produce an article called “Zionism, race and genetics.” (The article’s title was later changed to “Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism”.) The article attempts to tie Zionism’s roots to 19th century views on “race science” embraced by the Nazis, thereby drawing an implicit — and, in at least one instance in the article, explicit — parallel between Zionism and Nazism. Pro-Palestine group member Onceinawhile created the article in July of last year, accompanied by a note arguing, “Early Zionists were the primary supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it offered scientific ‘proof’ of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent.”Together, Onceinawhile and Nishidani’s contributions account for nearly 90% of the article’s content. Onceinawhile would continue to push this view in numerous other articles, including the article on “Zionism.”

In March, a Wikipedia user submitted a case to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) alleging “a systematic removal of instances documenting human rights crimes by Iranian officials on Wikipedia, accompanied by the addition of misleading information favoring the IRP (Islamic Republic Party) on the platform.” The case shows that a member of the pro-Palestine group called Mhhossein edited the article on the Mahsa Amini protests — the months-long anti-regime demonstrations that rocked Iran when a young woman died in custody after being arrested for improperly wearing her head scarf — to change key wording to falsely depict widespread support for the Iranian regime and whitewash violent calls from pro-government counter-demonstrators.

According to the allegations, Iskandar323 (who has co-edited with Mhhossein nearly 400 times) worked with a separate editor to delete “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Iranian] officials.” This included a claim about Iran’s post-revolution death commissions that executed thousands political prisoners; details showing executions were carried out by “high-ranking members of Iran’s current government”; mention of the Iranian government’s “unprecedented reign of terror” in the early 1980s; the sentencing of an Iranian official to life in prison in Sweden for his role in the executions; the targeting of an Iranian dissident group with “psychological warfare,” and dozens of others.

The charges are serious, and the evidence backing them up abundant. Nevertheless, seven months later the Arbcom case is still pending. The reason is systemic: in a lengthy request for arbitration on a separate PIA case, one of Wikipedia’s arbitrators noted that the final decision-making panel is staffed by 12 volunteers, only 10 of whom are active. “It is clear that AE [arbitration enforcement] has run out of steam to handle the morass of editor conduct issues in PIA,” the arbitrator wrote. “PIA is a Gordian knot; and AE has run short of knot detanglers.”

Electing more Arbcom members would require a massive overhaul of the site’s governing regulations, a task akin to the US government amending its constitution. And though Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site, has around $500 million in assets, because of the air-gap between Wikipedia and WMF and the volunteer ethos of Wikipedia’s mission not a penny can be used to hire people to oversee contentious topics.

So the group’s pro-Iran efforts go unchecked. One of its most prominent members, Nableezy (over 6,000 PIA edits since 2022), has put considerable effort into sanding the hard edges off of Iran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah. Nableezy — who took the extraordinary step of including a userbox on his Talk page that links to a text that reads “This user supports Hezbollah.” — has worked to rebuff claims that Hezbollah is a terror organization. In one instance, Nableezy pushed back against another user characterizing a Hezbollah attack on Israeli population centers as a terror attack, arguing “An attack on military targets is not terrorism.” Last year, Nableezy, who appears to be an American, argued in the Talk page for the “Hezbollah” article that, “The US military is designated as a terror group by Iran, should we include that as an endnote everywhere the US army is mentioned?”

But Nableezy’s main area of focus is Israel. To this end, Nableezy’s editing has included subtle, ideologically consistent moves like removing a picture of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the “Israel” article (the image remains absent at time of publishing), pushing for the removal of the ancient history of Israel from the article, and altering a sentence on Zionism that described it as a call by its leaders for the “restoration of the Jews to their homeland” to a call for “the colonization of Palestine by European Jews.”

This exchange embodies the rhetorical approach taken by the group: the shifting of language, the torturing of settled definitions, and positioning fringe academic theory as mainstream — an approach developed by the radical left, in concert with global Islamist movements, in the wake of 9/11, when the attacks put Islamism on the moral back foot. In response, the leftist-Islamist alliance launched two decades of ideological assault on the US, and the West more generally. The same post-9/11 dynamic took place after October 7, when the savagery of the Hamas attack opened a vulnerability as the broader public would recognize it as a barbaric attack on civilians.

In response, the ideological push-back on Wikipedia ramped up. In February, an explicitly coordinated effort was launched when leaders on a group called Tech For Palestine (TFP) — launched in January by Paul Biggar, the Irish co-founder of software development platform CircleCI — opened a channel on their 8,000-strong Discord channel called “tfp-wikipedia-collaboration.” In the channel, two group leaders, Samira and Samer, coordinated with other members to mass edit a number of PIA articles. The effort included recruiting volunteers, processing them through formal orientation, troubleshooting issues, and holding remote office hours to problem solve and ideate. The channel’s welcome message posed a revealing question: “Why Wikipedia? It is a widely accessed resource, and its content influences public perception.”

At the heart of TFP Wikipedia Collaboration was a veteran editor called Ïvana, who was tapped as the resident expert on the site, and whose Discord username featured the red triangle affiliated with Hamas’ targeting.

With Ïvana’s guidance, as well as her hands-on editing of articles, the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration group coordinated both on Discord and Wikipedia, where they created editing staging grounds on Talk pages that included elements like “Work in Progress Table,” “Investigate and Decide,” and a volunteer job board with detailed responsibilities. Off-wiki, the group created planning documentation with agendas, meeting notes, goal setting, role allocation, skills and breakdowns. Their activities ranged from editing celebrity articles by adding pro-Palestine statements they made to creating new articles out of whole cloth, like a proposed article called “Palestine: The Solution.” The group focused extensively on the article for German discount supermarket Lidl, adding a section in the “Criticism” section about products from Israel being incorrectly labeled as Moroccan. They also put special emphasis on articles concerning sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, with Ïvana questioning the veracity of reports of rape from that day, while adding to other articles claims that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians. (In March, a senior UN official who investigated sexual violence on October 7 concluded that, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.” The official wrote her investigation produced a “‘catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors,’ including sexual violence.”)

In its most audacious case, TFP members developed a project to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British Members of Parliament to change their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict in advance of UK elections in July. The plan called for scraping data on visits by MPs to Israel and Israel-related donor information, to create a dedicated Wikipedia article using the data to (as the originator of the project put it) inform “voters to put pressure ahead of the next [parliamentary] elections.”

Within the TFP channel, there was always a background awareness that what they were doing was not in keeping with Wikipedia norms. Early in the channel’s existence, a user and veteran Wikipedia editor called shushugah wrote, “I’m a little confused what the goal is here. I’m an active Wikipedia editor, and for any Israel/Palestine topics you need a solid grasp of Wikipedia policy/culture, and have 500 edits/30 days of activity…no shortcuts.” Within minutes, another user, Heba, wrote “Let’s chat [hand wave emoji].” One of the channel’s power users, zei_squirrel, who runs an X account with 270,000 followers, noted “it’s important to keep this as decentralized and organic as possible to avoid it being used against us, but again this should all be familiar to those who know how wiki works.”

The anxiety was not unwarranted. In September, a researcher discovered the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel and published a number of posts on a blog called Wikipediaflood. (A magazine called Jewish Insider also stumbled across the group, but mostly failed to appreciate its full significance.) These events sent the group into a panic, with Ïvana erasing all her chats in the channel, and deleting the Talk pages and Sandboxes staging pages she’d created. The group locked down the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel in September. At minimum, the group made revisions to at least 112 articles on celebrities, American cities, pro-Palestine organizations, and figures and events related to the Gaza war.

There is little doubt that the kind of careful, intelligent Wikipedia coordination detailed above will continue. Wikipedia is simply too powerful a tool — and one too easy to manipulate — for actors like the pro-Palestine group and TFP activists to stay away from. But Wikipedia is coming to a crossroads. The ask-and-answer modality of generative AI will eat away at the value of the site’s privileged position within the Google information ecosystem. Groups less savvy than pro-Palestine will also learn to exploit the site, to much more public effect. As with so many of our once-cherished institutions, trust will be lost, and credibility will soon follow.

One of the hallmarks of an institution in crisis is that, far from preparing for the future, it is barely capable of managing the present. With Arbcom grinding to a halt and edit wars erupting in all corners — all while Wikimedia Foundation, fiddling to the baroque tunes of DEI, has turned its attention to funding progressive activism — it seems Wikipedia is facing exactly this challenge. In most cases, calling a crisis existential is overblown. While Wikipedia may not be there just yet, it’s clear that moment is not far off.

==

This is what online jihad looks like.

If you've donated to Wikipedia, stop. For anything even marginally political, Wikipedia has been successfully ideologically penetrated and compromised by coordinated activist attacks.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” -- George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

[terven-queen]

Are the hamas death squads parachuting into Israel to decapitate babies and rape women (claims that have been confirmed to have no factual basis whatsoever) in the room with us right now?

Hamas HAS raped women. Both sides of every war since the beginning of fucking time have raped women and children. War crimes are being committed on both sides. I’m anti-Hamas, pro-Palestinian civilians, pro-Israeli civilians, anti-Israel’s government, pro two state solution, in support of both Palestine’s & Israel’s right to exist.

Corrupt evil men on both sides are causing undue suffering.

Does that clear shit up for you? :)

[news4dzhozhar]

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Source

[corruptedmind-pureheart]

Oakland, California