Israeli-Palestinian conflict (61 Viewers)
- Thread starter ReBeL
- Start date
Stupid is everywhere. We don't even need a newspaper for that.
Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups
Since the earliest days of the worldwide web, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen its rhetorical counterpart fought out on the talkboards and chatrooms of the internet.
Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in "Zionist editing" for Wikipedia, the online reference site.
Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My Israel) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.
"We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. "We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day."
Wikipedia is one of the world's most popular websites, and its 16m entries are open for anyone to edit, rewrite or even erase. The problem, according to Ayelet Shaked of Israel Sheli, is that online, pro-Israeli activists are vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian voices. "We don't want to give this arena to the other side," she said. "But we are so few and they are so many. People in the US and Europe never hear about Israel's side, with all the correct arguments and explanations."
Like others involved with this project, Shaked thinks that her government is "not doing a very good job" of explaining Israel to the world.
And on Wikipedia, they believe that there is much work to do.
Take the page on Israel, for a start: "The map of Israel is portrayed without the Golan heights or Judea and Samaria," said Bennett, referring to the annexed Syrian territory and the West Bank area occupied by Israel in 1967.
Another point of contention is the reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – a status that is constantly altered on Wikipedia.
Other pages subject to constant re-editing include one titled Goods allowed/banned for import into Gaza – which is now being considered for deletion – and a page on the Palestinian territories.
Then there is the problem of what to call certain neighbourhoods. "Is Ariel a city or a settlement?" asks Shaked of the area currently described by Wikipedia as "an Israeli settlement and a city in the central West Bank." That question is the subject of several thousand words of heated debate on a Wikipedia discussion thread.
The idea, says Shaked and her colleauges, is not to storm in, cause havoc and get booted out – the Wikipedia editing community is sensitive, consensus-based and it takes time to build trust.
"We learned what not to do: don't jump into deep waters immediately, don't be argumentative, realise that there is a semi-democratic community out there, realise how not to get yourself banned," says Yisrael Medad, one of the course participants, from Shiloh.
Is that Shiloh in the occupied West Bank? "No," he sighs, patiently. "That's Shiloh in the Binyamin region across the Green Line, or in territories described as disputed."
One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn't want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."
In 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators.
Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month. "It turns out there is quite a thirst for this activity," says Bennett. "The Israeli public is frustrated with the way it is portrayed abroad."
The organisiers of the Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the "Best Zionist editor", with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.
Wikipedia wars
There are frequent flare-ups between competing volunteer editors and obsessives who run Wikipedia. As well as conflicts over editing bias and "astroturfing" PR attempts, articles are occasionally edited to catch out journalists; the Independent recently erroneously published that the Big Chill had started life as the Wanky Balls festival. In 2005 the founding editorial director of USA Today, John Seigenthaler, discovered his Wikipedia entry included the claim that he was involved in the assassination of JFK.
Editors can remain anonymous when changing content, but conflicts are passed to Wikipedia's arbitration committee. Scientology was a regular source of conflict until the committee blocked editing by the movement.
Critics cite the editing problems as proof of a flawed site that can be edited by almost anybody, but its defenders claim the issues are tiny compared with its scale. Wikipedia now has versions in 271 languages and 379 million users a month.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups
Since the earliest days of the worldwide web, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen its rhetorical counterpart fought out on the talkboards and chatrooms of the internet.
Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in "Zionist editing" for Wikipedia, the online reference site.
Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My Israel) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.
"We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. "We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day."
Wikipedia is one of the world's most popular websites, and its 16m entries are open for anyone to edit, rewrite or even erase. The problem, according to Ayelet Shaked of Israel Sheli, is that online, pro-Israeli activists are vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian voices. "We don't want to give this arena to the other side," she said. "But we are so few and they are so many. People in the US and Europe never hear about Israel's side, with all the correct arguments and explanations."
Like others involved with this project, Shaked thinks that her government is "not doing a very good job" of explaining Israel to the world.
And on Wikipedia, they believe that there is much work to do.
Take the page on Israel, for a start: "The map of Israel is portrayed without the Golan heights or Judea and Samaria," said Bennett, referring to the annexed Syrian territory and the West Bank area occupied by Israel in 1967.
Another point of contention is the reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – a status that is constantly altered on Wikipedia.
Other pages subject to constant re-editing include one titled Goods allowed/banned for import into Gaza – which is now being considered for deletion – and a page on the Palestinian territories.
Then there is the problem of what to call certain neighbourhoods. "Is Ariel a city or a settlement?" asks Shaked of the area currently described by Wikipedia as "an Israeli settlement and a city in the central West Bank." That question is the subject of several thousand words of heated debate on a Wikipedia discussion thread.
The idea, says Shaked and her colleauges, is not to storm in, cause havoc and get booted out – the Wikipedia editing community is sensitive, consensus-based and it takes time to build trust.
"We learned what not to do: don't jump into deep waters immediately, don't be argumentative, realise that there is a semi-democratic community out there, realise how not to get yourself banned," says Yisrael Medad, one of the course participants, from Shiloh.
Is that Shiloh in the occupied West Bank? "No," he sighs, patiently. "That's Shiloh in the Binyamin region across the Green Line, or in territories described as disputed."
One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn't want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."
In 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators.
Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month. "It turns out there is quite a thirst for this activity," says Bennett. "The Israeli public is frustrated with the way it is portrayed abroad."
The organisiers of the Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the "Best Zionist editor", with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.
Wikipedia wars
There are frequent flare-ups between competing volunteer editors and obsessives who run Wikipedia. As well as conflicts over editing bias and "astroturfing" PR attempts, articles are occasionally edited to catch out journalists; the Independent recently erroneously published that the Big Chill had started life as the Wanky Balls festival. In 2005 the founding editorial director of USA Today, John Seigenthaler, discovered his Wikipedia entry included the claim that he was involved in the assassination of JFK.
Editors can remain anonymous when changing content, but conflicts are passed to Wikipedia's arbitration committee. Scientology was a regular source of conflict until the committee blocked editing by the movement.
Critics cite the editing problems as proof of a flawed site that can be edited by almost anybody, but its defenders claim the issues are tiny compared with its scale. Wikipedia now has versions in 271 languages and 379 million users a month.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups
More photos of Israeli soldiers with detainees posted to highlight issue
AN ISRAELI group advocating an end to the occupation in the West Bank has posted new pictures on Facebook of soldiers posing with Palestinian detainees to prove how widespread the phenomenon is.
Breaking the Silence, an organisation that collects testimonies from soldiers serving in the West Bank, uploaded new images including a group of soldiers posing next to a seriously wounded Palestinian lying on the floor and a picture of a soldier pointing a rifle at a prisoner stripped to his underwear.
The organisation said it uploaded the images in an effort to counter claims by Israeli military officials on Tuesday, in which they condemned the pictures posted by a woman soldier, Eden Abergil, but said that her actions were those of a lone soldier and did not represent the norm.
Ms Abergil, who completed her mandatory military service last year, posted pictures of herself smiling next to Palestinian detainees, prompting a wave of criticism in Israel and around the world. She was stripped of her military rank and will not be called up for reserve duty.
Ms Abergil criticised the army’s decision, and claimed the affair had been blown out of proportion and that she had never intended to humiliate Palestinians. “I’m very disappointed with the Israel Defence Forces. The army is ungrateful. I risked my life, got injured; I was a model soldier, and now I wish I never served in this army.”
Ms Abergil claimed that she has received death threats from all over the world since the story broke.
Breaking the Silence called on the Israeli military spokesman not to underestimate the intelligence of the Israeli public and to admit that this is a widespread phenomenon.
Another Israeli human rights group, Machsom Watch, which monitors the behaviour of soldiers at West Bank checkpoints, linked the latest set of photographs to the immorality of 43 years of military occupation.
In an opinion piece on the Ynet news website, Edna Canetti from Machsom Watch wrote: “What makes this case special is its banality, triviality, and ordinariness. She was photographed with cuffed human beings for the hell of it. What caught the attention of the media worldwide was the fact that she felt no shame being photographed like that, and no shame sharing the photos.”
Meanwhile, supporters of Ms Abergil set up a new Facebook page yesterday entitled: “We’re all with Eden Abergil.” They also posted fresh images of troops posing in front of Palestinian prisoners and sent messages of support, describing Ms Abergil as an honest soldier and the victim of a military witch-hunt.
The fact that so many soldiers decide to upload photographs on Facebook and similar sites has created a headache for the Israeli military censor.
Army bases have posters reading “Not everyone is your friend on Facebook”. In March an operation in the West Bank was called off at the last minute after it became known that one of the soldiers had revealed operational details on a social networking site.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0819/1224277150807.html
AN ISRAELI group advocating an end to the occupation in the West Bank has posted new pictures on Facebook of soldiers posing with Palestinian detainees to prove how widespread the phenomenon is.
Breaking the Silence, an organisation that collects testimonies from soldiers serving in the West Bank, uploaded new images including a group of soldiers posing next to a seriously wounded Palestinian lying on the floor and a picture of a soldier pointing a rifle at a prisoner stripped to his underwear.
The organisation said it uploaded the images in an effort to counter claims by Israeli military officials on Tuesday, in which they condemned the pictures posted by a woman soldier, Eden Abergil, but said that her actions were those of a lone soldier and did not represent the norm.
Ms Abergil, who completed her mandatory military service last year, posted pictures of herself smiling next to Palestinian detainees, prompting a wave of criticism in Israel and around the world. She was stripped of her military rank and will not be called up for reserve duty.
Ms Abergil criticised the army’s decision, and claimed the affair had been blown out of proportion and that she had never intended to humiliate Palestinians. “I’m very disappointed with the Israel Defence Forces. The army is ungrateful. I risked my life, got injured; I was a model soldier, and now I wish I never served in this army.”
Ms Abergil claimed that she has received death threats from all over the world since the story broke.
Breaking the Silence called on the Israeli military spokesman not to underestimate the intelligence of the Israeli public and to admit that this is a widespread phenomenon.
Another Israeli human rights group, Machsom Watch, which monitors the behaviour of soldiers at West Bank checkpoints, linked the latest set of photographs to the immorality of 43 years of military occupation.
In an opinion piece on the Ynet news website, Edna Canetti from Machsom Watch wrote: “What makes this case special is its banality, triviality, and ordinariness. She was photographed with cuffed human beings for the hell of it. What caught the attention of the media worldwide was the fact that she felt no shame being photographed like that, and no shame sharing the photos.”
Meanwhile, supporters of Ms Abergil set up a new Facebook page yesterday entitled: “We’re all with Eden Abergil.” They also posted fresh images of troops posing in front of Palestinian prisoners and sent messages of support, describing Ms Abergil as an honest soldier and the victim of a military witch-hunt.
The fact that so many soldiers decide to upload photographs on Facebook and similar sites has created a headache for the Israeli military censor.
Army bases have posters reading “Not everyone is your friend on Facebook”. In March an operation in the West Bank was called off at the last minute after it became known that one of the soldiers had revealed operational details on a social networking site.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0819/1224277150807.html
Riiiiight 
Skip the lecture on Israel's 'risks for peace'
In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America's eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner
. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."During Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's July visit to Washington, Barack Obama praised him as "willing to take risks for peace." There was a time when that meant swapping "land for peace" -- Israel sacrificing something tangible and irrecoverable, strategic depth, in exchange for something intangible and perishable, promises of diplomatic normality.
Strategic depth matters in a nation where almost everyone is or has been a soldier, so society cannot function for long with the nation fully mobilized. Also, before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel within the borders established by the 1949 armistice was in one place just nine miles wide, a fact that moved George W. Bush to say: In Texas we have driveways that long. Israel exchanged a lot of land to achieve a chilly peace with Egypt, yielding the Sinai, which is almost three times larger than Israel and was 89 percent of the land captured in the process of repelling the 1967 aggression.
The intifada was launched by the late Yasser Arafat -- terrorist and Nobel Peace Prize winner -- after the July 2000 Camp David meeting, during which then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to cede control of all of Gaza and more than 90 percent of the West Bank, with small swaps of land to accommodate the growth of Jerusalem suburbs just across the 1949 armistice line.
Israelis are famously fractious, but the intifada produced among them a consensus that the most any government of theirs could offer without forfeiting domestic support is less than any Palestinian interlocutor would demand. Furthermore, the intifada was part of a pattern. As in 1936 and 1947, talk about partition prompted Arab violence.
In 1936, when the British administered Palestine, the Peel Commission concluded that there was "an irrepressible conflict" -- a phrase coined by an American historian to describe the U.S. Civil War -- "between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country." And: "Neither of the two national ideals permits" a combination "in the service of a single state." The commission recommended "a surgical operation" -- partition. What followed was the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939.
On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations recommended a partition plan. Israel accepted the recommendation. On Nov. 30, Israel was attacked.
Palestine has a seemingly limitless capacity for eliciting nonsense from afar, as it did recently when British Prime Minister David Cameron referred to Gaza as a "prison camp." In a sense it is, but not in the sense Cameron intended. His implication was that Israel is the cruel imprisoner. Gaza's actual misfortune is to be under the iron fist of Hamas, a terrorist organization.
In May, a flotilla launched from Turkey approached Gaza in order to provoke a confrontation with Israel, which, like Egypt, administers a blockade to prevent arms from reaching Hamas. The flotilla's pretense was humanitarian relief for Gaza -- where the infant mortality rate is lower and life expectancy is higher than in Turkey.
Israelis younger than 50 have no memory of their nation within the 1967 borders set by the 1949 armistice that ended the War of Independence. The rest of the world seems to have no memory at all concerning the intersecting histories of Palestine and the Jewish people.
The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived
. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews. In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.
By George F. Will
Thursday, August 19, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../08/18/AR2010081804691.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
Riiiiight
Almost as it is in Juventuz. The Palestinian side of the story is heard much more often than the Israeli side.
The article Rebel just posted is what you'd call the "Israeli" side.
I'd love to hear more of the Israeli side of the story on attacking international activists, now that would provide for some comedic material.
But what made me laugh most in the bolded part, is the fact that he included USA too. and by Europe, i'm pretty sure he meant the bigger countries of Western Europe.
I'd love to hear more of the Israeli side of the story on attacking international activists, now that would provide for some comedic material.
But what made me laugh most in the bolded part, is the fact that he included USA too. and by Europe, i'm pretty sure he meant the bigger countries of Western Europe.
The US part is laughable, indeed, but for Europe I'm not so sure it's the same.
You see, we know the Jews much better than the Americans. It's a little harder to sell some stories to us here, no matter if you're talking about the big France, Russia and Germany or the small Croatia, Belgium and Slovakia
You see, we know the Jews much better than the Americans. It's a little harder to sell some stories to us here, no matter if you're talking about the big France, Russia and Germany or the small Croatia, Belgium and Slovakia
The US part is laughable, indeed, but for Europe I'm not so sure it's the same.
You see, we know the Jews much better than the Americans. It's a little harder to sell some stories to us here, no matter if you're talking about the big France, Russia and Germany or the small Croatia, Belgium and Slovakia
You see, we know the Jews much better than the Americans. It's a little harder to sell some stories to us here, no matter if you're talking about the big France, Russia and Germany or the small Croatia, Belgium and Slovakia