Robert wrote:
These "little known" quotes, as you call
them, in fact are
very widely distributed in hundreds of print sources,
books, journals, and now exist on thousands of virulently
anti-Semitic, pro-KKK, pro-Nazi websites, and some
pro-Islamist websites. If you imagine that these
extremel;y well-known and widely used anti-Semitic
fabrications are little known, then this just means you are
totally ignorant of this particular subject. They are just
as predominant and widely used as "The Protocols of the
Eldars of zion".
Is exposing fraud and proven forgeries now pro-Israeli? Is
creating and promoting fraud now pro-Arab? Come on.
Certainly I have no problem with removing forged quotes -- I was
advocating that the entire issue should be absent from the article,
since the two people in question have no connection with anti-Semitism.
If you do think it rises to the level of "wide-spread myth in need of
debunking" though, I wouldn't object to a simple one-sentence note that
they were not anti-Semitic, and some recent quotes insinuating so are
forgeries. What I object to is a 2-paragraph-long expose with links to
various sites that have these forged quotes and so on -- I'd think
something like "Some anti-Semitic quotes attributed to Benjamin Franklin
in recent years are forgeries" would suffice. If there does need to be
a lengthy explanation of the phenomenon of attributing forged
anti-Semitic quotes to 18th-century Americans (or other historical
figures), it should be a separate page, with "see [[Anti-Semitic
forgeries]] for more information" or something along those lines.
Anyway, I brought this up on the list more because I was looking for one
example each of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli biases, and these were
the first two that came to mind (for the record, BL doesn't think his
additions are biased either).
-Mark