Jimmy-
Since wikipedia isn't really accessible at the moment (sigh, new parts arriving tomorrow or Monday, though!), and also just for the historical record of the mailing list, can you give the mailing list some details of what RK was doing?
After one of his many flamewars (I sent you an email when I noticed I had another inbox full of RK flames), he started accusing people - respected Wikipedians including Angela and Martin - of "vandalizing" his *user* page. What they did is post comments on his *talk* page. Both Angela and Martin are exemplary, reasonable Wikipedians, and their comments were not hateful in any way. (In fact I deeply admire Martin for his patience with RK, if he had treated me like that I would have called for consequences long ago.)
He then accused these people of hating Jews and replaced their user pages with disparaging comments. If I remember correctly, he also blanked a regular talk page. I put a comment on his talk page to the effect that 1) there is a distinction between user and talk pages, and everyone was free to leave comments on RK's talk page; 2) vandalism is absolutely unacceptable, that if he continued blanking Martin's user page, that page would be protected, and that he would be banned if he continued vandalizing other pages. This, to me, seemed like a reasonable safety measure to prevent this nonsense from escalating further. In response, he inserted a disparaging comment on my user page. At that point I decided to ban him.
This might be an ideal case study for 'line drawing' in the case of temporary bans for vandalism.
In my opinion, this is a clear cut case of vandalism by a user who has obvious psychological problems, and an enforced cooldown period was very much within the "arsenal" of sysop powers that we should acknowledge.
It is correct that RK has made good edits in the past. He is very knowledgeable about Jewish culture and has a healthy pro-scientific attitude. But whenever he has a conflict of opinion, his usual course of action is to revert -- completely. I spent weeks trying to find compromises over a single article with an anonymous user, responding to each of his arguments in detail. RK, on the other hand, will just write something like "reverting anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish nonsense" in his edit summary. When the other person doesn't back down or is a regular, he will send a rambling post to the mailing list about evil persecution. Because most of his "victims" are anons, they usually don't defend themselves much -- but it creates a very negative impression of our project.
Not that there weren't real anti-Semitic edits. But there's a difference between anti-Semitism and criticizing Israel's current and past politics. In fact, even if you accuse Ariel Sharon of being a murderer or a terrorist, that has not necessarily anything to do with anti-Semitism. I think we can agree on that. Yet, that has always been RK's accusation against anyone. I was accused of being anti-Semitic by him months ago because I oppose circumcision.
He lost it completely this time, and most people who are familiar with the matter consider the response adequate. Whether he returns is his decision, but I personally am of the opinion that he should apologize for this recent episode before being allowed to edit again, not the least because he insulted everyone working on this project and it would be a further insult to just pretend that nothing happened. I for one don't like being called a nazi, in rage or not, and I don't like to work with people who do so.
Regards,
Erik