Delirium writes:
[[User:RK]] is, as is probably obvious, somewhat of a pro-Israeli activist, and is becoming difficult to clean up. The latest thing I've noticed is him adding 2-paragraph-long attacks on Arab anti-Semitism to articles such as [[George Washington]] and [[Benjamin Franklin]], in the guise of "defending" their "tarnished" reputations against charges of anti-Semitism stemming from little-known fabricated quotes.
I find your attack on me unwarrented, and your ignorance of the topic very problematic.
These particular quotes are most certainly not "little known". Wikipedia was the subject of repeated anti-Semitic vandalism by people putting in fake quotes into the articles of well-known (and highly respected) historical figures.
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".
Wikipedia should not be vandalized by agitators who use recognized and proven forgeries to put anti-Semitic diatribes in the mouths of well-respected historical figures. What about this do you find problematic? In fact, noticing this problem and identifying it to prevent future abuse is precisely the kind of work we need to encourage in all Wikipedia articles.
How can you can connect this to the Arab-Israeli dispute is beyond me. That connection only exists in your mind. How you can twist this necessary clarification into "pro Israeli" propaganda is beyond me, and frankly, quite disturbing.
Is exposing fraud and proven forgeries now pro-Israeli? Is creating and promoting fraud now pro-Arab? Come on.
With concern,
Robert (RK)
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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