[WikiEN-l] Terrorism is a particularly nasty form of violence (was: OneVoice)

[Poor, Edmund W]

Viajero gave a detailed description of the edit history:

<< More recently, an article called [[Terrorism against Israel in 2004]]
was started in early January by an anon user and OneVoice (companion
articles for earlier years were also created).  As can be seen from the
page histories, initially it was a timeline of Israeli victims of
atrocities. 
Danny was furious about this article and left an angry comment at the
top of the Talk page. I agreed:  I thought it was basically a propaganda
exercise.  User BL took it upon himself to salvage the thing by renaming
it [[Violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 2004]] and adding
Israeli atrocities to give it more balance.  OneVoice insisted on
removing the Palestinian listings for a variety of convoluted reasons
given on the Talk page.  I agreed with BL's actions, and reverted
OneVoice, and also reverted his repeated efforts to undo the redirect
from [[Terrorism against Israel in 2004]].  As a reward for our efforts,
OneVoice listed BL and me on [[Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress]],
accusing BL and me of being the same person. >>

First of all, there is no doubt in my mind that BL and Viajero are
different people. I've had on-line conversations with both of them, and
their writing styles and philosophical outlook are distinct. 

The idea of lumping together all the "terrorist acts" in the Middle East
and labelling them "violence" may or may not be the best long-term
solution for the Wikipedia's treatment of this terribly difficult and
painful subject. 

Certainly there are some "sides" that want to minimize or omit their own
part in the fray, while maximizing the actions of others. I personally
regard this as a sort of propaganda exercise and hope it won't be
allowed to go too far at Wikipedia. Rather, we should write about ALL
the significant events that have occurred in the Middle East.

If we are writing articles that have a bearing on the Arab-Israeli
conflict, with its history of grievances and injustice and violence, how
can we treat this matter without including everything we know?

Ed Poor
Family Federation for World Peace