what the heck... couldn't you start this debate at another time than four days before my master's exam? ;-)
Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu writes:
But the gist was that anti-Semitism is a nationalist philosophy originiating in the 19th century that goes beyond merely accepting a society's dominant prejudices.
Toby gets the problem: Anti-Semitism is a concept of the 19th century. And its full consequences showed up in the 20th century (holocaust). Today, under the background of the holocaust, the term is one of the most evil reproaches you can think of. At least here in Germany, if you accuse someone successfully of anti-semitism, he can forget any career forever.
So, if Wagner called himself an Anti-semite, he did this under totally different circumstances and in the meanwhile the term changed its connotations - from stupid mainstream ressentiments against Jews to a very likely support of Hitler's murder of Jews. Would he also have called himself Anti-Semite if he knew of the Holocaust?
To put this problem on a meta-level: can we apply a concept or a term of the 20th century to something prior to it?
Can we call Plato's conception of state totalitarian? Is it appropriate to call the Prophet Muhammad, living in the 7th century an anti-semite?
Is it okay to call Aristoteles a sexist and criticize him for denying women the right to vote?
There is no right or final answer to these questions, but we have to think about it.
Just a small glance in the future: _if_ the Israelis adopted suddenly a policy of exterminating systematically _all_ Palestinians (some say they do already) - is then everybody who says today "I don't like these quarreling people, the Israelis are right to fight them" (like some American journalists and politicians do) a supporter of genocide?
Will Wikipedia in 50 years write "Dick Armey was Anti-Palestinian" and this will carry the same meaning as if you would say today someone is anti-semite? [1]
Concerning Ed's alleged abuse of sysop power: it should be noted that no other sysop on Wikipedia is so engaged in "hot" topics and trying to settle edit wars. I don't consider protecting pages a good way to achieve this but opinions may differ here. I support that Ed keeps his sysop status.
Rather I'd suggest a temporary ban of RK because of repeated NPOV abuses, if that didn't entail accusations of Anti-Semitism on Wikipedia.
For people who like to write good articles about anti-semitism, I want to point out that there is some work to do at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AThe_dark_side_of_Wikipedia As I have already said to Ed, I won't touch these articles.
greetings, elian [1] http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article569.shtml BTW, _if_ this interview transcript is correct - I don't trust the source entirely -, replace Israel with Germany and Palestinians with Jews and these sentences could pass for a Nazi's statement of the 1920ties. For the people not familiar with German history: longtime there was no mention of actually killing Jews, mostly the Nazis called for a "transfer of the Jews" and held that "Germany belonged to the Germans", where Germany was meant to comprise also the "vast spaces in the East", settled by the Polish etc. - these people should also be "transfered"...