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The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem

Personal work section notes. I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.

• An editorial split between those in favour of using 'Judea & Samaria' to designate (a) parts of, or (b) all, or (c) all of the West Bank and parts of Israel, and those who oppose the usage, except on those specific pages devoted to (i) Samaria (ii) Judea (iii) the administrative territory known in Israel as 'Judea & Samaria'.

• The 'Judea and Samaria' school holds that (a) these are geographical and historical designations predating the West Bank (b) used in a variety of sources published in Israel and abroad to denote the territory, or parts of it, known as the West Bank (c) and that opposition to the employment of these words in wiki constitutes an 'ethnic-based discrimination' against both Israeli and Jewish people.(d) specifically, that MeteorMaker, Pedrito and myself have conducted a campaign to denigrate or deprecate Jewish terms in the I/P area, a kind of ethnic cleansing of nomenclature, in a way that lends substance to fears our position is motivated by, well let's call a spade a spade, anti-semitism.

• The 'West Bank' school asserts that (a) these terms have an intrinsic denotative vagueness because they refer to different geophysical, administrative and political terrains depending on historical period, and that to use the terms of the territorially bounded and defined area known internationally as the West Bank creates cognitive dissonance (b) that these terms, as documented, were used under the British Mandate, then dropped for 'West Bank', which has remained to this day the default term of neutral usage internationally and in international law and diplomacy (c) that, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, the terms 'Judea & Samaria' were pushed onto the political agenda by an extremist settler group, Gush Emunim, then adopted by the Likud government in 1977, and imposed by government decree on the Israeli mass media, which suppressed the international term, West Bank (d) that, as documented, the terms 'Judea and Samaria' have a potent ideological charge as appropriative nomenclature, renaming Palestinian land presently occupied, annexed or expropriated illegally by Israel (ICJ judgement 2004), over which Israel has no sovereignty, where Israel is establishing illegal settlements at least half of which on land with private Palestinian title, and with its own Arabic toponyms, and erasing the traditional native nomenclature by creating a neo-biblical toponomy (d) that reliable secondary sources explicitly define the term as partisan, even in contemporary Hebrew and Israeli usage (e) that the evidence for usage overwhelmingly documents the prevalence of 'West Bank' (northern, southern) in neutral sources, whose neutrality is affirmed also by the very sources that otherwise employ the words 'Samaria and Judea' adduced by the former school, (f) that if explicitly attested partisan Israeli toponymy and administrative nomenclature is allowed on non-Israeli territory, then by WP:NPOV criteria, automatically this would mean the corresponding Palestinian toponymy and nomenclature, often covering the same areas, would have to be introduced (g)that in this whole debate, the West Bankers have not even represented the Palestinian side, which is absent, invisible, while the Israeli side is being treated as though its national naming were on terms of parity and neutrality with international usage (h) that wiki criteria, WP:NPOV, WP:Undue, WP:RS, WP:NCGN etc. require that neutral terminology, particularly as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of reliable sources, be employed. (i) If we are to allow Israeli terminology to be generally employed in denoting territory over which Israel exercises no sovereignty, but is simply, in law, an occupying belligerent, a very dangerous precedent, with widespread consequences for articles where ethnic conflicts exist, would be created.

(ii)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.

'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.'

Wa’-yitser’ Yĕhôwāh’ (Adonai) ĕlôhīm’ min-hā'ădāmāh’ kol-‘ha’yath’ ha’-sādeh’ wĕ'ēth kol-ôph ha’-shāma’yim wa’-yāvē ‘ el-hā'ādām’ li-r'ôth mah-yiqrā-lô’ wĕ-kôl ăsher yiqrā-lô’ hā'-ādām‘ ne’pfesh ‘ha’yāh’ hû shĕmô. (20) Wa’- yiqrā’ hā'-ādām‘ shēmôth….

‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20. And Adam gave names.. .'

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

'And He taught Adam the names, all of them.’ Qu’ran 2:31.

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, the narrator Cherrycoke recounts, against the huge backdrop of seismic shifts in the political and scientific world of that time, the story of the eponymous figures who have undertaken to draw a scientific map of the wilderness and terrain between Pennsylvania and Maryland:

‘what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding and ultimately meaningless, - we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence.”

Late in the novel, the Chinaman of the piece remarks:

‘To rule forever, . .it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,- to create thus a Distinction betwixt’em. –’tis the first stroke.-All else will follow as if predestin’d, into War and Devastation.’

The dispute here in wiki, like the historical reality it refers to, has its ‘Bad History’. In the novel, the apparently empirical task of defining boundaries is found unwittingly implicated in the later travails of American history, with its exceptionalism, erasure of native peoples, of possible alternative worlds, of Frostian paths never taken. American innocence and pragmatic realism, in the innocuous work of two surveyors, is swept up in the torment of power: cartographic principles embody an Enlightenment’s reach into the unknown, while, applied, to the ends of order and control, they inadvertently engender violent confusion and disarray. What is the ‘right line’ to take on nomenclature, when history’s line demarcating Israel and the West Bank was drawn by war, then the West Bank was occupied in the aftermath of war, and the world of Israeli settlers begins to redraw the map? One thing that happens is that the complexities have drawn editors into a minor war, as Pynchonesque as it is Pythonesque. There is one difference: most the cartographers say one thing, and Israel, the controlling power, asserts a different terminology. So what’s in a name?

Before the world was tribalized and invested by the collateral damage or fall-out from the Tower of Babel, God assigned to the mythical forefather of all, ‘man’ or Adam, the faculty to name the world, though God himself had exercised this right in naming the light (or) day (yom) and the darkness (hôshek) night(layĕlāh) (Gen.1.5) There was only one name for each thing, and in later European thought the primordial language employed in this taxonomy was to be called ‘the Adamic vernacular’. The thesis was that the pristine jargon employed by Adam, being pre-Babelic, represented the true name for every object: every thing had a proper name intrinsic to its nature. The Greeks, as we see in Plato’s Cratylus, were much prepossessed by the philosophical crux of the correctness of names (ὀρθότης τῶν ὀνομάτων): did names have an intrinsic relation to, or represent, things, or was the link arbitrary.. The Confucian school’s doctrine of the Rectification of names (zhèngmíng: 正名). In the Bible itself the Hebrew text is full of the magic of words, of the power of words themselves to alter reality, a belief testified to in Isaiah:

'So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.'

Modernity, especially after Ferdinand Saussure (1916), has opted, correctly, for the latter position, and disposed of the magical force of naming. But nationalism, another product of modernity, reintroduced it, via the backdoor, in a new sense. Naming was an act of assertive territorial control, of defining ethnic rights over land, especially as Anthony Smith argues, ethnie are defined also by attachment to a specific geophysical reality, the ‘homeland’ that defines in good part their identity ). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.

John Gaddis, glossing James Scott’s recent book on North Dakota roads and maps, remarks on maps that they reflect

‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.”

The idea of a nation as a territorial unit speaking one language over that territory is a parlously modern ideology, one engineered by nation-builders into a plausible if specious semblance of commonsense. As Massimo d’Azeglio is said to have remarked at the dawn of the Italian Risorgimento, ‘we have made Italy: our task now is to make Italians’, 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.

Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’

Daphne Kutzner, in her analysis of the role of Empire in classic children’s fiction, looks at the question from the perspective of the intrusive Empire and its refraction of imperial renaming as reflected in popular books, notes that

‘Naming a place gives the namer power over it, or at least the illusion of power and control. Colonial powers literally transform a landscape once they rename it and begin reshaping it.’

Terra incognita is the foreigner’s name for an ostensibly empty landscape which, had they taken the trouble to learn the local languages, would have revealed itself to be replete from every rocky nook to crannied gulley with ancient toponyms. The tendency was one of erasure, and, as with introduced fauna and flora , the landscape was consistently remade as it was renamed to familiarize the alien by rendering it recognizable, a variation on the landscape settlers came from. The new mapping, as often as not, represent as much the settler’s mentality, as the queerly new features of the foreign landscape under toponymic domestication.

Australia is somewhat the extraordinary exception, and broke with the gusto for imperial nomenclature. There, following the pattern set by the earlier land surveyor Thomas Mitchell and his assistant Philip Elliott that “the natives can furnish you with names for every flat and almost every hill” (1828), native names were adopted in a standarized English form for both euphony and their characteristic relation to the landscape, and indeed a resolution was passed as early as 1884 which established the priority of native names in international usage.

Often imperialism and nationalism go hand in hand. Napoleon’s troops, in 1796, could hardly communicate with each other, such were the grammatical, semantic and syntactical rifts between the various provincial patois at the time. By 1814, Napoleon had formed a European empire, and millions of provincials spoke the one, uniform language of the French state’s army. When two nations, or ethnie, occupy the same territory, the historical victor’s toponymic choices, dictated by the victor’s native language, and as articulated in bureaucratic documents and maps, usually determines what names are to be used. However, the presence of two distinct ethnie on the same national soil creates fissiparous tensions in nomenclature. Speaking of French and British conflict in Canada over areas, Susan Drummond, remarks that, 'Symbolic appropriation of a territory is a critical index of control’, and notes that, as late as 1962, the Québec cartographer Brochu, invoked the political dimension of place names as important, in the conflict with the majoritarian English heritage of Canada over the naming of the northern Inuit lands.

Again, in another familiar example, Alfonso Pérez-Agote notes that Spain has its Basque Autonomous region, Euskadi. But the original force of that name covers an area beyond the administrative and territorial units of Spain, and Basque nationalists evoke its symbolic territory, comprising also the Basque area of Navarre in France. Euskadi has, on one level, within Spanish administrative discourse, a ‘territorial political objectification’, and on another level, in Basque nationalism, a ‘non-administratively objectified’ territory extending into a neighbouring country.. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.

The anomaly, in comparative terms, is that history has settled the question, whatever local separatist nationalisms, revanchist or irredentist, may claim, except for such places as ‘Palestine’. For there, while Israel is a constituted state, it emerged the victor, manu militari in a conflict that gave it control over a contiguous land, but has no recognized legal right, since that land is defined as and ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory. Acts of unilateral annexation, the extension of administrative structures, settlements, toponymic remapping, and widescale expropriation of land in Palestinian title, is not only not recognized, but judged ‘illegal’ by the highest international bodies of law. All major encyclopedias (Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta etc.,), except Wiki, maintain a strict neutrality, and, in recognition of the fraught difficulties, adopt the neutral toponymic convention of ‘(northern/southern) West Bank’ in order to avoid lending their prestige to the partisan politics of the parties in this regional conflict.

(iii)The specific instance of Palestine and the West Bank

When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'.. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed 'Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-

'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.'

One pauses to reflect. We are being accused here of 'anti-Jewish/Israeli discrimination' for refusing to insert Israeli toponyms into the West Bank. Nothing is said of the logic of this POV-pushing, i.e. that a Palestinian reader might well regard a Wiki endorsement of suc h foreign nomenclature as a 'searing defeat', and adduce it as proof of 'anti-Palestinian discrimination' both by Zionist editors, and Misplaced Pages itself.

Since Zionism took root, and especially since Israel was founded, the making of a people, living in a defined territorial unit and speaking one language, has followed the universal pattern of modernity. The landscape, full of Arabic words, had to be renamed, often according to Biblical terminology, but, more often, by the invention of Biblical-sounding names. To do this, a good part of the 10,000 odd Arabic toponyms collected by Herbert Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence and others in surveying that part of the Middle East had to be cancelled, and replaced with Israeli/Hebrew terms, to remake the landscape and its topographic songlines resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.

The problem is, as Steven Runciman pointed out in the mid-sixties, that the part assigned to Israel by the UN deliberation of 1947 was the western, non-Biblical part, whilst the part assigned to a future Palestinian state, what we now call the West Bank, is precisely the area most infused with Biblical associations cherished by the Jewish people, with sites and names redolent of the founding myths and realities of their ancient forefathers. Israelis, in their secular land, mostly dwell where the Philistines dwelt. The Palestinians dwell where the ancient Jewish tribes once settled. The tensions simmer between the secular Israel, which thrives in its new Mediterranean world, and the religiously-identified Israel that aspires to return to a geophysical space where origins and the present, the sacred nomenclature of the Bible and the modern world of Jewish life, might at least, once more overlap, in an ‘Adamic’ harmony congruent with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

(iv)The Negev Precedent With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' Ben Gurion wrote to the committee setting forth his view that:-

We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.

Political pressure and ‘the influence of patriotic arguments’ prevailed over those who, like S.Yeibin, thought the erasure of Arab names, many of which might preserve an archaic Hebrew origin. Yeibin thought this a disaster:-

‘With a clap of the hand they were wiping out an entire cultural heritage that must certainly conceal within it elements of the Israeli-Jewish heritage as well. The researchers did indeed endeavour to identify all those names that had a link to ancient Hebrew ones in an attempt “to redeem, as far as possible, names from the days of yore.” <

Any Arabic toponym in short only interested the topographers in so far as it might provide a clue to reconstructing the hypothetical Hebraic original that might lie behind it. This consideration, however, often created a mess of concocted pseudo-traditional names. The hebraization of such Arabic toponyms did not restore the historic past, but invented a mythical landscape, resonant with traditionalist associations, that had, however, no roots in Jewish tradition. The most striking geologic formation in the Negev, Wadi Rumman was rewritten as if that word disguised an ancient Hebrew Ram ('elevated'), whereas the Arabic term it was calqued from actually meant 'Pomegranate Arroyo', for example.

Reflecting on Benvenisti’s account in his larger study of language conflict in the Middle east, the Palestinian expatriate scholar Yasir Suleiman makes remarks that,

’By assigning Hebrew names anew to places on the map, the committee was therefore ‘redeeming’ these places from the corrupt and ‘alien’ Arabic names that they have acquired over the centuries’

and likens this process of linguistic erasure of Arabic and the reconstitution of Hebrew metaphorically to the nakba:-

‘The cartographic cleansing of the Negev map of Arabic place names and their replacement by Hebrew names is an enactment of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland’

The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew language to the alien realities of the Palestinian landscape, the obvious problem was that the nomenclature for much of the flora and fauna, not to speak of the landscape itself, was infused with the very language, Arabic, a revarnished Hebrew had to compete with. As early as 1910 Jacob Fichman, a member of the Language Council, stated that Hebrew:

‘will not digest the new names of plants, especially those which have been taken from the Arabic language’ and that these borrowed names ‘will always be like atrophied limbs’ for ‘despite the fact that the Arabic language is our sister language in the family of Semitic languages, it has no foundation in our |psyche ’

Hebrew was thus to be programmatically sealed off from Arabic, to prevent atrophisation, and cultivate purism by means of a fake Biblical antiquarianism. Theodor Adorno, writing in the melancholic aftermath of the Holocaust on the effects of cultural purism, once remarked on the purging of foreign words from German undertaken by nationalists intent restoring an ideal of cultural authenticity. He saw this as part of the pathology of nationalism in Germany. Foreign words were treated as if they were 'the Jews of language' (Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache). In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.

(v)The West Bank. History and Naming The relationship between demographic displacement and the loss of one's landscape through the erasure of its traditional placenames in Palestine has been remarked on by Paul Diehl.

‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’

In 1950, when King Abdullah, of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, unilaterally annexed the territory he had conquered in 1948, he changed the name of his country to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which incorporated the remaining fragment of Palestine as aḍ-Ḍiffä l-Ġarbīyä, or 'the West Bank' of that kingdom. The usage is still current in German (Westjordanland). Though only Britain recognized his annexation, the word itself found ready acceptance in, and was not, 'forced on', the international community, as Binyamin Netanyahu argued.

In 1967, Israel conquered what the world knew as ‘The West Bank’, the Biblical heartland, and a decree calling it ‘Judea and Samaria’ was issued by the Israeli military on December 17 that year with the explicit definition that it would be identical in meaning for all purposes to the West Bank region to replace the interim terms 'Occupied Territories' (ha-shetahim ha-kevushim), and ‘the Administered Territories’ (ha-shetahim ha-muhzakim) in use since the immediate aftermath of the June war. The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy.

Gideon Aran describes the achievement:

‘The importance of changing names in the process of conquering territory is well known. Assimilation of the name “Judea and Samaria” in normal and official language, as well as in jargon, attests to G(ush)E(numin)’s political and cultural achievements.'

The Camp David Accords negotiations of and the final agreement, in 1979, only underline how great was the linguistic rift between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's position and the American government intent on brokering an agreement.

‘Begin consistently proved to be the most extreme member of his delegation, insisting on seemingly innocent terms such as “autonomy” as opposed to “self rule,” on the labelling of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” in the Hebrew text, and on the use of the phrase “undivided Jerusalem.'

A huge amount of wrangling between the American negotiators and Begin revolved around this term.

‘for what must have been the tenth time, he (Begin) objected to the term West Bank, giving a lesson to the president on the geographic and historical appropriateness of the term and the importance of using the words Judea and Samaria.’

Begin refused to back down from his ‘rock-hard’ intransigence on using ‘Judea and Samaria’ and at the Camp David signing ceremony, (March 26,1979) several interpretive notes were required to be added as annexes to the basic documents, one specifically dealing with the West Bank, which President Carter annotated with his own hand with the words:

‘I have been informed that the expression ‘West Bank’ is understood by the Government of Israel to mean ‘Judea and Samaria’.

An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovokedinvasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state on Israel’s northern flank from Lebanon, where the PLO projected a 'state in waiting' image that threatened Israel’s plans for long-term control over the West Bank. The war was, the head of the IDF said at the time, ‘part of the struggle over the Land of Israel. It aimed to further the isolation of Palestinians on the West Bank by depriving them of close support, halt the rise to political respectability of the PLO, which embodied Palestinian nationalist aspirations, and deprive that body of its claims to be a political partner in the peace process for Israel’s normalization of its relations with the outside world. One calculation, a minority view entertained by both Ariel Sharon and Raphael Eytan, however, was that, expelled from Lebanon, the PLO would be forced to return to Jordan, topple king Hussein, and establish a Palestinian state there to satisfy Palestinian national ambitions that Israel would thwart on the West Bank.

Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Misplaced Pages, became a programmatic goal. The settlers were in fact 'colonists' in the old sense, but Israeli English usage has here prevailed in the politics of the culture wars to determine how the international community perceives the dynamics of that area. The corresponding Hebrew usage is complex (see Israeli settlements), but continuity with the biblical setlement of Eretz Yisrael is evoked by referring to Jewish settlers as mitnahalim. The root *n-h-l directly evokes a passage in the Book of Numbers where each tribe is assigned its portion on entering Canaan, or the Land of Israel, particularly as ' in the pledge by the tribes of Gad and Reuben that they will fight on the west side of the Jordan river to help the other tribes take possession of their assigned portions' Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.

Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area..

This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them 'Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), , thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.

Michael Sfard indeed has spoken of Hebrew being mobilized to lend itself to the national emergency of occupying Palestine, and denying the Palestinians the liberty to be themselves. They are passive subjects of an activist language that wraps them about in bureaucratic euphemisms.

'It has been tasked with providing a soothing, anesthetizing name for the entire project of suffocation, for the blanket system of theft we have imposed on those we occupy . . Thus extrajudicial executions have become “targeted assassinations”. Torture has been dubbed “moderate physical pressure”. Expulsion to Gaza has been renamed “assigning a place of residence”. The theft of privately owned land has become “declaring the land state-owned”. Collective punishment is “leveraging civilians”; and collective punishment by blockade is a “siege,” “closure” or “separation".'

A proposal is now being made to apply the principle of Hebraization, as of 2009, even to those places within Israel which the world designates by traditional toponyms, such as Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) Nazareth (Natzrat) and Jaffa (Yafo). According to Yossi Sarid, the process, illustrated further by Knesset proposals to eliminate Arabic as one of Israel's official languages, constitutes a form of ethnocide.

(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions

‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’

'Mapmaking is not, however, solely an instrument of war; it is an activity of supreme political significance – a means of providing a basis for the mapmaker’s claims and for his social and symbolic values, while cloaking them in a guise of “scientific objectivity.” Maps are generally judged in terms of their “accuracy”, that is, the degree to which they succeed in reflecting and depicting the morphological landscape and its “man-made” covering But maps portray a fictitious reality that differs from other sorts of printed matter only in form.'

After 1967 ‘Cartographers . .had many options, which tended to reveal their political proclivities. Those who were sympathetic to Israel labelled the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Sinai as “administered territories” and used the phrase “Judea and Samaria” for Jordan’s former West Bank. They also included all of Jerusalem within Israeli territory,. Mapmakers who were ideologically neutral generally referred to “occupied territory” and maintained the term “West Bank”. . . In the post-1993 period a Palestinian Authority has been established in the West Bank and Gaza, yet there is no actual independent state of Palestine. Most international maps have stayed with the terms “West Bank” and “Gaza” but maps published by the Palestinian Authority describe these areas as “Palestine.” Furthermore, Palestinian Authority maps usually leave out Israel and assign its territory to “Palestine,” with the added designation that it is “occupied territory.”Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Harvey Sicherman, The power of projections: : how maps reflect global politics and history, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 pp.37-8

We are dealing with a defined territory and its naming. User:Ynhockey would make tidy distinctions, define the bound geographical territory (CIA Factbook) as just a political reality, and use Judea and Samaria for all other contexts. In his own work on Wiki, much of it admirable, we find many maps. Examine the following map he authored and uploaded, and which is employed on the Battle of Karameh

The central colour, a washed acquamarine tint, allows one to highlight the field of movement in the battle, and blurs the neat territorial division between the West Bank, and Jordan. But note that, in a wholly unnecessary manner, Israel is stamped in large bold characters and made to overlay the West Bank, which is placed diminutively in parentheses. Willy-nilly, the impression is that the West Bank is some territorial hypothesis or province within Israel. Whether Ynhockey meant to give the reader this impression or not is immaterial. Maps, as one source already quoted noted, reflect the cognitive bias of the mapmaker as much as an interpretation of a landscape, and here the bias is that the West Bank is under Israel, behind Israeli lines, a subset of that state. It is a fine example of what many cartographers and historians of cartography argue: the making of maps, and toponymic nomenclature in them, serves several purposes, to clarify, as here, a battle landscape, for example, but also to impose or assert power, or claims, or blur facts. Objectively, User:Ynhockey has loaded wiki with a map that cogs our perceptions, tilting them to an annexationist assumption. Indeed, unlike the Israeli government so far, his map actually looks like it has the West Bank annexed.

1. T.G.H.Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia,Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971 p.126; cited by Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H.Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, 2002 pp.436f.
2. Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
3. For a fascinating study on both the figure of Adam in Islamic tradition, and on commentaries on this particular text specifically, see M.J.Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr and Hadīt Literature,’ in Joel L. Kraemer (ed.) Israel Oriental Studies, Volume XIII, BRILL, 1993 pp.112-174, p.140
4. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
5. George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
6. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,, vol.1, tr.Ralph Manheim, Yale UP 1955 pp.119ff.,p.122
7. Isaiah 5:11. For this and other passages, see S.J.Tambiah ’s 1968 Malinowsky lecture, "The Magical Power of Words," (the ancient Egyptians, the Semites and Sumerians all believed that “the world and its objects were created by the word of God; and the Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names (pp.182-3). My attention was drawn to this particular essay by Tambiah by Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984 p.96
8. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
9. John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
10. Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
11. Regis Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject, University Of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 p.169 gives many Papuan examples. Compare his remark elsewhere in the same book, ‘In indigenous cultures . .(t)he most important means of taking control of the landscape is by naming, Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known.’ Ibid pp. 40-41
12. M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
13. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
14. ‘Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them. They are, in this sense, less a representation of part of the earth’s surface than a representation of the system of cognitive mapping which produced them,’ N.Penn, “Mapping the Cape: John Barrow and the First British Occupation of the Colony, 1794-1803.” in Pretexts 4 (2) Summer 1993, pp.20-43 p.23
15. John Atchison, ‘Naming Outback Australia,’ in Actes du XVI Congrès international des sciences onomastiques, Québec, Université Laval, 16-22 August 1987, Presses Université Laval, 1987 : pp.151-162 p.154-5
16. Susan Gay Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1997 p.32 .
17. Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
18. Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
19. Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2000 pp.12-13 cf.'Suffused with the sense that “it is impossible for a present-day Hebrew map not to identify by name the places of Hebrew settlement mentioned in the Bible and in post-biblical Hebrew literature,” they set about identifying these sites and putting them on “Hebrew maps,” which they placed opposite the official Mandatory maps.’
20. Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
21. Benvenisti, ibid, p.19
22. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, op.cit.p.14. The Arabic names were also found ‘morose’ and ‘offensive’ . As one member put it: ‘Many of the names are offensive in their gloomy and morose meanings, which reflect the powerlessness of the nomads and their self-denigration in the face of the harshness of nature’ (ibid.p.17). On the committee see also his memoir, Meron Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2007 p.72.
23. Amar Dahamshe Off the linguistic map. Are Arab place names derived from Hebrew? in Haaretz 30.06.10
24. Benvenisti, ibid. p.17, p.18
25. ‘The name of the Ramon Crater, for example, perhaps the most dramatic geological formation in the Negev, “is derived from the Hebrew adjective ram (meaning elevated), “states an Israeli guidebook. The fact that its name in Arabic was Wadi Rumman (Pomegranate Arroyo), . . was not considered worthy of mention’ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.19
26. Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
27. cf.Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn,, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1930, Meridian Book reprint 1962. Shalom Spiegel was Sam Spiegel's more distinguished and erudite brother.
28. Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words, ibid p.140
29. Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
30. Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
31. 'The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948'. Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Warner Books, (1993) 2000 p.20. Netanyahu's dislike of the term (and his faulty memory for dates), is mirrored by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, evidence if ever of the neutrality of the term: cf.‘I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassanah and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defense forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than when concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location, not a country, not a homeland. The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word, it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. . .The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank or call its Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say the Territories! Brilliant! I am a Palestinian, but my homeland is the Territories! What is happening here? By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history.’ Mourid Barghouti, 'The Servants of War and their Language', in International parliament of Writers, Autodafe, Seven Stories Press, 2003 pp.139-147 pp140-1
32. Emma Playfair, International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 41.
33. Ran HaCohen, 'Influence of the Middle East Peace Process on the Hebrew Language' (1992), reprinted in Michael G. Clyne (ed.), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp.385-414, p.397.
34. Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
35. 'The terms “occupied territory” or “West Bank” were forbidden in news reports.'Ian S. Lustick, 'The Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectic of Religion and Nationalism in the Middle East', Logos, Vol.1, No.3, Summer 2002 pp.18-44, p. 39
36. 'Begin was happy to castigate the media and the intelligentsia for their views, real and imaginary, and their use of politically incorrect language. Israeli television was now instructed to use “Judea and Samaria’ for the administered territories, annexation became ‘incorporation’ and the Green Line suddenly disappeared from maps of Israel and the West Bank'. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2008 p.174
37. 'The successful gaining of the popular acceptance of these terms was a prelude to gaining popular acceptance of the government’s settlement policies'.Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict, Transaction Publishers, 1991. p. 10.
38. Gideon Aran, 'Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Block of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Enumin),', in American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 1994 pp.265-344, p.291, p.337
39. Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
40. William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
41. William B.Quandt, Peace process, ibid. p.134. This was then accompanied by a formal note to Begin (September 22,1978), it which it was registered that ‘(A) In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian People” are being and will be construed and understood by you as “Palestinian Arabs”. (B)In each paragraph in which the expression “West Bank” appears, it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.’ William B. Quandt, Camp David: peacemaking and politics, Brookings Institution Press, 1986 p.387
42. Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
43. Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
44. James Ron, Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel, University of California Press, 2003 p.180. Decoded, the statement means, 'invading Lebanon secures the West Bank for Israel and thus achieves the Biblical borders set forth more or less in the Tanakh's account of the early kingdoms'
45. Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
46. See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
47. Numbers, 32:18
48. David C. Jacobson, Does David still play before you? Israeli poetry and the Bible, Wayne State University Press, 1997 p.50
49. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1998 p.14
50. Nigel Craig Parsons,The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa, Routledge, 2005 p.299
51. Michael Sfard, Occupation double-speak,' at Haaretz, 12 June 2012.
52. Jonathan Cook, Israeli Road Signs, Counterpunch 17-19, July 2009
53. Nir Hasson, Give Arab train stations Hebrew names, says Israeli linguist, Haaretz 28/12/2009
54. Yossi Sarid 'Israel is not killing the Palestinian people - it's killing their culture,' Haaretz 3 Octobr 2014
55. John Brian Harley, David Woodward, The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Humana Press, 1987 p.506, cited Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid.p.13
56. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.13

Further reading:-

• Mark Monmonier, No Dig, No Fly, No Go. How maps restrict and control, University of Chicago Press 2010

Things to be done/Notes to self (or what pieces are left of that hypothetical entity)

• Huldra trans Talk:Bardala‎
• Huldra trans Talk:Nisf Jubeil
• Sabah as per promise to Doug Weller
• Abu Iyad as per promise to Al Ameer
• The Ashkenazi Jews/Khazarian origins theory
• Werner Muensterberger
• 中里介山 and also his 大菩薩峠, which have no wiki article. ('to call him Dickensian would be utterly inadequate, to call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be to flatter him greatly' William E. Naff, The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Tōson, University of Hawai'i Press, 2011 p.4.) Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

(2)'To call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be an over-statement of his considerable gift for for creating memorable characters, while to call Kaizan "Dickensian" would be a seriously misleading understatement. This richness became all the more impressive when set against the national drive towards human standardization.' ibid. p.430

To be kept close to the bottom of this page because I forget the agenda as time scurries on Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

• • e.g.<ref="Horowitz" /> Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

WP articles on Exceptionalism/ Indispensability

Nishidani, which books or scholarly articles do you recommend on the ancient roots of today's delusional belief among almost all countries in the globe that they, and their people, are exceptional or indispensable?

Did you by any chance read The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti? I recommend it.

Additionally, you may want to take a look at a somewhat interesting recent article by David Bromwich on some of the ancient roots (going back to ancient Greece) of the modern Israeli, Palestinian, American, Chinese, Japanese, UK, Australian, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Indian, Brazilian, Nigerian, South African, Chilean, Columbian, Arabian (as well as many more countries') elites pushing their citizenry into the mental illness of falsely believing in their own exceptionalism/ indispensability/ grandiosity.

IjonTichy (talk) 03:23, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

It depends on how technical one wants to get or how far oine has leisure to read around. There's a good if sometimes abstruse book by Giorgio Agamben called the State of Exception, on the historical roots and philosophical ramifications, which given your mention of Parenti's book, comes to mind because of its excellent examination of homo sacer. But the literature is vast, and much of it psychoanalytic, which is out of vogue, though Freud's remarks on der Narzißmus der kleinen Differenzen, or 'narcissism of minor differences' is a fundamental insight. Generally the works of Norman Cohn are in my view, indispensable for understanding historical trends of paranoia, esp. The Pursuit of the Millennium, Europe's Inner Demons, and Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. Of course, they are more concerned with paranoid trends in history from messianism to antisemitism, rather than 'exceptionalism', which is in every sense of group identity, as we see from the common endonym of many tribes whose languages frequently define themselves by a word denoting 'people', implying 10,000 out-groups aren't quite people. But more specifically, engineering a notion of 'exceptionalism' is characteristic of all drives towards national statehood. The paradox of this kind of exceptionalism was well put by Ernest Gellner in his Nations and Nationalism: to form a distinct national identity, nation-builders had to mould or rig the micro-world views of numerous regional peasant communities to conform to a fictive sense of belonging to a larger state. You dissolved many 'exceptionalist' internal differences in order to assert an homogenized difference from the rest of the world. Modernization meant cancelling internal differences and exchanging them for a larger difference, that constructed by the new state to differentiate it as distinct from all neighbouring countries. Since democracy is premised on respect for internal differences, there is a natural tension between democracy and nationalism. Nationalism is powerful because it allows maximum expression in a group assertion of being exceptional for individual communities and persons who, sucked into the homogenizing world of industrialism, must sacrifice their personal sense of being individuals qua individuals. It's a safety valve for the loss of a real sense of intimate difference as we are drilled to conform to a broad model of seamless social group-identity. The paradox here is that the United States has a powerful political sense of its version of the fiction, in the idea it has an historic mission as an exceptionalist state, and yet is a democracy. Even in international law, it underwrites general principles and then adds clauses saying it alone is exempt from them (as Noam Chomsky repeatedly points out). It has deep roots, that you can get an idea of by reading any number of works, Jack P. Greene's The Intellectual Construction of America, University of North Carolina Press, 1993, or Byron E Shafer (ed.) Is America Different! A New Look at American Exceptionalism, Clarendon Press 1991 etc.

As for the engineering of delusional states of mind, and passing them off as normal, that is inherent in all modernization, and Walter Lippman's Public Opinion is a classic and germinal analysis of the problem.

I haven't read Parenti's book. I haven't read for that matter most books I should read. I'll keep an eye out for it.Nishidani (talk) 12:35, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

How Exceptionalism Fuels America’s Gun Massacres (Why Laws Won't Stop the Bloodshed), by Abby Martin, in CounterPunch

Nishidani, thanks for the detailed information.

Talking about Michael Parenti, here is a recent article by him. Reminding us that in all human clashes over the last several thousand years, including but not limited to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, power elites on all sides of the conflict send low-income and poor people to kill other low-income and poor people and to be killed by them, while the wealthy elites and high-ranking military officers on all sides smile all the way to the bank.

Regards, IjonTichy (talk) 14:14, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

The Ghosts of Gaza: Israel’s Soldier Suicides. IjonTichy (talk) 18:18, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. A useful summary, perhaps worth inclusion in the article. I don't think that blaming the jihadi elements like Col. Winter gets one anywhere. The IDF's policies haven't changed because of the rise of religious fanatics in the IDF ranks: their presence just makes explaining the usual policies, and criticism of Islamic jihadis, more difficult.Nishidani (talk) 18:57, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for demonstrating your extreme anti-Semitism and complete disregard for WP:BLP by calling an honorable Jewish soldier a "religious fanatic." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.207.47.232 (talk) 06:42, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Jehovah akhbar! Nishidani (talk) 09:48, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps a direct link to this Times of Israel article might be useful.     ←   ZScarpia   13:43, 2 November 2014 (UTC) (By the way, did you read about Netanyahu's gross, abominable, sickening, insulting etc. comparison between rocket attacks on Israel and Nazi aerial assaults on the UK during WWII? ;) )

Yes I did. Perhaps he got that hyperbole from his father, an excellent historian on medieval matters, but a wild-eyed apocalyptic fantasist with regard to contemporary history.Nishidani (talk) 20:05, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

From an interview Prof. Netanyahu did with Maariv: .     ←   ZScarpia   02:10, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Apologies for being pedantic, but there's an embarassing typo there, which means you wrote something very different from what you meant (think of the elative from the root K-B-R). Regards, NSH001 (talk) 22:51, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Whozzat? I love pedantry, but where's the typo, and in whose remark?Nishidani (talk) 23:12, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

See elative and akhbar and, err, a few lines up. --NSH001 (talk) 23:21, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Ah, I see. My cousins used to say that I was a great punner, only the point each time required a footnote or tedious paraphrase before you understood it (the irish joke about micturating, a malapropism for the intended 'matriculating', had to be glossed, and it was that which elicited my elder cousin's riposte).

In writing:'Jehovah akhbar!' I added the 'h' to make such a pun, 'Jehovah' (a misreading of YHWH) and 'akhbar' a distortion of '(Allahu akbar). The point was to liken distortions of holy writ for fanatical ends to slips in orthography, by twisting the terms, and driving home that our own evangelical fanaticism (Jehovah) made God out to be a 'mouse'(that roared). And I suppressed the pedantic temptation to add notes to the fact that in Mycenaean Greek there is a form 'si-mi-te-u' that is linked probably to an inscription at Chryse in the Troad attesting to a cult of Apollo Smintheus (Apollo the Vole). The god of the Trojans was a field-mouse (σμίνθος: as opposed to your average domestic mouse,μῦς), just like the akhbar in 'Jehovah akhbar'. I can't help making private puns, but it relieves the boredom of working here, at least makes me smile, and if flagged would only give the impression of a braggart display of pseudo-erudition. Cheers, pal. Nishidani (talk) 11:21, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Quotes from the book Johnny Got His Gun.   IjonTichy (talk) 08:06, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Coincidence. I read a long article on that extraordinary man, Dalton Trumbo, some weeks ago.Nishidani (talk) 20:05, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Yale chaplain forced out by Zionist attacks. The chaplain was forced to resign over a brief letter to the New York Times in which he explained that actions such as the recent Israeli war on the people of Gaza were breeding anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere. IjonTichy (talk) 20:29, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Noted that the day it occurred. He's the last on a list I have of, at last count, 36 prominent academics kicked out of academia or harassed or denied tenure for trying to make a reasonable case for Palestinian rights over the last few years. We have no wiki article on the phenomenon, despite the fact that it is a chronic problem.Nishidani (talk) 20:33, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

How is this a problem? Anti-Semites who demonize and tell lies about Jews and Israel should not be brainwashing students. Western universities are infested with anti-Semitism, as can be witnessed with the growing influenced of the racist hate group "Students for Justice in Palestine" in demonizing and slandering Israel on American universities. (unsigned comment left by 190.94.210.123)

ZScarpia, care to explain your deliberate mischaracterization of Netanyahu's accurate comparison of the Hamas rocket attack on Israel to Nazi Germany's attacks on Britain? The Gazans are very similar to the Nazis and even have the same ideology of wanting to genocide all Jews. How come you people never post links that cast Arabs or Muslim in a bad light? You always post anti-Israel crap. Here are some things to enlighten you:

• Fatah official calls for blood to ‘purify’ Jerusalem of Jews
• Palestinian savages massacre rabbis in Jerusalem synagogue
• Song urges Palestinians to ‘run over’ Jews
• “Palestinian” Muslims have a new song, “Car Intifada,” urging Muslims to use their cars to kill Jews
• 26-year-old Jewish woman stabbed to death by murderous Arabs after being deliberately run over by a car
• US “deeply concerned” not over recent “Palestinian” jihad attacks, but over Jews building houses
• Jordanian MPs hold moment of silence for two Palestinian terrorists -- Lawmakers read Koran in memory of cousins who perpetrated deadly Jerusalem synagogue attack, hail them as ‘martyrs’
• Hamas praises the brutal murders of innocent rabbis

(unsigned comment left by 190.94.210.123)

Is that an 'answer' to the documentation above about Israeli calls for a genocidal solution? This is the 'Yes,-but-they-are-even-worse' gambit in the dishwater polemical vein of public discourse on ethics and law. In Italy and Greece, many average people avoid taxes and scream when their services don't function, and their excuse is, 'But they (politicians and bigwigs) steal millions.' So your gambit is proof only of an an-ethical crowd attitude, based on focusing on the sins of others in order to turn the conversation away from one's own faults, shortcomings. It works of course, because, as the poet said Humankind cannot bear very much reality. And as another poet wrote:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

One was also told as a child that it is pointless talking back to garrulous airheads with a lopsided sense of outrage, esp. if that outrage is envenomed by a unilateral sense of righteousness and victimization. In any case, you will be reverted if you offload the usual junk of blinkered pathos on this page. So don't waste your time, or mine, further. Thank you.Nishidani (talk) 12:08, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

ZScarpia, care to explain your deliberate mischaracterization of Netanyahu's accurate comparison of the Hamas rocket attack on Israel to Nazi Germany's attacks on Britain? The theme of my postscript was hypocrisy and double standards. A bit of context: recently, a complaint was made about Nishidani's use of the Warsaw Ghetto as an example, the complaint being based on the (bogus) grounds that the ADL has stated that comparisons between the regime in Israel and that in Nazi Germany are anti-Semitic. Now, if supporters of Israel find such comparisons objectionable, shouldn't supporters of Israel avoid making those comparisons about others? If making comparisons between the two regimes is anti-Semitic, then what adjective should be used when supporters of Israel make similar comparisons about others. A case in point, which is why I highlighted it to Nishidani, is Netanyahu's comparison between Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and German ones on Britain during the Second World War . The justification comment you left above serves as another case in point: The Gazans are very similar to the Nazis and even have the same ideology of wanting to genocide all Jews. As far as accuracy goes, you might like to read the linked-to Telegraph articles and also look at the Misplaced Pages ones on Qassam and V-2 rockets. If Netanyahu's speech writer had read the latter, perhaps he or she might not have made the historically erroneous claim that, "There's only been one other instance where a democracy has been rocketed and pelleted with these projectiles of death, and that's Britain during World War Two." Since the total Israeli death toll due to rocket attack is three people, if Hamas is really trying to "genocide all Jews", obviously their current rocket strategy isn't the way they're going to achieve it.     ←   ZScarpia   23:33, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Chris Hedges says that ISIS—the New Israel. IjonTichy (talk) 21:16, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

That parallels exist is clear. But Israel was not founded on internecine sanguinary sectarian murder between tribes, there was no reformist vs orthodox bloodbath: it succeeded because the Ashkenazi elite understood the technology of modernity, and had no real link to religion, unlike the maniacs who direct ISIS. Secondly, it is too early to speak of a state or a 'shell state'. Thirdly, the technocratic angle is trumped by ideology (just as Nazis destroyed for ideological reasons an advanced industrially able workforce in the Jewish populations of Europe, damaging their war from the inside). Hezbollah (and its imitator Hamas) does not wage war against the Lebanese Sunnis or the Maronites, Hezbollah provides services, and modernizes its Shiite tradition to make it compatible with a viable Islamic state. It does not behead its enemies, but if captured, keeps them in detention (apart from several early recourses to pure terror, mostly mirroring what it perceived its adversary did in targeted assassinations and indiscriminate bombings). Fourthly, Israel succeeded because it had a superpower patron: ISIS is patronized by backward obtuse monarchical regimes, with no industrial basis or growing service class of note: oil revenues buy off the population. Etc. So I am unimpressed (=disgusted), and don't think the analogy dignifies ISIS or demeans Israel, which drove out, as ISIS did, massive numbers of people, but did not, as ISIS does, murder, decapitate, or liquidate those who managed to remain (Christians, Yazidis, Shiites etc.) Israel was under a leash that imposed limits on what could be done before the world's eyes. ISIS has no such rein on what it might do. Nishidani (talk) 10:53, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

U.$. $enator tells Netanyahu Congre$$ will follow his lead on Iran sanctions. "In Jeru$alem, Lind$ey Graham says $enate will vote on Iran sanctions bill in January."

"Graham also discussed the possibility of cutting off U.$. funding for the United Nations if the Security Council passes a pending Palestinian state resolution. “Any effort by the French, the Jordanians or anyone to avoid direct negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians over the peace process, anyone who tries to take this to the UN Security Council, there will be a violent backlash by the Congre$$ that could include suspending funding to the United Nations,” Graham said. “We will not sit back and allow the United Nations to take over the peace process.” "

IjonTichy (talk) 22:20, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Which Misplaced Pages article is the following source best suited for? Please advise.

Israeli Founder Contests Founding Myths, Consortium News. By Uri Avnery and William R. Polk.

Thanks, IjonTichy (talk) 22:27, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

‘You Have a Mother’. Very powerful, moving by Chris Hedges on the horrors of the Holocaust.   IjonTichy (talk) 06:06, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

• Gaza in Arizona - How Israeli High-Tech Firms Will Up-Armor the U.S.-Mexican Border. "So consider it anything but an irony that, in this developing global set of boundary-busting partnerships, the factories that will produce the border fortresses designed by Elbit and other Israeli and U.S. high-tech firms will mainly be located in Mexico. Ill-paid Mexican blue-collar workers will, then, manufacture the very components of a future surveillance regime, which may well help locate, detain, arrest, incarcerate, and expel some of them if they try to cross into the United States."
• Israel at the U.S. Borderlands, video interview with Todd Miller, the author

IjonTichy (talk) 07:56, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Overpopulation, overconsumption – in pictures, The Guardian. Looks like a 2015 partial update of the great 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi.

Happy weekend Nish, IjonTichy (talk) 21:53, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Norman Finkelstein

Interviews with Finkelstein on The Real News.   IjonTichy (talk) 06:57, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes, saw it last night, and look forward to the next installments. NF looked tired, but as precise as ever. It really is a disgrace, such a fine intellect, and a beautiful moral fibre, being ground down by a fucking obtuse bunch of brainless cunts in his community's commentariat. Even the Palestinians have it in for him at times. Not much space in this disenlightened world of money-grubbing, land-grabbing, ideology-spouting, Tanakh/bible/Quran-bashing arseholes for someone who thinks thinking cogently and and acting coherently on larger principles obligatory. Have a good New Year, mindful that most won't of course, which is no reason to not embrace an augury.Nishidani (talk) 14:20, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Good year to you too. Best, IjonTichy (talk) 17:54, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Two new episodes, illuminating, have since been published on the same network.2/4 and 3/4 and 4/4 Nishidani (talk) 11:17, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Eight interviews posted to date, out of a total of eight. IjonTichy (talk) 03:38, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

A wonderful series, and the 7th particularly, with that very rare but logically acute dismissal of talk about Zionism (it's human rights, forget doctrine), and, in particularly, his defense of Israel's right as a state to claim good cause for maintaining its Jewish character, was original as it was admirable. I haven't thought it through, but it shows how thoroughly undoctrinaire he is, and, if you will, how strong, despite all appearances and polemics, his sense of his (Jewish) roots beats, something so personal he rightly denies it voice in order to protect it from the contamination of public discourse. Deeply moving, and shaming to the communities who hold him in exile. Thanks for the tip-off. Nishidani (talk) 16:40, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Happy Christmas

almost everyone.Nishidani (talk) 20:23, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Cops standing over a beaten Santa Claus. Wonderful iconic image - it would be intersting to see how much use it might get. John Carter (talk) 20:29, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

As iconic as a a film or photo of Claire Anastas's gift shop at Rachel's Tomb, i.e., zero.Nishidani (talk) 20:45, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Christmas presents are best given on the 25th.Nishidani (talk) 18:58, 25 December 2014 (UTC)

Palestinian children receive Christmas "gifts" from the Israeli military (in Hebrew). English Translation.   IjonTichy (talk) 17:54, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

I can't read the word 'gift' without thinking in German, but realities are complex. In a season people extol for good will, it would be inappropriate not to draw attention to things like this. Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

11-year-old-girl-seriously-hurt-from-firebomb-thrown-at-car-in-West-Bank. Veldaloe (talk) 08:50, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Terror lurking in a Christmas tree? Israel tries to ban non-Jewish celebrations, by Jonathan Cook on December 24, 2012. IjonTichy (talk) 20:59, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Those illegal colonists have forgotten WW 2, now they are the new Nazis in the world and run so called «Israel». This Anti-christ «Israel's» policy is a lot worse than racism, it's ethnic cleansing and a genocidal war. Even most stupid person in the world can see that they don't want to leave a place to the native Palestinian to live on their own Holly Land PALESTINE. Zionists are Nazis. Israel runs by racist people so they come out as racist and they have racist policies. This is why it is a cancer state. Wake up people, same people, same ideology, different name. The reason why Hitler made Nuremberg Laws is to stop the jewish racists from discriminating everyone, see how Gaza is just an upsized concentration camp. Keep up the great work! Lord Pierpont (talk) 07:39, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Personal attack

I feel compelled to warn you against personal attacks, for your calling a wikipedia editor a jihadi here. (Best wishes for the new year). --Epeefleche (talk) 21:21, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Wow! I'd never thought of that. Hey, just for fun, why not cite me at the WP:AGF wikiquette board for a sanction using that diff to argue that I failed to assume good faith on my part by insulting myself as a jihadi? I'm sure there's a few literalists around here who, to defend me, would willingly sanction me. Stranger things have happened. (Of course, I'd come to my own defence with a super-clever chessmaster rhetorical move, like, um, 'jihadi' is an Arabic term derived from the Greek text of the Igeret haYakov.

Of course, best wishes for the coming year, to you and yours. Mine if I manage to survive the food and drink tsunami will be occasioned by a rereading of Auden's New Year Letter, which is uncannily prescient for our times as well.Nishidani (talk) 21:43, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Good thought! Epeefleche (talk) 21:52, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Measuring up

If you feel like a change, how about casting a skeptical eye over the "Rendition of Old Japanese units of length" table at WP:Articles for deletion/UKline? Please do not waste much time on it, but it would be good to know if "yabiki" in the table is valid or a blunder (see the comment under the table). The background is that a very enthusiastic but challenged new editor has created a lot of stubs on units based on a book which contains tables like the one shown. The editor extracts factoids from these to create articles (if really wanted, there is an overview here). I'm curious to know if yabiki is a valid unit; it is not mentioned at Japanese units of measurement#Length. Johnuniq (talk) 23:28, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Biki in yabiki is clearly an Australian unit of measure,that has strayed north. It refers to the mean length of a Guest's teddybear biscuit manufactured by Arnott's, made for children between the age or 3-5. When I was a guest downunder in the 1960s, I often heard it used as an incentive to get kiddies to eat their porridge at the breakfast table. They were promised one if they managed to get that slush down, and sure enough, once their dials were cleaned of that mushy goo, Dad or Mum would smile and hand them one, saying:'Here's ya biki."

Talking about units of length, it's sparrowfart here and I must go abhout my morning business of shaking the 'yard' at the porcelain. (Have a good NY Johnno) Nishidani (talk) 07:33, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Yikes, too much Christmas spirit, I suspect. Happy Shaking! Johnuniq (talk) 08:35, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Gaza Strip

Your addition of editorial comment to the lede of the Gaza Strip article on 25 December was reverted by another editor. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:19, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Happy New Year Nishidani!

Nishidani,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Misplaced Pages. Iryna Harpy (talk) 00:20, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

A good 2015 to you and yours!

I hope it is happy and productive. I always enjoy our often sadly all-too-brief exchanges. Yours with walnut topping! Irondome (talk) 01:28, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't aspire to happiness, since I was born with (nicknamed 'Smiley' for my first three years -i.e. until I began to take full cognizance of things) that defect of grace, and have experienced an exceptional abundance of that rare feeling. I tend to hope every new year will begin with it some flash of common decency on the horizon, coruscating into a brighter spring and summer of, if not incandescent justice,( I'm a realist) then generosity, magnanimity and compassion. A Syrian refugee on the MS Norman Atlantic, credited with shepherding for several hours two children and a woman to safety as the ship went up in a fetid conflagration, was asked if they were Syrian: he replied: 'They were people'. As to productivity, that is a variable of the weather, though the close lopping of fruit trees two years ago promises a goodly windfall, and the last tomato off my vines was picked, resisting the chill, on the last day of December.

All the very best to you and yours for this coming year, Irondome.Nishidani (talk) 13:32, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

You are aware by now that I "suffer" from strange bursts of optimism. Odd, as for some years I was ironically named "smiler" by some of my associates. My worldview is bleak, I am personally anxiety-ridden and riddled with a sharp awareness of my deep flaws, which must be that nasty human condition thing I have heard reference to. I inject large dosages of optimism into the bloodstream of my "self", much like cocaine. And like cocaine it's effects are short lived (so I have read on the substance) and demand increasingly large dosages to achieve the same effect. I understand you perfectly, Nishidani. Peace Irondome (talk) 23:39, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Global account

Hi Nishidani! As a Steward I'm involved in the upcoming unification of all accounts organized by the Wikimedia Foundation (see m:Single User Login finalisation announcement). By looking at your account, I realized that you don't have a global account yet. In order to secure your name, I recommend you to create such account on your own by submitting your password on Special:MergeAccount and unifying your local accounts. If you have any problems with doing that or further questions, please don't hesitate to ping me with {{ping|DerHexer}}. Cheers, —DerHexer (Talk) 14:17, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

@DerHexer:.(a) what is a global account? I edit from one place, on one computer, with one name, on Misplaced Pages, not on any allied projects. I could read up on this, of course, but I avoid technical literature because it lacks musicality and avoids metaphor. If you can convince me of its necessity (spin me an ἀγωγή in the magical, not in the Spartan sense, that is), of course, I might change my mind.Nishidani (talk) 15:45, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Metaphors, uhm … a global account is like a master key for all countries around the world. If you prefer to stay home, just stay at your enwiki house. But if you want to get outta there and take pictures, you may need a key for your commonswiki house. Some time ago you got one (and according to Special:CentralAuth/Nishidani you most likely got one there and on other wikis) but now you have to search for it in order to enter it and login. Soon after you've taken your pictures, you want to show them to folks around the world and have to travel to their wikis. But you don't want to do that anonymously but assign your efforts to your account. Ofc, you could ask for visa and a new key to these countries, but if you already had a master key, you could just cross the border and would be recognized. And even if you come back home, (soon) people can contact you in their homewiki countries and you would be notified at home without having to get the mail in their respective country-wikis. If you decided to watch some or their activities at the time when you've been there, you could even check your mails at home in your watchlist. In any case, till April 2015 your home owner will change your current key into a master key no matter what you do. But he might not know all of your former local keys but mix them up. That's why he recommends you to collect your local keys by entering your respective passwords on Special:MergeAccount and change them into a master key, your global account. You would still be able to solely work at home but could more easily get outta there, do some stuff and stay in touch with the outside. Convinced? ;-) Cheers, —DerHexer (Talk) 16:09, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

That's very lucid - it's nice relief from Thucydides, though his description of the siege of Sphacteria which I reread this afternoon was, as ancient memory reminded me, itself uncommonly straightforward. I've only wandered off to those other sites once or twice on occasion, and invented some password without registering which one, so cannot remember. I don't take photographs, have no camera nor cellphone, don't communicate with other editors, except very rarely. This is my only point of contact with the market (I'm sure you'll recognize Wo die Einsamkeit aufhört, da beginnt der Markt). What little I do here is in deference to the fact I'm 'part of the maine' though prefer to be an island with limnited portage elsewhere! Thanks anyway, and my very best wishes for the New Year.Nishidani (talk) 18:58, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

A global account is important, if not for you, then for the rest of us. We don't want the confusion of wondering whether someone called Nishidani and editing at, say, Wiktionary is you. DerHexer has some tricks for people who haven't tracked their passwords, but you can fix a couple yourself. You might try visiting it:User talk:Nishidani and seeing if you can log on there. If you can't, you can go to it:Special:PasswordReset and enter "Nishidani" while leaving the email address blank. Clicking "Reset Password" will then send an email with a temporary password to whatever email address you entered years ago. If you receive that email, you have to do what it says for the temporary password to work. DerHexer would have to explain what happens after that, but I think you can visit Special:MergeAccount and do stuff there to confirm that you control at least the enwiki and itwiki accounts. Johnuniq (talk) 23:06, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

I think I've done a few edits to the German, French, Japanese and Italian pages, but that is history. Renewing my accounts there, one-offers, would be wasting people's time and 'mainspace'. It's best to let all that nugatory (a word redolent with fond memories, like 'pinguid': my Latin teacher didn't expect us to know 'nugae' and 'pinguis' has reflexes in English, at least in our early adolescence, and I was promoted from being a suspected hoodlum to studious eccentric when I piped up and gave these as examples) crap a miss and allow those accounts to die a natural death, lapsing into, uh,'desuetude' or, more colloquially 'abeyance'. Is that okay with the system? Nishidani (talk) 11:42, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Caution-2015-01-06

Unfortunately, in December, I was too lazy to copy such a warning to your Talk page too. It was after your selective choice of sources and the same selective, only confirming your point of view - quotng, from already existing sources. See HAMAS: "are Nishidani's last edis - NPOV ?".

Today, when you choose from the source only accusations against Bennett, omitting any refutation of these charges in the same article (diff), it seems me close (sorry, but :(...) to some kind of falsification.
I have to remind you again that the selective choice & quoting is a violation of the rules of NPOV. --Igorp_lj (talk) 17:21, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

I think you are well-meaning but this is silly. I can't do everything you and others may want - this is a collegial workplace where we each contribute and, collectively, build articles. No one is expected to figure all the angles. Specifically,when I look at most pages, I see that most editors do little, or rather, put in bits of stuff they note or like, without reading the page. What was remarkable about the page in question, which I went to edit in the article on Bennett and that incident after reading about it in The Times of Israel this morning, cited in your diff, is that, reading it before editing I noted it cited Fisk minimally, ignoring most of what he said, which is a far more horrendous account of what actually happened and the mechanical nonsense spun out by the IDF in justification. Please note I could have added dramatic accounts of bits and pieces of over a hundred bodies being picked up in body bags, of bits of kids' bodies stuck on burnt trees etc. It's there. And the text before my edit was mainly concerned to contextualize the reasons (justifications) for why Israel fired on a UN compound, and accidentally killed 106 people. I fixed that, and then added Bennett.

You complain that I was obliged to add, what you now, in garbled English (please correct it) added (getting there of course by pure chance, not following me around)

Indirect Drucker's evidence denied then Deputy of Bennett, who called them "Vanity of vanities, nonsense, a pile of bullsh*t", Haaretz daily's defense analyst Amos Harel and others . . (verb?).

I think facts are important. I laugh at the way we have reactions sections, listing the usual spokesperson claptrap of shock at some I/P news report. No one reads that crap because it is predictable and meaningless. Just as no one is interested if Bennett, in reaction, brushed off the story by mixing an inane allusion to the preacher's exclamation" הֲבֵ֤להֲבָלִים֙ " in the Book of Ecclesiastes with the manure pats one finds in a cow paddock. By all means, exercise your right to add such outbursts. I myself am waiting for serious details of Bennett's role in the incident, which may or may not emerge, i.e., field reports.

If you are worried about partial or partisan editing on that page and numerous other I/P articles, there are hundreds of editors you should worry about, not just me. Look at editors like Baatarsaikan whose silly edit to the page show she is clearly are unfamiliar with Robert Fisk, an historian with a book that goes into great detail on that incident and period, who was on the spot when the massacre occurred above him on the hills, and interviewed everyone in the UN and Fijian high command, and the survivors, that very day, within hours, and for weeks and months afterwards. As for the rest, this place is packed with lazy editors who are ignorant of everything but the concept of POV, and can't read anything except to figure out if the enemy is insulting them in this or that edit. A new year augury is that you avoid temptations to fit the mould of that type, the partisan wikipedian who only edits in terms of what she or he thinks is the potential political fallout of any one else's contributions.Nishidani (talk) 18:00, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

p.s. please don't use 'refute' for 'dismiss'. Bennett 'dismissed' the report by brushing it off as a heap of shit, and laughably by using a biblical phrase 'vanity of vanities' that is meaningless in context, a sputter of evocative terms resonant of Weltschmerz, wholly inapplicable to the situation. 'Refutation' refers to a logical and factual rebuttal of, or reply to, a charge or accusation. I note several editors recently consistently ignore this simple but crucial distinction.Nishidani (talk) 18:25, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Speaking of Fisk, this is a good, if somewhat emotive example of why some people like him and myself regard this part of our discursive universe as utterly contaminated by topsy-turvy 'logic'. Nothing makes sense in what is passed off, daily, as commonsense. But you're under no obligation of course to read it.Nishidani (talk) 18:33, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

So many words, instead of simple: "Sorry (keyword), it was not my best editing". :(

Unlike you I am not going to evaluate who of us is "sillier". :) As for Fisk, we can and should discuss whether he is RS in this case, but not here. I only say that you may have a same as his desire to accuse Israel in something yet, but we are not in a class of fisking, but in Wiki-pedia, and are obliged to give accurate information. The same is true with your re-directs to (valid?) accusations against other editors.

Here we discuss your edit only, so I remind what you did include in the article, and what - omitted:

• "According to Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker reported that Bennett's radio call for support was "hysterical" and contributed to the outcome that ensued."

versus

• "Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker citing an anonimous "senior army figure" reported that Bennett's radio call for support was "hysterical" and contributed to the outcome that ensued. Bennett’s deputy during the operation called Drucker’s charges as “Vanity of vanities, nonsense, a pile of bullsh*t”. Bennet's position was also defended by other officers involved in the incident and Haaretz daily's defense analyst Amos Harel. Amiram Levin, who headed the Northern Command during the operation, said that Bennett “... demonstrated level-headedness and did not panic”.

IMHO, it was better not to include anything about this Drucker's pre-election dirty trick, and to give a complete picture, if to include. Otherwise - it's not a fair edit. Sorry. --Igorp_lj (talk) 23:40, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

This is a content dispute, presented as a behavioural problem. I don't take seriously anyone who passes over without comment the work of numerous abusive or blatantly censorious/POV-pushing editors where, and just follows me about to find something in my own edits to which they take exception as a lapse from Misplaced Pages's highest standards. he fact that Naftali Bennett is rumoured to have been involved in communications that led to the massacre is relevant, both to his biography and the Qana massacre page. ps. I notice that you never reply to the substance of my replies, and when I do to you, in detail, you simply suggest that it was WP:TLDR. Whatever, this is a content dispute, not a behavioural problem. My only behavioural problem here is that I waste time better spent on other projects, by editing this farcical area.Nishidani (talk) 10:57, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm glad that you decided to add not one side info to the article after such my edits.

But I have to mention the next case of your "selective quoting" as well as what I see as not NPOV editing. See the corresponding "NPOV" topic.

Can you explain / specify what were you meaning writing :

• "I notice that you never reply to the substance of my replies, and when I do to you, in detail, you simply suggest that it was WP:TLDR" above ?

By the way, IMHO just your answers are as min . Are you doing so specifically? :) --Igorp_lj (talk) 00:22, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Comic Relief

It may be time to take a quick break from battling the various POV-pushers and Hasbarah propagandists, and read this well-written satire of 9/11 conspiracy theories from The Onion. I laughed hard when reading this, I hope you do too. Warm regards, IjonTichy (talk) 17:30, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Laughed again ... IjonTichy (talk) 08:39, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

ありがと

「愚公山を移す」、西田にさん。心 (talk) 05:09, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Stop your WP:BIASED, WP:NVOP editing

In your edit here, you took an objective sentence and edited it into an apologetic one, based on a WP:RS that is also WP:BIASED. There are 5 sources for that sentence but you forced your WP:NPOV. You are welcome to report me, this example is indisputable for the way you edit and contribute. I would love an administrator to look closer at your work. Ashtul (talk) 09:27, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

So RS are biased. So you can't spell NPOV. So you can't distinguish one diff from another. So you believe that I am forcing my policy of neutrality ('forced your WP:NPOV') on you and Misplaced Pages!! So you invite me to waste my time reporting you, so . .yaawwn. Please study Misplaced Pages's relevant policies, desist from following me around to pages you have never edited and which I do regularly (WP:Hound), and please desist from blotting this work page with inane complaints that only illustrate a certain haste and incompetence. Thank you. Nishidani (talk) 12:05, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

List of Ashtul's mechanical and falsely motivated reverts of edits I make.

• (1)edit 638038015 by Nish. WP:OR. defensive interpretation not supported by WP:RS

The well-known fact is all over RS, as my revert showed. Rather than request enlightenment with a tag, he just erased my edit at sight.

• (2)I wrote: 'Israel sought to justify the blockade as necessary to limit' taking out the word 'legal'. This was reverted by Ashtul.

Your wording is biased. Israel doesn't need to justify anything!

The source says: Israel has sought to justify its broad restrictions by citing security concerns.’

The word ‘legal’ I cancelled is not in Borgon magazine:

nor in the BBC report;

nor in Middle east Monitor:’ "Security concerns" is an elastic term which sometimes refers to valid concerns; a UN report in 2011 found that the naval blockade was legal, but that this should be viewed separately to the restriction of goods overland,’ which means that the blockade itself overland was not regarded as ‘legal’;

Nor in The Jerusalem Post which refers to

• (a)3 Israelis detained for violating a ‘lawful order’ not to enter Gaza, and has nothing to do with the legality of the blockade;
• (b) a statement that Binyamin Netanyahu claimed the IDF operation to enforce the blockade on the Gaza Strip was in keeping with international law,’ which is a political lie representing a prime ministerial assertion, and refers to the operation by the IDF, not the blockade.
• (3) In July 2011, the UN’s Palmer Commission published a report on the IDF’s interception in May 2010 of the Turkish protest flotilla, and ruled that Israel’s security blockade on Gaza “is both legal and appropriate.”; This is a dead link and in any case not RS. It is a false claim to boot.

The wording 'legal and appropriate' for the blockade nowhere occurs in the Palmer report, which distinguished a naval from a land blockade (p.39)Nishidani (talk) 13:08, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Section70 Palmer report.

At this juncture, a word of clarification is necessary. The naval blockade is often discussed in tandem with the Israeli restrictions on the land crossings to Gaza. However,in the Panel’s view, these are in fact two distinct concepts which require different treatment and analysis. First, we note that the land crossings policy has been in place since long before the naval blockade was instituted. In particular, the tightening of border controls between Gaza and Israel came about after the take-over of Hamas in Gaza in June 2007. On the other hand, the naval blockade was imposed more than a year later, in January 2009. Second, Israel has always kept its policies on the land crossings separate from the naval blockade. The land restrictions have fluctuated in intensity over time but the naval blockade has not been altered since its imposition. Third, the naval blockade as a distinct legal measure was imposed primarily to enable a legally sound basis for Israel to exert control over ships attempting to reach Gaza with weapons and related goods. This was in reaction to certain incidents when vessels had reached Gaza via sea. We therefore treat the naval blockade as separate and distinct from the controls at the land crossings. This is not to overlook that there may be potential overlaps in the effects of the naval blockade and the land crossings policy. They will be addressed when appropriate. Likewise, the restrictions on the land crossings to Gaza are part of the context of our investigation, and our recommendations in Chapter 6 address the situation there. But the legal elements of the naval blockade are analyzed on their own.'Palmer report Nishidani (talk) 15:14, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

• (3)clearing wrong tags by BOT. Another deceitful edit summary. I put the tags in because the prose devised by Ashtul has no resonance in the citations given.Nishidani (talk) 16:40, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

1. You added a source later. Your initial edit had no RS.

2. The main point of edit wasn't the word 'legal but rather 'sought to justify' instead of 'maintains'. Clear NPOV.

3. The edit was signed by a BOT not Nish. The source is at the end of the paragraph.

Ashtul (talk) 18:51, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

To repeat. You have little if any knowledge of the subjects of these pages. You turn up frequently on pages I edit. If you see an edit whose veracity you doubt, ask the editor for a reference or post a note on the article, requesting a verifiable source. Given your incompetence, due I suppose to utter inexperience, about editing, don't keep causing trouble by ignoring customary ways of improving pages. Your answer is further proof you don't read what an editor like myself notes, and you can't distinguish. I.e., that the edit I made requesting sources is not signed by a BOT but me, and though I provide proof you still insist it was a BOT, because, for fuck's sake, you did not look at the diff I provided, but at a later diff by a BOT, as a maintenance tag, which has nothing to do with this issue, and was vandalistic because you must not remove tags without good reason, and you had none. If you can't see what any 5 year old can sight at a glance then, please visit an optometrist or some cognitive specialist. Otherwise, don't edit Misplaced Pages. Please go away.Nishidani (talk) 19:37, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Not for an article but, cripes, such is one man's war against terrorism

Lisa Goldman, How Bibi Tried To Make Paris All About Him The Forward 12 January 2015

For those who haven’t been following the story, Netanyahu crashed the national solidarity event despite President Hollande’s explicit request that he stay at home. Then, after the VIP reception at the Elysee Palace, cameras for a local media outlet caught him elbowing aside a female French minister as he tried to jump the queue for the bus that would transport the group to the starting point of the march. Finding himself relegated to the second row at the march itself, he shoved aside the the president of Mali and inserted himself in the front row, one down from Hollande himself and within eyesight of Angela Merkel.Nishidani (talk) 20:11, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

I liked especially the last bit, how he "marched with world leaders"...and then he Crops Out PA President Abbas From Photo Released Of World Leaders At Paris Rally when tweeting the picture. Noted. Huldra (talk) 20:32, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, dear. I always thought politicians were supposed to be sharp, cunning, cluey, devious calculators and manipulators, but, this and the earlier stuff suggests this is not the case. Such patent, easily exposed, crassness means, that he hasn't the foggiest notion of how others view him. He's Mario-magician'd Congress, but no one else. What are Auden's lines?

Here great magicians, caught in their own spell,

Long for a natural climate as they sigh

Beware of magic to the passer-by. Nishidani (talk) 21:24, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Paris: Little and Big Monsters:   "Glen Ford and Paul Jay discuss the march against terrorism in Paris and the participation of leaders of countries who have committed and encouraged various forms of terrorism and war crimes." The Real News

"Circus of Hypocrisy": Jeremy Scahill on How World Leaders at Paris March Oppose Press Freedom. Democracy Now!

IjonTichy (talk) 21:39, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Yeah, double-think, and loads of hypocrisy. Under Berlusconi's Bulgarian edict, top journalists like Enzo Biagi were expelled from the national RAI network. Over the years, brilliant comics like Daniele Luttazzi, Corrado Guzzanti and Sabina Guzzanti, Michele Santoro, all experienced career problems after political pressure was waged on networks, to name but a few. Vauro Senesi contemporary Italy's most proficous and genial vignettista was likewise punished for revealing ahead of time the trumpery of trhe pseudo-reconstruction of Aquila after the great earthquake, and got into hot water for mocking Fiamma Nirenstein who pretends to be 'objective' about Palestinians while having a house in occupied territory, when she joined Berlusconi's party, crammed with fascists with a tradition of defending Mussolini and his racial laws (Vauro was eloquently defended by the wonderful Yiddish theatreman, singer and thinker,Moni Ovadia . All fired, shifted, told to piss off. Nishidani (talk) 19:57, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

'The reproduction by Charlie of the caricatures published in the Danish magazine seemed to me appalling. Already, in 2006, I had perceived as pure provocation the drawing of Mohammed decked in a turban in the form of a bomb. This is not so much a caricature against Islamists as a stupid conflation of Islam with Terror; it’s on a par with identifying Judaism with money!. It has been affirmed that Charlie, impartially, lays into all religions, but this is a lie. Certainly, it mocks Christians, and, sometimes, Jews. However, neither the Danish magazine, nor Charlie would permit themselves (fortunately) to publish a caricature presenting the prophet Moses, with kippah and ritual fringes, in the guise of a wily money-lender, hovering on a shlomostoppedstreet corner.'Shlomo Sand, A Fetid Wind of Racism Hovers Over Europe, Counterpunch 18-20 January 2015.Nishidani (talk) 18:51, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

Netanyahu's Elbowed Presence in Paris. Shir Hever: "Netanyahu responded to the terror attack in Paris by calling on French Jews to emigrate to Israel. Netanyahu's statement is a clear attack on France. This is a vote of non-confidence in France's ability to protect its own citizens. And it's also contributing to the very dangerous and worrisome rise of anti-Semitism or anti-Semitic ideas, which is when people associate everything Jewish with everything that represents the state of Israel." IjonTichy (talk) 07:34, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

It's election time in Israel, and new evangelical fundamentalist Republican party majorities hold Congress and the Senate. I'm sure the fellow knows all the flak that would fly in Europe, but Eurabia is not his constituency, and the feisty banana-republican thumb-in-your-eyes circus act was intended for the only two state actors who have an impact. Politically, his egregious vulgarity and offensiveness was quite 'rational.'Nishidani (talk) 09:34, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Good analysis and insights by Max Blumenthal.   IjonTichy (talk) 04:47, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Wie geschickt sich Abbas an Merkel ranschleicht :) --Igorp_lj (talk) 10:13, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I missed that. Of course (a) the Bild is a dumb tabloid, which is underlined by the introductory lie to the piece:

Deutlich zu sehen ist es auf den Fotos bei Palästinenserpräsident Mahmud Abbas (79), der sich und seine Fatah-Bewegung nie deutlich von der terroristischen Hamas distanziert hat.

This is a contrafactual hasbara meme, so Bild merely served as a witless pipeline for the Israel Foreign Office.

It ignores the fact that France invited neither Netanyahu nor Abbas. When Netanyahu insisted on being present, France duly, per diplomatic NPOV, invited Abbas. Neither was designated to march in the forefront.

Netanyahu elbowed out a French minister to get on the bus, elbowed his way to be in the front line, (Abbas was in the third row, and appears to have (been) moved up after Netanyahu made his move.

Still, thanks. The slow achievement of parity by Abbas when Netanyahu tried to disrupt and take over the parade was missed by the sources I'd seen. Nishidani (talk) 13:08, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Max Blumenthal says: "Netanyahu's politics, just as they align with those of the Tea Party in the U.S., are of a part of the far-right parties in Europe, the party of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the National Front of Marine Le Pen in France, the Swedish Democrats in Sweden, who are simultaneously anti-Semitic and pro-Israel. All of these parties align on the issue of Islamophobia. And Netanyahu's Israel, to them, represents a Fort Apache on the front lines of the clash of civilizations.   So Netanyahu, by his or through his arrival in France, is aiming to undermine French liberalism, to undermine small-r French republicanism, and to advance the hopes of these anti-E.U. far-right parties, which are now completely aligned behind a Likud-run Israel. Netanyahu's presence, everywhere he goes, is deeply divisive. He represents Israel as the ethnocratic apartheid state it is. And his natural allies are those who support Israel for that reason and because they would like to advance those same values in their own countries."   IjonTichy (talk) 16:00, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

"hasbara meme", "Blumenthal says", ...

- Guys, do you really take all this nonsense seriously? :) --Igorp_lj (talk) 21:04, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm still thinking over what Blumenthal argues. Not convinced, but then again, I take a lot of time to form an opinion, and when I do, I can explain it. I don't hyperventilate. 'Hasbara meme' . You may have a point. The phrase may be a tautology, and redundantly pleonastic. Nishidani (talk) 21:12, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

A quick question

After raising a question in the talk page and if there is no reply, how long should I wait for a reply before making a change? Thanks, Ashtul (talk) 22:08, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

I wait a week, taking into account the strong possibility that, over such a brief period, many editors travel, are away from their workplace or home, as I was.Nishidani (talk) 10:53, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Warning

Please stop editing your WP:COI into article where they do not belong. Adding the following passages to Carmel, Har Hebron is a clear violation of WP guidelines.

According to Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times Carmel is

'a lovely green oasis that looks like an American suburb. It has lush gardens, kids riding bikes and air-conditioned homes. It also has a gleaming, electrified poultry barn that it runs as a business.' Beyond its barbed wire fencing, the Bedouins of Umm al-Kheir in shanties are denied connection to the electricity grid, barns for their livestock and toilets, and all attempts to build permanent dwellings are demolished. Elad Orian, an Israeli human rights activist, noted that the chickens of Carmel's poultry farm get more electricity and water than the Palestinian Bedouin nearby.

Hammerman writes as follows:

Right next to the stately country homes - complete with air-conditioning, drip-irrigation gardens and goldfish ponds - a few extended families including old men, old women and infants live in dwellings made of tin, cloth and plastic siding, though there are a few cinder-block structures, too. They tread on broken, barren ground. They have no running water. They are not connected to the power grid that lights up every settlement and outpost in this remote region. They have no access road.

If you insist on continuing in this line of editing I won't have any other option but to report you.

1. Nicholas Kristof, 'The Two Sides of a Barbed-Wire Fence,', New York Times 30 June, 2010.
2. Cite error: The named reference Hammerman was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

Ashtul (talk) 14:44, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Go ahead and see where it gets you. It will be noted that both those sources deal extensively with Carmel, Har Hebron, and that is why they are cited there. You could only arrive at that page by, as elsewhere, tracking my edits. This harassment (WP:Hound), cognitive failure (WP:COI?) is duly noted. Don't post on this page. Piss off. Nishidani (talk) 16:02, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

AE matter

Nish, You have to add this line to your complaint:

;Sanction or remedy to be enforced: ] - 1RR

That is what Sandstein keeps asking for. Zero 23:48, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, right. I keep complaining about editors not understanding editing policy, but I know nothing of these (to me detestable) reporting procedures. It took me an hour and a half just to write out that report. I'm stupid. Thanks.Nishidani (talk) 10:39, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

.22 bullets

Probably this ought to be mentioned on one of those pages I don't like to edit. Note the link to an audio recording of the IDF commander assuring a group of settlers that his guys are using live ammo and getting lots of hits. My old man had a .22 rifle for shooting rabbits but one day a rabbit looked him right in the eye and he put the rifle away for ever. Zero 06:53, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Coincidence. I read that yesterday while adding material from B'tselem to the Susya page. Probably one needs a separate page on the thing I've been noting over several years, and its in the old intifada reports: the use of a team of 2, spotter and sniper, in clashes ( the point of departure for such an article would be this). One picks out the target, usually a youth who looks like a leader, and then the other shoots him, often (as here) after a provocation is staged. Your father's reaction was mine, when we shot an owl once. I was only 13. Never touched a gun for personal use (aside from cadet training until I was expelled as a pacifist after getting the best record in target firing with a .303!), or trusted groups, after that.Nishidani (talk) 07:54, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

BY the way, why Arutz Sheva should not be considered a reliable source. Compare this account in the Times of Israel (mainstream more or less), (Stuart Winer, 'Two settlers arrested for shooting Palestinians,' The Times of Israel 20 January 2015)with the version (Ido Ben-Porat, Ari Yashar, "Scandal" as Samaria Guards Arrested Instead of Arab Terrorists,' Arutz Sheva 20 January 20155) in the settler organ. While the latter does indeed provide many details one would like to use, its overall reportage states as 'facts' what are the versions given by the settlers whom the police indictment now states faked the whole scene. Because they confuse evidently falsified stories with facts, the evidently real details (precise locations of shepherd, one of the settler gunman is part of an elite IDF unit) cannot be used. (Nishidani (talk) 10:50, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

The Arab rock throwing terrorists caption is awesome in that A7 article. At least have a picture with a throwable rock. nableezy - 20:27, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

What actually happened on the ground and not in generic newspaper reports on blame. Any articles welcome

• Elior Levy, 'One family, three dead, three maimed: 'Black Friday' in Gaza,' Ynet 24 January 2015.

Among other things, the Samson Option is supposed to immediately saturate with bombing the precise area and surrounds where any IDF soldier is presumed captured. According to this report, it didn't work that way: the families hit by a direct IAF missile were two kilometres away.Nishidani (talk) 17:55, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

• Samer Badawi, '+972's Story of the Year: Gaza,' +972 magazine, 30 December 2014.

'something about the sheer weight of Gaza’s suffering — in wartime and under siege — stunts language, too. I’m supposed to be a writer. But I have not written a word about Gaza in more than 100 days. I couldn’t.'

• Jutta Bachmann,Laurel Baldwin-Ragaven, Hans Petter Hougen, Jennifer Leaning, Karen Kelly, Önder Özkalipci, Louis Reynolds, Alicia Vacas,Gaza 2014:Findings of an independent medical fact-finding mission, Physicians for Human Rights 21 January 2015

I love your irony

What is "unresponsive assertiveness"? CSWP1 (talk) 06:49, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Arbitration/Requests filing

Nishidani, a request for Arbitration was just filed. I hope you will understand this isn't in anyway a retaliation but rather using a tool I wasn't aware of before. Direct link Ashtul (talk) 11:35, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Today

is Holocaust Memorial Day. Rather sad that Misplaced Pages should be marred by editors who haven't a clue what real anti-semitism is. Regards, NSH002 (talk) 12:52, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, N. Actually, I thought of that immediately (I'd had a good talk with one of our local Moroccan street-vendors on this while out shopping this morning), but thought it best not to mention the coincidence.Nishidani (talk) 12:57, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

NSH002, I agree with your assessment, regretfully. (Recommended reading: ‘You Have a Mother’, describing Lola Mozes’ experiences as a child in Nazi camps. By Chris Hedges.)

Nish, what do your local Moroccan street-vendors sell? When I was a child growing up in Israel, two out of my three very best friends were Moroccan. Whenever I visited my friends at their homes, their moms always ascertained I was well-fed with copious amounts of delicious Moroccan food. (And when they visited me, my mom provided Persian, or Afghani, Lebanese or Syrian dishes.) Decades later, I still love Middle Eastern food. How about you? Best, IjonTichy (talk) 17:43, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Lucky man. The Moroccans I know are in haberdashery, though one, flogging cheap books from the estates of deceased Americans, once sold me a copy of a Ist edition of Salman Rushie's Satanic Verses for a few dollars, laughing cheekily with a jokey mock horror as he handed it to me. As to Yusuf, whom after Hebdo several passers-by gave a hard time to with insults about Islam (he reads the Qur'an in those long hours he sits outside as economically stressed Italians pass by him these days without buying anything), he called on the authority of a leading theologian at Al Azhar to attack Sahih al-Bukhari for attributing as Islamic the hadith associated with Abdullah ibn Umar, who imputed to Muhammad the "The Jews will fight with you, and you will be given victory over them so that a stone will say, 'O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me; kill him!' " That of course is all over the internet (unlike what the likes of Mordechai Eliyahu state, or, speaking of trees and killing, his son Shmuel Eliyahu said). My friend was visibly disgusted at the thought of this hadith.

Once while I was searching for beer during Ramadan in Bethlehem, the old Palestinian gentleman who found me several bottles late one night, while plying me with huge bunches of grapes from his vineyard, divagated in exquisite, poetic detail on a dish he prepares for guests, made in a special oven, and lamented that I was departing the next day, for he would liked to treat me to it. I was in a group on a schedule, otherwise I would have cancelled my flight to take up his offer, in exchange for a suitable gift.

Unfortunately, I have otherwise little acquaintance with Levantine food: my wife is a reknowned cook who can whip up dishes for most guests from the Far East to Europe and South America that leave them languorously saturated with and delighted at her inimitable Italian touch to their home fare. The only Jewish dish she makes is Carciofi alla giudia. All this just means that, though I'm a spoiled man in the kitchen, surprises from the Maghreb to the Levant still lie out there to be discovered, tasted and devoured. If we all met each other and sat down to dine in each other's kitchens, as I'm sure User:Cptnono would concur, none of this tragedy would have occurred or keep repeating itself in the first place. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 20:38, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Would love to agree (my kitchen is small so I tend to invite folks over to the local bar). So Ashtul was kind of a dick (I had hoped it was due to newness) but i tried to get him to be cool. You could return the favor by asking Supreme Deliciousness to knock it off. He has been around for awhile but somehow has escaped any issues due to the minor poking and prodding. He needs someone to be cool since it that sort of shenanigans that starts trouble. All I know is that I am seriously going to start smoking in the next couple of months because beer just makes me cranky. *all is calm... Super Bowl weekend**all is calm... Super Bowl weekend**all is calm... Super Bowl weekend**all is calm... Super Bowl weekend*Cptnono (talk) 06:23, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

American Sniper (film)

I think you may find the critical commentary on the film American Sniper very interesting. The commentary includes analysis of the political, historical, social, cultural, philosophical, moral, ethical, religious, racial, ethnic and other aspects of society. I started the article, but don't have the time to combine or interweave the rich - both deep and broad - set of sources (including e.g. Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Max Blumenthal and many other scholars and investigative journalists, and I'm hopeful additional scholars e.g. Norman Finklestein may express their views in the near future too) into a more 'coherent' story. (Fahrenheit 9/11 controversies is an example of a more coherent article.) It would be great if you applied your considerable talents to improve the article. You may enjoy it.

Here is a helpful comment from the talk page of the article on the film: "One good way to condense the text would be to group individual critiques under similar themes, rather than chop up criticism into two sentence "paragraphs" that read like a play-by-play of every person's view, and become somewhat overwhelming to read. Something more balanced and easier to read might go "A number of critics cited inaccuracies or distortions in the film. For example, Joe Smith stated "..." Similarly, Sue Smith wrote "..."". The next paragraph might read "Reception from Arab and Islamic-majority countries was (harsh/mixed) " This is how an encyclopedia should read, and it takes a bit more editorial finesse than quote after quote, but it is better writing. --Animalparty-- (talk) 20:12, 28 January 2015 (UTC) "

Warm regards, IjonTichy (talk) 04:45, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Most of those are soundbite judgements, for and against. Of course, one could compile a list of such reviews succinctly excerpted for the outright thumbs-up/-down reactions by competent movie critics, as is being done. I did much of such a compilation for that trashy piece of filmic fantasy by Emmerich, Anonymous (film), but I don't think this is informative. Or let us say, you need reviews by critics who do frame analysis, historico-sociological contextualization, and do so within the logic of, say Eastwood's career parabola (for example, there is more than an inkling of a Wende, a readjustment of focus, starting from Unforgiven, A Perfect World and The Bridges of Madison County through to Letters from Iwo Jima Invictus and Gran Torino, that seems, at least to judge from some reviews I've read, to be undone in American Sniper. The key there is to see how he deals with 'empathy for the other' (zilch in the Dirty Harry series) and the emergence of self-awareness in the to-be-admired protagonist/broken hero, the shift from the heroic to the tragic. I usually wait a few years to read or watch anything new, but expect it would, in its genre, have a hard time rivaling the Enemy at the Gates film on Vasily Zaytsev. Zaytsev snipered to defend his homeland against barbarian invaders, but the backdrop is larger. Chris Kyle was a professional killer in a barbaric army of invaders. Nishidani (talk) 11:16, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated. By the way I also generally wait at least a year to watch new films, more typically several years or even decades. Regards, IjonTichy (talk) 17:15, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Apropos, see Max Alvarez, 'A Short History of Sniper Cinema,' Counterpunch Jan 30-Feb 1, 2015. He appears to have missed the old classic Sergeant York (film) about Alvin C. York's WW1 exploits.Nishidani (talk) 17:06, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for Information.   Among the many criticisms of the political/ historical/ social/ ethical aspects of American Sniper (film), one of the most brilliantly insightful, and most frightening and disturbing, is the commentary by Janet Weil: Gunman As Hero, Children As Targets, Iraq As Backdrop: A Review of ‘American Sniper’, published at Antiwar.com.

Among other things, Weil refers to the documentary film Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. The full documentary (50 min) can be viewed here.

Regards, IjonTichy (talk) 04:48, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

• The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to “Redeployment” and “American Sniper”, by Roy Scranton, a former US soldier in Viet-raq, Los Angeles Review of Books. The author is finishing a PhD in English at Princeton, where he is working on a book about the politics of trauma in American war literature
• Archive of articles by Roy Scranton at NYTimes.com on some of his experiences as a US soldier in Viet-raq
• Joseph E.Lowndes, '“American Sniper,” Clint Eastwood and White Fear', Counterpunch

Let’s start with Clint Eastwood himself, who says that American Sniper was meant to criticize war. “The biggest antiwar statement any film” can make is to show, he said, “the fact of what does to the family and the people who have to go back into civilian life like Chris Kyle did.” There are two Eastwoods in the popular imagination – the celebrant of violence in the Sergio Leone “spaghetti westerns” and the Dirty Harry movies; and the lamenter of violence in films such as Unforgiven and Gran Torino. But as American Sniper demonstrates, those two modes are not so far apart. Eastwood does here what he has done repeatedly in his career – resolves his hero’s ambivalence, psychic pain, and sense of structural powerlessness through masculine honor, sacrifice, and vulnerability (often played out on a highly racialized landscape).

Which was my original point, though he picked up what I forgot The Outlaw Josey Wales, which goes back to mark the Wende earlier (1976) than I did, and where the ambiguity, and its resolution is perhaps better exemplified by the figure played by John Vernon than by Eastwood perhaps.Nishidani (talk) 12:23, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, when I originally read the paragraph you quoted above, your words sprang into my mind ... Regards, IjonTichy (talk) 16:56, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I happened to catch The Hurt Locker on the boobtube the other night. That is a masterly piece of film in the genre against which to measure this Eastwood reel.Nishidani (talk) 10:57, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

The Hurt Locker and American Sniper are similar in the sense (a) both were successful financially (although the latter much more so than the former), and (b) both received a very large number of positive reviews. but the two films are very different in the sense that Sniper received a much larger number of negative reviews of the historical/ political/ social (HPS) aspects of the film than Locker. For example, for a partial listing of the negative reviews of the HPS aspects of Sniper, see this section of the article talk page.

Did you get a chance to watch Lord of War and War, Inc.? I highly recommend these two films. They are both highly intelligent, deeply insightful, thought provoking, and entertaining. I've read extensively over the last 10 years about the complex, challenging issues analyzed in these films, and both of these films offer highly accurate, truthful, penetrating, revealing, sophisticated, nuanced historical/ political/ social commentary. (Which partially explains why both films received poor reviews from mainstream film critics.) The films are not documentaries, they are officially works of fiction, but in reality they are (to a large extent) documentaries well-disguised as mass entertainment (otherwise they could not be sufficiently funded, as well-made war movies generally require relatively high budgets). Both offer many documentary-like elements of the highest quality. By the way you may want to check the Wikiquote entries on both films to get a taste for the high level of intelligence and brutal intellectual honesty offered by these films. Take good care, IjonTichy (talk) 00:17, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

I've seen Lord of War, despite disliking Nicolas Cage, and have yet to see War, Inc, despite having a high regard for John Cusack. If there is a defect in the former, it is (to make a variation on the point re the antithetic tensions in Eastwood's films) that (a) the horror of arms-running is embodied by a marginal criminal, whereas it is how official states function, as is admitted only in the postscript to the film and (b) the lesson Yuri voices as the sum of the wisdom he acquired in supplying dictators with weapons of massacre, 'Never go to war, especially with yourself' is contradicted by his own life, which is split, except for two moments, between the realized fantasy of an American dream world laundered of violence, and the brutalizing reality of the violent world he exploits to finance his other life. He's a liminal maverick, but everything he does is what the respectable world of state 'actors' do on a day by day basis, as part of their job, which no one takes exception to. Suffice it to see the massive, lunatic contradictions in the real life behavior of a mainstream figure depicted by Tom Hanks in (Charlie Wilson's War). Still, it's some time since I saw the film, and, as I said, I don't like Cage as an actor.

Vladimir Propp argued that humanity had but 5 plotlines in its fabulatory repertoire, which is probably richer than the story-lines of people or of history in the real world. Generally the rare grim tales in the Grimm brothers' yarns don't translate well for a mass audience, and fail box office success, and the obvious reason, to cite Ibsen, is that we're more comfortable existentially with the blandishment of lies, or as the Old Possum said in Burnt Norton: 'Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality.' We know everything to the point of having at arm's reach a certain predictive grasp of the consequences of our repeated national and international follies, but it is only to be expected that it has little or almost no impact on reality.Nishidani (talk) 11:31, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your insights Nish. Your keen observations of Lord don't diminish my very high regard for the film (and I don't feel that was your intention at all). All your observations are insightful and thought provoking. I agree with your analysis. You mentioned you saw Lord some years ago, maybe if you will watch it again you may develop additional perspectives. If I would have watched all these films 10 years ago I probably would have rated Sniper very highly and Lord and War Inc very poorly. It is only because I've educated myself extensively over the last 10 years about the financial interests behind war (and more importantly and more generally about the role of financial interests in larger society from ancient human history to date) that I was in a position to develop a full and deep appreciation for the brutal intellectual honesty of films such as Lord and War Inc, both of which I've watched for the first time in 2013.

By the way Lord was successful at the box office, although nowhere near the level of the financial success of Sniper. Andrew Niccol, the writer and director of Lord, appears to have made several compromises in the script of Lord which in my view did not detract from the film and probably helped the film to (at least modestly) succeed at the box office. Without crafting Lord with an eye towards financial success Niccol would have faced enormous roadblocks to obtain funding for his future filmmaking efforts, e.g. Good Kill (which I've not yet seen --- did you get a chance to catch it yet?). And I loved the Yuri speech near the end of Lord where he informs the idealistic Interpol agent Jack Valentine that the state 'actors' are much larger criminals than Yuri himself and that the state is certain to intervene on Yuri's behalf.

By the way in my view other great anti-war films include, but are certainly not limited to, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as well as High Noon, and of course many films by Charlie Chaplin, including but not limited to The Great Dictator. IjonTichy (talk) 19:36, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Well, there's an ad break from listening to Luttwak discuss Libya, so I haven't time to add my list. (Some wars are 'good', you know, i.e.necessary. The Holocaust wouldn't have occurred if more Jews acted (then, rather than applying the doctrine against harmless Palestinians now) in WW2 like the Bielski brothers. Have you seen La grande guerra. I suppose it wouldn't go over well in translation, there's so much local dialect, regional mindsets, etc., in it. Extremely powerful ending. Train of Life,The 25th Hour, The Last Valley, Zulu) (saw that with my father, who gave me through the film a detailed run-down of the history of Zulu chieftains by name, which his father transmitted to him in turn, since he had fought in the Boer War: a fine study in courage, by both sides, even if the Brits were imperial arseholes), and yes, (I liked the character portraits of the British soldiers, esp the one played by Attenborough) in Guns at Batasi 'Nite (no, I wasn't being critical of the Cage film, really. But his speech in the end sounding to me like a pretext, and therefore an example of instrumental self-justification. Put it this way- what the film is trying to say is: the 'American dream' is built on foreign nightmares, whether it's Yuri the maverick or the State Department doesn't really matter. Back to the debate.Nishidani (talk) 21:25, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I will definitely look into the films you linked to.

By pure coincidence, I've read the Hebrew translation of The Good Soldier Švejk about one short year before I was drafted into the Israeli military. Without a doubt one of the top 3 antiwar books I've read in my lifetime. Decades later, I smile when I remember the pure joy I felt reading that book. From the first page of the book I sensed this was a special, extremely well-crafted story, and I remember trying to limit my reading of the book to only a few paragraphs every day over a period of weeks, in an effort to prolong the pleasure as much as possible. And when I finished reading the book I immediately read it again from cover to cover. I experienced the same joy very recently, in 2011-2, when I read Catch-22 for the first time in my life -- not only the best antiwar book I've ever read, but the very best book in any genre I've ever read. Best, IjonTichy (talk) 00:18, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Švejk would be even better in Yiddish, I would reckon. I thought immediately of Catch-22 just as I switched off the computer, and also Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, which is up there with the greatest American novels. Since you mentioned finance and violence, the latter is particularly apposite. There is a long speech in there by General Cummings, designed to show that (despite 'us' being on the good side) the directive elite of the Western powers, esp. corporate America, are as fascist as their enemies. Quite a premonitory statement for the period. I can't find the chapter or page numbers as my worn copy is stored elsewhere, but I recommend it, if you haven't read it (Uri Avnery's In the Fields of Philistia must be a fascinating read, though I haven't seen it yet). I was raised listening to people talking about their Boer and WW1 memories - they glossed life in the trenches more or less along the lines of Wilfred Owen's poem, or Frederick Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune, Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That and Frank Richard's Old Soldiers Never Die. There's a huge number of very good books and films (Gallipoli is another: my paternal grandfather was there), now that you mention it. I suppose it's just entertainment now: since, if the consumers of these realistic fictions took their reading or viewing of these things to heart, the world would be a different place. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 09:28, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Full text of the book on WikiSource and Well-made 10-min film on YouTube.

Allegory of the Cave by Plato. Well-made 3-min film on YouTube.

IjonTichy (talk) 19:40, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Historical mystery

Can any one with an eye on this page provide a time frame or details on the incident, which gave rise to a popular Palmach song in the 1940s, described by Tom Segev, Eye of the Beholder / Yasser Arafat revisited Haaretz 11 October, 2002? I refer to the punitive castration of a suspected Arab rapist by two Yishuv operatives who later went on to enjoy distinguished careers, Yohai Bin-Nun and Amos Horev. Thanks in anticipation Nishidani (talk) 14:47, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Morris, Birth..Revisited, p 127: "In 1946 three men from Sheikh Muwannis had raped a Jewish girl. Parallel to Mandate court proceedings, the Haganah had shot and wounded one of the attackers and then kidnapped and castrated one of the others (and then deposited him in a hospital)". But these details seem different. Zero 23:28, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks very much. As Segev's notes, there's a book ca 2002 which deals with this. This example is evidently later, putting into practice the lesson taught to Palmach operatives. The first is on suspicion of rape, without trial. The effect on this on later Arab flight in 1948: the Beit Shean district incident apparently had a huge impact and seems to date to late 30s or early 40s. It throws some light on Bar Ilan professor Mordechai Kedar's statement during the Gaza war last year, I think. I.e. figuring out what 'deterrence' works with 'Arabs' and applying it. Nishidani (talk) 09:04, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

• Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, Nation Books, 2014 p.313, taking a hint from the above, but using implicitly some other source, says castration of the enemy, which was taught in the Palmach, was more widespread than this solitary notice would suggest.Nishidani (talk) 18:11, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
  • Yonatan Mendel, 'Re-Arabizing the De-Arabized: The Mista'aravim Unit of the Palmach,' in Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard, David Attwell (eds.) Debating Orientalism, Palgrave/Macmillan pp.94-115.

The unit involved in executin the Haganah's order when the man was convicted by the Haganah in absentia, was the Ha-Shaḥar unit, which however delegated, on receiving permission, the task to mista'aravim, Jewish Arabs. The song 'We castrated you, Mohammed' celebrating the event, was written by Haim Hefer.Nishidani (talk) 18:21, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

On the other hand, the Mandatory army's Highland Light Infantry once arrested 4 Haganah operatives near St Stephen's Gate and handed them over to an Arab crowd which then castrated the four (February 12, 1948). John Bowyer Bell Terror Out of Zion, Transaction Publishers (1996) 2008 p.269.

Extraordinary people

Worth a wikibio like Ezra Nawi or under a theme: Palestinians who have returned to cave-dwelling, i.e. the folks in the South Hebron Hills, and Silwan. Most make aliyah with huge subsidies. The locals survive even after their own possessions are stolen.

• Abdul Fatah Abed Rabbo
• Oakland Ross, 'The caveman's day in court,' Toronto Star 12 April 2009
• Adrian Blomfeld,'Cave-dwelling Palestinian farmers facing eviction from homes,' The Telegraph 13 May 2012
• Tasneem Nashrulla , Family Lives In A Cave After Their House In Jerusalem Is Demolished,' BuzzFeed 27 August 2013.
• Harriet Sherwood, of the occupation: growing up in Palestine,' The Guardian 8 February 2014.Nishidani (talk) 18:09, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

U.S. gunman kills three young Muslims

U.S. gunman kills three young Muslims, Reuters. --IjonTichy (talk) 17:40, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Chris Johnson, One dead and three injured in Copenhagen 'terrorist attack', The Guardian, 14 February 2015. Nishidani (talk) 11:00, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

New AP Report on the Massacre in Gaza in Summer 2014

Economist Shir Hever discusses an Associated Press report about attacks on the Gaza civilian population during Operation Protective Edge, The Real News. HEVER: "This is the importance of the AP report now, because it undermines the Israeli narrative about that war. This argument, as if Hamas has been using human shields to protect their fighters, this is an extremely racist argument. It presents the people of Gaza as if they don't care about their own family, about their own neighbors."   ...   HEVER: "it just shows that the only thing that the Israeli forces were effective at doing is keeping most of the Israeli civilians out of harm's way. But when it comes to using their offensive capabilities, they have made no effort to distinguish between Palestinian civilians and fighters."

High civilian death toll in Gaza house strikes, says report, Ynet news --- IjonTichy (talk) 18:43, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Palestinian workers article

You put quite a lot of info in the Barkan page which made me realize there probably should be an article or at least a section somewhere about it the can be linked. Maybe here?

I probably not going to WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT but going into length in each Industrial Park article seems to me to be unproductive and make the article harder to read. Any thoughts? Ashtul (talk) 22:28, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

The Barkan Industrial Park article, like most wiki articles, was a primitive stub. An article should (1) be comprehensive, 40-70,000kb) (2) exhibit the same formatting for sources, (3) be divided thematically into sections, etc. Articles that are well organized and drafted aren't hard to read. If readers desire a snippet view or snapshot in 15 seconds, they don't consult an encyclopedia, they click on google. Nishidani (talk) 09:41, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

AE request

I think we both agree the paragraph eliminated was insignificant and was returned by you only due to the massive rollback you have done to other changes you disagreed with. The material was redundant after your massive build of the article not to mention Beitar Illit isn't CS anymore which makes it false.

I have also explained why the Karmei Tzur revert was justified (not to mention not 1RR) as Nableezy removed the content to which the photo was related. Ashtul (talk) 20:37, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

It wasn't justified. If you see the AE report comment just posted, you were breaking a rule which says that one can count as a revert a revert just outside the 24 hour limit. You don't just sit and watch the clock, and revert on expiry. You are supposed in the meantime to address your colleagues and come to an understanding. I will not participate in the AE dispute, but these three edits, though as you say, technically two of them outside of the 24 hr limit, game that rule. You reverted Zero partially, and reverted Nableezy, and waited for the third revert.

Ist revert 17:37, 22 February 2015 ES: removed unimportant events of specif protests and an event of stone throwing. WP:NOTNEWS with no WP:LASTING effect, Reverts the prior edit by User:Zero0000

Those wiki policies don't apply, by the way.

17:37, 22 February 2015 2nd revert. ES remove pic according to previous edit)

18:35, 23 February 2015 3rd revert ES (deleted pic related to content eliminated by Nableezy).

The third falls just outside the 24 hour period, but looks like gaming. See the policy at AE as explained by EvergreenFir.

This of course is arguable and I won't introduce it at AE, nor participate there. One your first report you got off as a first timer, promising to be more careful. The second time, I, and I have an extreme reluctance to report anyone, reported you out of sheer exasperation at the amount of empty arguing your, to me, unawareness of policy and practice was causing. You got, rightly, a light sanction. HJMitchell rightly gave you an opportunity to come back to the topic, and you have caused again a flutter in the dovecotes soon after. Whatever happens, let's keep out of each other's way. You seem a personable chap, and no hard feelings. But too much speed and passion here makes for a short wiki life. You won't save Israel, or your family in Ofra, from some dire threat by your work here, no more than I will save the idea of a Palestinian state by my work on the representation of their realities and history. The facts, all the facts, are what readers require, not POVs. Good luck. Whatever, please take a break. Most experienced editors and admins do, for their own sanity. Nishidani (talk) 20:57, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

I have asked Nableezy to comment on the Karmei Tzur revert so I will wait for it. The picture is clearly related to the passage he agreed on elimination.

I asked you to comment on the one on Community settlement (Israel). Please do. Thanks, Ashtul (talk) 21:22, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Sorry. I must catch my evening movie, and in any case, comments of that order are irrelevant for an AE dispute, since they are content disputes. Admins don't read them, and look dourly at editors who clutter the page with extenuating arguments over content disputes. Another point you should hasten to learn.Nishidani (talk) 21:26, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Enjoy the movie!

In other words, no it wasn't important, there is no content dispute and it didn't represent WP:WAR. Just admit your massive rollback returned content that I removed justifiably as it was WP:USI, WP:INACCURATE and redundant. This will save us both some time. Ashtul (talk) 21:49, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Consider an answer a favor to a fellow WP editor. Ashtul (talk) 22:21, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Consider what I've been telling you for some months. Your mode of editing, based on unfamiliarity with rules and practices, has reduced my wiki productivity by about 50%. Some might think that itself a useful contribution :) But my interest her is in creating or building articles, not passing part of my demented old age argufying the obvious.Nishidani (talk) 08:25, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Hiya, Nishidani, I made a small correction to your section header at AE. Hope you don't mind. -Starke Hathaway (talk) 17:40, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

gaza strip

It's been almost a week since I requested assistance on the article talk page and nobody except you has responded to my desperate cry for help. This proposed content is important and would help improve the article. You appear to be the last resort to improve the concision of the proposed content, and post the content to the article. I'm far too busy in real life to work on this. Thanks for all your great work over many years helping build the encyclopedia. Warm regards, IjonTichy (talk) 16:29, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Since I did that one edit I've been away two days in Germany. I'll try to work on it, of course. Very few editors in the I/P article add notable content to articles if it is not breaking news. Significant work is done slowly, over time. Festina lente is the motto! CheersNishidani (talk) 16:47, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Jewish Supremacism (My Awakening to the Jewish Question)

@Nishidani:I wrote an article for introducing a book by David Duke in my user space draft page. But several users come and make problem for it and after move to main space with me deleted it. They want bane me and said that you can add negative idea in the article. But they don't accept and delete page and want ban me. Can you help me? https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Really_need_to_topic_ban_AliAkar_from_Jews_and_Judaism AliAkar (talk) 12:58, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I haven't read the page, since it has been deleted. It is not anti-Semitic in itself to write an analysis or article on an anti-Semitic book. Were that so great scholars like Norman Cohn would have been fired for writing magisterial studies of the Protocols of Zion and the history of that forgery. David Duke is an anti-Semite of course, and his thinking illustrates in textbook fashion the profound envy that permeates anti-Semitic minds and culture. The jealous deplore as negative traits what they themselves would secretly aspire to have, but haven't. Were they to have the gifts, or power or influence they imagine others possess, they would consider all these things in a positive light. Let me illustrate. In the David Duke article he is quoted as saying:-

We desire to live in our own neighborhoods, go to our own schools, work in our own cities and towns, and ultimately live as one extended family in our own nation. We shall end the racial genocide of integration. We shall work for the eventual establishment of a separate homeland for African Americans, so each race will be free to pursue its own destiny without racial conflicts and ill will.

I.e. he wants a community that mirrors the one constructed in Israel where some observers say (and it is profoundly untrue of how, generally, Jews in the diaspora act) that there is:

A reality where religious and ethnic communities maintain their separation. Palestinians and Jews live live in their own neighbourhoods, read their own newspapers, send their children to their own schools, use their own bus lines and taxi companies. Ira Sharkansky, The potential for Ambiguity: The Case of Jerusalem, in Efraim Karsh, From Rabin to Netanyahu: Israel's Troubled Agenda, Frank Cass 1997 pp.187-200 p.187.

So you see, it is impossible for any rational person to admire David Duke's writings and, at the same time, be a critic of Israel or 'the Jews', because what critics might deplore in Israel's ethnocratic tendencies, or in the traditions of communitarian identity in Jewish tradition, is something David Duke brandishes as an ideal for the 'white race'. Anything DD has to say that might seem accurate, is so because it has been copied and pasted from the works of great Jewish critics and writers who, however, were not 'jealous' or 'envious' of some vague 'Jewish other' for the simple reason that they themselves were inclusive Jews, happy to live with several identities, none of which had anything to do with racial stereotypes or national-ethnic profiling. DD, like all racists, anti-Semites, and homogenizing rhetors of separate identity. I'm afraid I can't help you out therefore, other than stating briefly that, while there's a place on wiki for articles on any book, any wikipedian who wishes to write on this kind of trash, should immerse themselves in the history of both racism and anti-Semitism, which is just the 'accelerated grimace' of the former. Ideas can kill. Mein Kampf produced the holocaust, the Aeneid's Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos might have given 'moral' comfort to the imperial campaigners who massacred the Jews for their revolt against Rome, Theodor Herzl's Altneuland fantasy spelt misery, dispossession, and disaster for millions of Palestinians, even to this day, . .the list is infinite.Nishidani (talk) 14:38, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Your comparison of the recreation of Israel to the Holcaust is extremely anti-Semitic and despicable, and you should retract your absurdly racist claim immediately. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 45.48.140.41 (talk) 11:05, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

See any primer on how to acquire basic literacy and reading skills.Nishidani (talk) 11:11, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Death of Binyamin Meisner

Actually I agree with the devil's advocate argument you put forth in this discussion. Instead of deleting articles on prominent Israeli deaths, I think we should be writing articles about any Palestinian deaths with significant, persistent coverage. After all, we are here to curate the sum of all human knowledge... Deryck C. 14:02, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. One could write of course dozens of such articles, given the volume of information out there covering also the latter. I think however, they should go into lists. I may be wrong. What is true (if one looks contextually into the I/P area around 2012), is that bevies of Israeli death/murder articles were being written by a handful of editors whom I could name, who were intent on creating a slanted view of the overall realities. I thought about this, and decided not to mirror the POV pushing by creating parallel Palestinian articles. One could easily "win" by the sheer numbers of well-reported Palestinian deaths of course, but the practice, of exploiting "small" tragedies for political ends, is execrable.Nishidani (talk) 14:57, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't really think one can "win a POV push" by writing many articles because readership per article decreases exponentially as the depth of such subtopic forks increases. Actually, if they think they're "winning", we may have just successfully diverted everybody's energy from edit disputes to curating niche articles that their "opponents" won't bother reading... Deryck C. 17:10, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Very good point. Perhaps I was thinking too much along the lines of 小洞不补，大洞吃苦. It's perhaps selfish of me. Most of these articles are poorly constructed, and when I see them confirmed, I think: 'Cripes. More work'. At Death of Yehuda Shoham, it was like this and required a extensive additions here, here, here, and here, to cite just my contributions, in order to be contextualized and achieve a level of comprehensive coverage. I would drop my opposition if editors were more scrupulous in covering what all sources report, rather than cherrypicking to focus on the creation of a "lachrymose" sense of unilateral victimization. That is a vice both Palestinian and Israeli articles of this kind both tend to exhibit.感谢您的帮助和鼓励，祝好Nishidani (talk) 17:46, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

For future reference

Igorp_lj 'your willing (sic) to equate Israel with Nazis.'

I don't mind being smeared really. Insults are like yoyos, they come back to whoever reels them out. I do object to anyone who cannot construe a simple set of statements about sources without making wild inferencesd about the putative motives of those who cited those sources. It's rather like a kibitzer observing a dissection of a suicide, and blaming the pathologist for his incisionsNishidani (talk) 18:00, 6 March 2015 (UTC).

(not answering on your next personal attack)

I'd simply remind what was my reason to write (more full quote): "we're already talking about such "comparisons" and your willing to equate Israel with Nazis. Now you do the same thing (as well as using & reverting Ewawer here)..."

See

• "The same comparison" subtopic from Comparing Arab-Israeli matters to WWII in your Talk archive, opened after such your expressions as

"In all wars, children have fought. They did so in the Warsaw ghetto"

At the moment: you haven't answered on my arguments in the Talk you mentioned above. So I think it'll be interesting for you the following new subtopic there: "IMHO, both Khawaja's & LeVine's articles aren't RS" because both they made false use of the source(/s?) mentioned in their articles". --Igorp_lj (talk) 00:14, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Anyone familiar with my archives will probably think (even if they regard me as a ratbag and thorough scoundrel) that I am willing to go to any length, even waste time, explaining in detail anything I have written which is obscure or which might give, on the surfaced, a disconcerting impression.

I've answered. I have decided not to exercise this obligatory courtesy with you generally because it is pointless, given that (a) you don't appear to understand English sufficiently (b) your interactions with me are, to me, incoherent, (c) your understanding of policy defective (d) you seem to have an unhealthy obsession with my desultory presence around here.

You are hermeneutically 'illiterate' with regard to English prose because you assert something which, apart from being obscenely offensive - 'Nishidani' equates Israel with Nazis'- is false, and for which you have no evidence. The error is the simplest in the book of elementary logic:

• A cites Clinton for saying: It's the economy, stupid
• A therefore believes someone (mentioned by Bill Clinton) is stupid.

Nope. A recorded what Bill Clinton is reported to have said. Reporting a fact does not mean, esp. for a wikipedian editor, believing the substance of that report.

It is a reportable offense to make such personal inferences and smear another editor. I don't report it because I am convinced that you believe this, and you believe it because you can't accurately construe what I write. Nishidani (talk) 11:14, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

• "I've answered" - see my reply about your answer's "correctness". :(

I'd propose you do not concentrate on "your next personal attacks" ( a), b), etc.), but on specific subjects of NPOV wiki-edits. --Igorp_lj (talk) 12:02, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Igorp. Don't write here further. Go away. It would be comical were it not painful to see the confusion. You attack me personally, I reply, and you take my reply as a second attack. Experienced people call this 'shit-stirring'. I may be a shit, but stir as you may, I refuse to be stirred. It's all much doodoo about nothing, unless the purpose is just, as they say, 'to wind' Nishidani up until he blows his top and lets slip something reportable. It's a wonderful day here. Time to prune the fruit trees.Nishidani (talk) 14:02, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

I do not repeate your "Go away", only remind you "Nolite judicare et non judicabimine"...

It's not me who opens this topic unstead of to answer at original place. So let's continue there if needed. --Igorp_lj (talk) 23:19, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

The future passive indicative of Latin verbs is not the easiest thing to memorize, so I won't correct your mistake there. But I do think it rather odd that in your choice of adage you treat me as several persons. I don't sock myself, except to mangle my bones with hefty left hooks into some semblance of life on rising of a morning.Nishidani (talk) 08:48, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

• Cohn, Marjorie (4 March 2015). Netanyahu, Censored Voices, and the False Narrative of Israeli Self-Defense. "One soldier likens evacuating Arab villages to what the Nazis did to Jews in Europe. As a soldier watched an Arab man being taken from his home, the soldier states, "I had an abysmal feeling that I was evil."" Monthly Review Magazine.
• Landau, Eidan (8 March 2015). Rwanda and Israeli Weapons: the conspiracy of silence. On the Israeli involvement in the Rwandan Genocide. On Eidan Landau's blog. --- IjonTichy (talk) 01:41, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

I read Majorie Cohen's account when it first came out in Counterpunch. Nothing surprising, those things happen in all wars, except of course for the lone voice who made that comparison (as a number of Israeli soldiers have regularly testified since the foundation of the state, about the analogy). It's a good thing the tapes are now available, in any case.

I know people who were there during the Rwandan genocide, the seeds of which were laid long before Israel was created. Israel, unlike a lot of countries that could have done more, sent a field hospital to Goma at the time, didn't it? Cheers Nishidani (talk) 17:50, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Battle of Shuja'iyya

Hi. Thanx for ur input on the article. But how are Democracy Now, Brasil247 and Press TV not WP:RS? If you had said only Press TV i could have sort of understood. But why Democracy Now and Brasil247? I don't see any problem with these two. Thnx. Also if you could look at the talk page of the aricle, i have proposed a name change. Sohebbasharat (talk) 14:56, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

The point is to use sources that won't invite challenges, as those three might (and did). As to Brazil247, it's best, except where indispensable, to use English language sources.Nishidani (talk) 10:30, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

DemocracyNow is a respectable site, IMHO. I should not be worried about citing it just bcz someone does not like it. That someone should prove why it is not RS. ANyway, thanks for your input. Sohebbasharat (talk) 11:38, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

My view is that high RS standards are required for Palestinian material, while generous scope is granted articles on the other reality. While this practice discrepancy is unfair, I tend to think that accepting a higher bar for P improves the reliability of that side of the equation. Of course, Democracy Now, like Mondoweiss, is far more insightful and intelligent than a lot of other sites (Algemeiner, Arutz Sheva etc.etc.) but I would suggest that if you are challenged, don't edit war to get it back, make your case, and only restore it if you get a consensus. I find that searching harder, rather than arguing, is more expeditious and productive. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:51, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. I dont edit war ever. I try to follow the consensus always. But i feel there is some inherent bias here. So, if one quotes haaretz/CNN (in something which is proIsrael), its considered alright and not unbiased. But if one quotes some source which is sort of pro Palestinian POV, everyone assumes that the source is unreliable. Sohebbasharat (talk) 14:28, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Fine. By the way, I peeked at your page. Very disappointing about Alonso. Nishidani (talk) 14:50, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

p.s. There's nothing wrong with being pro-Israel. Generally Haaretz covers both sides of the scene, but it is true that Ynet, The Times of Israel, the New York Times skew things one way. All sources are 'biased' of course, Israeli/Palestinian. It is true that there is a Wp:systemic bias in Western coverage due to the widespread tendency of lazy journalists to avoid taking cognizance of scholarship in Israel and the diaspora, perhaps because they make certain career calculations (this is true the world over however). The facts are mostly there: one just has to be patient to forage for them.Nishidani (talk) 14:54, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, you are right, 100%. Whats disappointing about Alonso? You mean accident/not racing in Melbourne? Thanx for your advice and input, btw. Its rare to find calm/cool people on Wiki, many editors are out to prove a point, it seems :-) It was nice talking to you. Have a good day. Where are you from? If you dont mind me prying. Your page doesnt say much. Sohebbasharat (talk) 16:30, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

The Melbourne memory lapse and its consequences. As to where I am from, I suspect from my mother's womb. Everything after that, the whereabouts of growing up, studying and living, is just circumstantial, since I don't have any specific 'national' identiy, though I do live in Italy at the moment.Nishidani (talk) 17:08, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, the memory lapse (Retrograde amnesia) is pretty normal after a concussion. Shouldnt be much of a worry. The media coverage by McLaren was bad though. You sound very poetic. Lol. Good to talk to you. Have a good time. Sohebbasharat (talk) 20:29, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Hamad al-Hasanat

The Arabic wiki has a biography on this co-founder of Hamas, though in Western languages, it appears sources are extremely rare, which is odd, given his role in creating a major political organization. If anyone can help with sources, I will write a stub. Hamad al-Hasanat

• Ramzy Baroud, 'The Secret History of My Geography Teacher,' Counterpunch 13-15 March 2015.
• 'Senior Hamas founder dies at age 80,' Middle East Monitor 3 March 2015
• Zaki Chehab, Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of Militants, Martyrs and Spies, I.B.Tauris, 2007 pp.24ff,
• Sara Roy, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector,Princeton University Press, 2013 pp.24ff.
• Khaled Hroub, Hamas, The Other Press 2009 pp.12ff.(Not mentioned among founders)

Nishidani (talk) 18:14, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Matthew 2

FYI our edits on Matthew 2 have been deleted from the Palestine article. I don't feel particularly strongly as it does jar a little at that location.

I have added much of the same content at .

Oncenawhile (talk) 15:05, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

I saw that. I will revert it while scaling it back. The prior section uses 'the term' three times at least, and is somewhat vague for that reason, and this begged for correction. I don't think the exodus parallel quote is needed. But since we deal in extensor with the land of Philustiem in the Septuagint, it is appropriate to mention eretz israsel/ge Israeli in New Testament. That's a fair compromise, toi avoid throwing the toddler out with the barfwater?Nishidani (talk) 15:30, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani, how about we add the whole discussion as an "endnote", using Template:efn-lr? The article has a few of these now, which i think work quite well. That way we wouldn't need to scale it back. For instance, I think the exodus piece is important because it communicates the point that "the term" was almost certainly not a contemporary geographical term in Matthew's time. Oncenawhile (talk) 16:41, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Fine by me. You've done such a fine job on this, go ahead. I'll have a look tomorrow for the prose angle I mentioned, as I think that passage is not quite clear. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 18:17, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

An interesting article on this topic: . See the section "In that case, what is the origin of the term “Land of Israel” as the homeland of the Hebrews?"

Oncenawhile (talk) 21:46, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Islam and antisemitism

Please see the talk page. I have responded. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RebSmith (talk • contribs) 19:39, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

New York Times Again

Overnight, an editor correctly reverted an edit I made at Har Homa, for clicking the link, he found that it did not provide the information I culled from the article the day before, which was more or less this:

“It was a way of stopping Bethlehem from moving toward Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said of his approval of Har Homa, against US wishes, in 1997. . His acknowledgment that Har Homa was intended to disrupt Palestinian development between Bethlehem and Jerusalem

It could be I got confused, but I don't conjure up edits regardless of sources. Checking, it would appear that the initial report I used was changed or Orwelled down the memory hole, disinvalidating the edit itself. So, since I had a visual image of the NYT page still in mind,

• (a) I googled:'har homa+Netanyahu+bethlehem+hamastan.'
• (b) This produced:

Netanyahu Says No Palestinian State if He Is Re-elected ...Mr. Netanyahu stood next to maps of Har Homa, one from 1997 that showed its empty ... “It was a way of stopping Bethlehem from moving toward Jerusalem,” Mr. Netanyahu said of his ... Netanyahu Warns of New 'Hamastan'

• (c)But clicking on (b) yields up no such text.
• (d)The Times of Israel has much of what I wrote, mentions the New York Times report, but, as one would expect, twists it to erase what the original source says. It is no longer what Netanyahu recalled as his purpose in 1997, but the motive for 'further construction' in 2015.
• (e) Slate magazine also carried the substance of Rudoren's article in a version by Ben Mathis-Lilley.
• (f) I eventually found Rudoren's article carried (dated 17 March) from the New York Times, in the Boston Globe ('Netanyahu says no Palestinian state if he is reelected.')

Netanyahu on Monday also visited Har Homa, a Jerusalem neighborhood where construction on land Israel captured in the 1967 war ignited international outrage. Netanyahu said he had authorized that construction during his first term to block Palestinians from expanding Bethlehem and to prevent a “Hamastan” from sprouting in the hills nearby.Netanyahu stood next to maps of Har Homa, one from 1997 that showed its empty hillsides, and one showing its roughly 4,000 apartments today. A further 2,000 are under construction or planned.“It was a way of stopping Bethlehem from moving toward Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said of his approval of Har Homa, against US wishes, in 1997. “It stops the continuation of the Palestinians. I saw the potential was really great.”

• (g)Her article gives precisely the content I cited in my original edit. Unless I am mistaken, Rudoren gave an initial report with this content, which disappears therafter though it survives partially in a video clip which however does not contain precisely that language, attached to the reformulated article. Either Rudoren distorted her source, which is possible, and rewrote the piece, or her original report was correct but deemed unpalatable for the NYTs readership. If the former, the fact is that other newspapers still carry the original version under her name. Nishidani (talk) 10:15, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Benevolent Big Brother, in the form of web.archive.org, is watching — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sean.hoyland (talk • contribs) 16:39, 17 March 2015‎ (UTC)

get yo acting like you can sneak in here nableezy - 22:50, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Just passing through to see whether the Wikimedia Foundation is still willfully empowering and engaging psychopaths and indoctrinated fools to build an encyclopedia.

Personal disclosure. While psychopathic, I've yet to see any cheque from the Foundation for the work I do here. They haven't 'engaged', (as opposed to, 'enraged' me), though working here gives a chap a sore 'ring'. Dunno Y unless it means I'm a fool: but I lack indoctrination, as opposed to documentation. I don't quite need the former. I spent a large part of my childhood getting used to pushing shit uphill with slippy fingers, and that's the key to it all.:) Best regards. Nishidani (talk) 19:57, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

What were you looking for, change? I swear, the smartest people can be all sorts of dumb.

A change of life. As to the last hypothesis, now that's something to look for as one follows the doings of Terry Tao. I prefer the formulation, the dumbest people on earth can be all sorts of clever (Bushed, Blare, Netanyahoo, Berluscrony, Tony Abbott(-and-Costello), Steppenwolf Harper, Al-Farter Sissy . . .For more historical depth, consult backcopies of Debrett's.

Jeez, I wish I wasn't net-illiterate, and could unscramble these mysteries like the brightest round here. Fanks, chief.Nishidani (talk) 16:47, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Reuters wrote this:

"I thought we had to protect the southern gateway to Jerusalem by building here," Netanyahu said, with a construction site behind the podium as his backdrop. "There was huge objection, because this neighborhood is in a location which prevents the Palestinian (territorial) contiguity."

You can also compare news diffs here. --IRISZOOM (talk) 17:31, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

New York Times did something similar today, as can be seen at Yousef Munayyer's tweet. --IRISZOOM (talk) 22:04, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Be constructive.

Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to blank out or remove portions of page content, templates, or other materials from Misplaced Pages, as you did at Islam and antisemitism, you may be blocked from editing. Thank you.Bkalafut (talk) 17:44, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Blocked by whom, and for reforming a patent piece of hate junk? Learn to edit the page using decent sources, which are lacking, not just revert. I gave you an example of how this is to be done in the lead.Nishidani (talk) 18:03, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

This is a curious defensive tactic, swinging your fists about POV and being upset about reversions while engaging in reversions to enforce WP:FRINGE POV. You cannot chase people off of pages on WP who are making constructive contributions. Kindly cease.Bkalafut (talk) 18:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

constructive contributions? reading that made me put Clint Eastwood's dictum into the past tense. LOL, as youngsters say. Nothing defensive, unless 'defense' means the defense of scholarly quality. You are restoring 'stuff' that, evidently, neither you nor RebSmith know anything about. I'll give you one obvious example.

(a) And their (Jews) saying, "Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah ."

That comes from an Islamophobic airhead's website, by the looks of it, though it is prefaced by 4 sources, two of which do not contain it, and therefore its incorporation here is a selective WP:SYNTH job.

What did the islamophobic Pamela Geller do with this ostensibly derogatory remark? Well, she clipped out the succeeding verses:-

(b)‘But they killed him not, nor crucified him; but it was made to appear to them. For of a surety they killed him not. Nay, God raised him up unto Himself.’

Now, any scholar of the subject knows that (a) it reports, reliably or not, that Jews in Arabia could be heard fessing up to deicide, (which is actually something Christians kept raising for 2,000 years, as an excuse for pogroms and genocide) and that (b) The text of the Qur'an denies the Jews were in fact guilty of deicide. In Islam therefore, the Christian charge is denied, and the lethal deicide accusation defused. There is a considerable literature on this: the Bavli (at Sanjhedrin 43a) reports a tradition that Jewish Christians were stoned and hung by other Jews, including Yeshu (Martinus C. de Boer, Johannine Perspectives on the Death of Jesus,Peeters Publishers, 1996 pp.61-62), so the Qur'an's registering one such Jewish mention of a Jewish tradition is not intrinsically derogatory.

So pull your finger out, and stop reverting back a mother-lode of primary research culled from stupid sources you clearly have not read, let alone famuiliarized yourself with the relevant scholarship

• Andrew G. Bostom is an M.D. not a scholar of Islam, and fails WP:RS. The article cites his book, without providing pagination, hence it fails verification. (well, it does have these verses, integrally, on pages 457,641, but you went ahead without knowing whether this was so or not)
• Robert Spencer is not WP:RS. His book is cited again without pagination. He happens not to have mentioned this passage.
• That passage is not cited in the Jewish virtual library text either (Islam:References to Jews in the Koran).
• So we get to another Islamophobe, the notoriously thick-agendadriven Pamela Geller. She mentions it, and that's probably where our page picked it up. And she, as I showed, ripped it out of its natural textual context.

You haven't edited the page. You don't know the subject. You have reverted consistently, without talk page discussion, you are restoring material potentially injurious to NPOV, and now you want to complain to admins about my POV-pushing. Yawn,...To cite one of the greatest Jews in the literary imagination, the only sensible reaction to what you and the other chap are doing there is Pprrpffrrppffff.Nishidani (talk) 20:24, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Note

Yonatan Mendel, Diary, London Review of Books, Vol. 37 No. 6 -19 March, 6 March 2015.

Notice of Edit warring noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Misplaced Pages's policy on edit warring. The thread is Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring#User:Nishidani reported by User:Bkalafut. Thank you. Bkalafut (talk) 18:16, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Goodbye. Thanks for reporting yourself and the other chap, whom you contacted.Nishidani (talk) 20:29, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

quote of the week

Ayman Odeh, the head of the new Joint Arab List, is a true leader. Extremely incisive, he often uses irony and wit to undermine his detractors while advancing an egalitarian vision for the future. In a moment of candor, a well-known Israeli commentator characterized his demeanor as a serious threat: “He’s really dangerous,” she said, “he projects something every Israeli can relate to.” Neve Gordon, 'The End of the Liberal Zionist Façade,' Counterpunch 20-22 March 2015

Reference Errors on 23 March

Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:

• On the 2000 Ramallah lynching page, your edit caused a broken reference name (help). (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, ReferenceBot (talk) 00:24, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Y fixed. --NSH002 (talk) 16:49, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Shudda dunnit meself. Sorry, and thanks.Nishidani (talk) 16:51, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

The state of knowledge, sigh (reliable sources etc.)

Itay Blumental, '3,000-year-old artifacts from Egypt rule of Canaan found in Negev cave,'

Artifacts were used by the tribe of Judah, the only tribe of Israel not to be exiled to Babylon in the late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. (circa 1,500 BCE) and the Iron Age (1,000 BCE)

Fascinating. The Babylonian exile took place 900-400 years after the artefacts were made, artefacts which (a) are Egyptian in motifs and style and yet (b) bear witness to Judahite cultural patterns a thousand/500 years later. Great. Nishidani (talk) 10:56, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Reference errors on 2 April

Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:

• On the Cremisan Valley page, your edit caused a broken reference name (help). (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, ReferenceBot (talk) 00:38, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Well, you learn something new every day

Hmm, you wouldn't expect a single extra quotation mark to make such a difference, but the wiki parser does do some things differently within ref tags.

I always enjoy a good puzzle, as I did those in Kasner & Newman's book, Mathematics and the Imagination, when I was in hospital for three months at the age of 10 because an incompetent locum doctor couldn't diagnose a textbook case of appendicitis. Our usual GP wouldn't have made that mistake.

Thanks for the challenge. --NSH002 (talk) 18:32, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I WILL ĶILL YOU, YOU ANTI-ŚEMITIC ṖIECE OF ŚHIT.

THE ONLY GOOD ŃAZI IS A DEAD ŃAZI. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.82.2.234 (talk) 06:37, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Have a nice day.Nishidani (talk) 06:44, 25 April 2015 (UTC)