[Previously #2]
Real Name: Peter Nicholas Dale
While #1 anti-Israel editor Zero0000 (Brendan McKay) is the Godfather of the cabal of anti-Israel Wikipedia editors—if for no other reason than being a Wikipedia administrator—Nishidani is undoubtedly the most prolific and proficient of the bunch. He is an erudite and skilled blowhard who employs his expert Wikipedia editing proficiency to derail and obfuscate discussions, limiting the ability for other editors to add even miniscule factual content positive toward Israel.
Nishidani can boast that in his more than 60,000 Wikipedia edits, he’s never once benefited Israel.
Nishidani’s real name is Peter Nicholas Dale. (Not to be confused with UC Davis Professor Peter Dale.)
Nishidani’s Wikipedia information
Wikipedia User Groups: autoreviewer, extendedconfirmed, user, autoconfirmed
Based on his own bio:
He was born in Australia in 1950. He has studied ancient languages (classical Greek) and oriental languages at Melbourne University. He is the winner of two scholarships and has lived in Japan for several years. He is the author of The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (Oxford, 1986), a critical analysis of the philosophy of the Japanese culture. He has been living in Italy for twenty years and has translated and annotated, in Australian (a rhymed crib in “Strine,” the dialect spoken in Australia down to the 1960s) the whole work of the Roman sonnets of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli.
Wiki-Israel will add that Dale’s passions are Shakespeare and Japanese culture, but his number one passion and priority is utilizing Wikipedia to delegitimize and demonize Israel.
Best of Nishidani’s edits
Nishidani is the main creator and editor of the anti-Israel series of articles: “List of violent incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 2016, 2017, and 2018.”
In this one edit, Nishidani paints both Himmler and the Mufti of Jerusalem as sympathizers of Jews. Nishidani wrote:
In [Amin al-Husseini’s] memoirs, he recalls Himmler telling him how shocked he was to observe Jewish kapos abusing fellow Jews and that he had, according to Himmler, the culprits punished.[180]
Nishidani was given evidence that Kibbutz Bet Alpha sat near an abandoned Arab village, yet he proceeded (several times) to change history, writing that the kibbutz sat ON the abandoned Arab village:
In the 6th century, there was a Jewish settlement, of which the Beit Alfa Synagogue formed a part.The kibbutz as well as the archaeological site with the remains of the synagogue nearby took their name from the abandoned Arab village, Khirbet beit Ilfa, which once stood on the site.[6][7][8]
He's written a slur against Jews being “The Chosen People.” He writes in a discussion page:
Sure, but having a piece of land registered in your own name expropriated because your DNA is not the one apparently given to the Chosen People, and all their collateral descendents or people who can convert to Judaism, from India to Peru (Incas!) and Ethiopia, and Russian Eurasia(300,000 non Jewish Russians) according to hearsay some 3400 years ago. I’m fine with one eretz Israel/Palestine, as long as civil property law is applied without distinction, impartially to everyone who’s born there. That will happen in about 2050, barring a really catastrophic. Patience.
In the Ezra Nawi article, Nishidani placed scare quotes around the word “victim” in relation to an underage boy that Nawi molested.
The statutory rape charge dragged on for 5 years because the ‘victim’ was reluctant to give evidence against him. Defenders claim that many of the prosecutions are politically motivated.[11]
Later in a discussion page, Nishidani argued for using the quotes:
‘Victim’ in quotes is required because the ostensible victim of his statutory rape refused to testify against him. The complaint was brought by the boy’s parents, not him. And it was consensual, as his minimal sentence indicated. A victim is ‘person who has been attacked, injured, robbed, or killed by someone else. : a person who is cheated or fooled by someone else. : someone or something that is harmed by an unpleasant event (such as an illness or accident)’, which, from the sources does not appear to be how the Palestinian saw this. In five years he never laid a complaint.
A longtime pro-Israel editor then asked Nishidani:
Did you get that from NAMBLA promotional material?
Quotes on Nishidani’s Wikipedia Userpage
To place Nishidani’s “neutral editing” in context, these quotes are on his personal Wikipedia editor’s page:
the Palestinians are the only people on earth required to guarantee the security of the occupier, while Israel is the only country that demands protection from its victims.Hanan Ashrawi paraphrased by Gideon Levy, ‘Even Gandhi would understand the Palestinians’ violence,’ Haaretz 8 October 2015.
The army’s professionality has been stained by the shooting soldier affair too. The chief of staff reported, in an explicit and documented manner, that two-thirds of the army are employed in keeping the occupied territories (it’s unbelievable, but only one-third deal with the Arab states, Iran, submarines, F-15, Hezbollah, Hamas and all the other calamities).Sima Kadmon, ‘Hebron shooting: A micromodel of Israel’s maladies,’ Ynet 5 December 2016.
‘Israel has a poor record of holding its own forces to account for serious laws-of-war violations; Hamas has not even claimed to investigate violations by Palestinian fighters. The involvement of the ICC could help to deter both sides from committing war crimes, while potentially offering victims a modicum of justice. With its UN observer-state status, Palestine is eligible to join the ICC, and it marked the New Year by finally doing so. The ICC will have jurisdiction over war crimes committed in or from Palestinian territory; that is, its mandate will apply to both sides in the conflict. However, the US and leading EU countries tried to prevent this development by placing misguided pressure on Palestine not to join the Hague-based court. But they take the opposite position in virtually every other situation of large-scale war crimes, where they recognize that curbing these crimes is often a prerequisite to building the trust needed for productive peace talks. No one has credibly explained why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be an exception to this rule.’World Report Events of 2014 Human Rights Watch January 2015 p.7.
John V. Whitbeck, The only legally, politically and diplomatically correct ways to refer to the 22% portion of historical Palestine occupied in 1967 are now “the State of Palestine”, “Palestine” and “occupied Palestine”. “Palestinian Authority”, “occupied territories” and “occupied Palestinian territories” are no longer acceptable.’ at Counterpunch, Weekend Edition January 18-20, 2013
(The EU’s 27 foreign ministers) have also received information from human rights organizations saying Israel is planning to evacuate some 2,500 Bedouins of the Jahalin tribe from their residence in the E1 area near Ma’aleh Adumim to the garbage removal site near the village of Abu Dis.Barak Ravid, ‘EU voices protest over Israeli policies in East Jerusalem, West Bank,’ at Haaretz, 23 December, 2011.
‘Anti-Semitism exists today on the furthest margins of Western society, in obscure sinecures, on the Internet, but perhaps most prevalently in our feverish imaginations. And in our generation that is where it constitutes the biggest threat. ..It would make much more sense if they could outlaw calling people anti-Semites. Not because there aren’t any anti-Semites out there, but because of the damage we do ourselves with this incessant searching and name-calling.’ Anshel Pfeffer, ‘The new anti-Semitism is whatever Israelis want it to be,’ at Haaretz 7 February 2014.[1]
Some times I am driven to desperation. It is a fugitive moment. I reflect that administrative work is a hard cross to bear. An Olympian gaze over the universe of Wikipedia is called in to waive the momentary overview, and fix a busy glance on an obscure cranny, chock full of recondite history, and make a judgement. The evidence is usually a set of diffs, scraping 0.0004% of the material that might constitute the ‘history’ or background to a disagreement. Unlike the Almighty’s omniscient cast of total vision, the administrator must make a rapid call on sparse traces, the more eminent spoors of contention, and judge by a generic rulebook, usually about ‘language’: WP:CIVIL is the easiest peg on which to hang a conviction. But speed reading over the unfamiliar terrain can often lead to oversights that have grievous consequence. The remark about ‘gudgeons’ you cite as an egregious instance of uncivil talk is, not only in my intention as its author, ironic and self-mocking, its tenor was playful. Though he is the plaintiff, I saw Jaakobou in a minority and therefore mocked several of us who, by ‘rising to the bait’ had created a huge fuss that fed his fears as it made them look serious, when the point of commenting was simply to ask him to be less ‘litigious’. I wished to take a little heat off the rather heavy cross-accusations that, perhaps of necessity, were being made. Perhaps I should not be editing Wiki, since my main passion in life is language, and I enjoy nuance. Nuance, irony, and a sense of allusive play seem to constantly cop raps over the knuckles. When I once withheld information from Zeq’s inquiries, because I told him the material I had might play into the hands of antisemites, and therefore I would not post it here, he accused me of antisemitism, and I, flabbergasted, sat back and thought: ‘How is one to edit if delicacy of sensibility is taken as an act of racist canting?’ I have been open here because we are not on a page of complicated editing over a difficult issue, but up before administrators with long experience. The problems both sides have had with each other are recurrent. They generate nothing, in comparative perspective, like the riotous and vulgar intemperance for which many useless or troublesome posters are hauled before Administration in Wiki. We are dealing with a handful of peccadillos, ripped from context, over two months, not some wilful campaign of vituperative slanging day in day out. Perspective is everything. So, seeing yet one more endless suit, I, like many have, in defence, put our cards on the table, not to prosecute Jaakobou but to defend Eleland, in the knowledge that administrators and mentors here, at least, are familiar with the contexts, understand that with the best of intentions it is a stressful environment for all, (Jaakobou included) and can, I personally hope, tell all with a quiet word that we, who have to work extremely hard, often unnecessarily hard, on pages no one (it is often remarked) cares to touch because of their difficulty, reflect on our respective POVs, and try to find what is it that annoys our respective adversaries. Endless arbitration over niggling things like the present suit is the sort of thing that risks driving off those few editors, on any side, from ensuring that Wiki has decent articles on this area. You don’t get people editing there unless they have exceptional patience, stamina and tenacity (or, like myself, are pensioned twits with a masochistic streak: I have had to spend 7al weeks proving, with some 160 sources, what every native English speaker with an advanced tertary education knows instinctively, that ‘uprising’ is a neutral word to describe, as scholarly literature in fact describes, the Al Aqsa Intifada, simply because one person, impeccably urbane, without evidence, does not wish that word to be used for fear it might create a parallel with the Jewish Warsaw Uprising. Nowhere in the world of civilised discourse are editors required to maintain perfect poise when their proofs of the obvious are not sufficient unless everyone agrees to them. It makes me smile wryly that I am forced to do this, but I would not blame others were they to blow their top at times). Editors are human, and to exact of them a level of punctilious, flawless hypercivility not even the denizens of the Olympian pantheon show, is to expect too much. Let Goethe have the final word:- Wie ich so ehrlich war, Hab ich gefehlt, Und habe Jahre lang Mich durchgequält; Ich galt und galt auch nicht, Was sollt es heißen? Nun wollt ich Schelm sein, Tät mich befleißen; Das wollt mir gar nicht ein, Mußt mich zerreißen. Da dacht ich: ehrlich sein Ist doch das Beste, War es nur kümmerlich, So steht es feste. Nishidani (talk) 12:18, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
ARTICLE CREATION HISTORY
Here is a list of some of the more notable pages created by Nishidani: