By Jack Saltzberg
Wikipedia is based on hundreds of policies that form the foundation for writing and editing articles, but three “core content policies” act as the cornerstones for all articles. They are (in order):
“Neutral point of view” is arguably the most important Wikipedia policy. It states:
All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias.
In theory, this sounds logical, simple, and altruistic. In reality (and ironically) no other policy—with the exception of Consensus—has been more responsible for making Wikipedia a platform of partisan-spewing editors guided by personal, professional, political, and religious agendas. It would be easy to delve into the many Wikipedia topics that have been hijacked: abortion, gun control, presidential campaigns, the death penalty, terrorism, global warming, etc. However, our focus here is on how antisemites and Palestinian nationalist editors have purposely manipulated Wikipedia articles to negatively portray Israel with standard BDS tropes and propaganda.
The part of the NPOV policy responsible for the total manipulation of information in Wikipedia is this phrase:
representing significant views fairly
Wikipedia articles related to mathematics are considered extremely accurate. The reason is that math is largely dispute-free because concepts are accepted and used to further the subject only after universal agreement that a proof has been objectively demonstrated.
In contrast, most other areas are not governed by clear, objective proof. Articles in hotly contested topic areas are thus dictated not by fact, but by agendas and points of view. And because “representing significant views fairly” is the key principle of the main policy guiding Wikipedia articles, significant views—no matter how misguided or factually incorrect they are—become intrinsic to agenda-driven articles.
One prominent example of this is in Wikipedia’s article on Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization, both conceptually and operationally; its resume of atrocities against the Jewish people of Israel speaks for itself.
Hamas’s 30 years of terrorist actions align with its infamous charter, which clearly spells out its position and goal in the opening paragraph [as taken from Yale Law School ]:
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
...Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day.
The Hamas Charter doubles down on its connection with the Islamic extremist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood:
The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine.
The United States Congress is in the process of designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
The end of the Hamas Charter is clear: …It [Hamas] will only serve as a support for all groupings and organizations operating against the Zionist enemy and its lackeys.
The Hamas Charter is a 9,000-word blueprint for the annihilation of the Jewish State of Israel. Yet the first paragraph of the Wikipedia Hamas article, in the section on the Hamas Charter, reads:
Only on Wikipedia can anti-Semites and Palestinian nationalist editors get away with conflating the Hamas Charter and the Likud Party. Equating Hamas and Likud under the pretense of the disclaimer that they are the same, minus the “racist sentiments present in the Hamas charter,” is like writing “Adolph Hitler sought the best welfare for his country, a position likened to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, without the gas chambers and death camps.”
There it is. Anti-Israel Wikipedia editors, buoyed by Wikipedia’s policy that significant views be represented—even if those views are aligned with the camp that singularly promotes Israel’s annihilation—patrol more than a thousand Wikipedia articles, making both incremental and monumental changes to negatively alter and undermine the public’s understanding and opinion of Israel.