User talk:Nishidani

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.'^[1]

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.. .' ^[2]

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

'And He taught Adam the names, all of them.’ Qu’ran 2:31.^[3]

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.’ ^[4]

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’^[5]. 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.^[6]. 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.'^[7]

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 ^[8]). 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.” ^[9]

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’^[10], 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’^[11]

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.’ ^[12]

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 ^[13], 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.^[14]

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.^[15]

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. ^[16]

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.^[17]. 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'.^[18]. 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.'^[19]

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 Wikipedia 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 ^[20] 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.' ^[21] 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.^[22][23]

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.” ^[24]<

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.^[25]

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’ ^[26]

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^[27] 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 ’^[28]

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)^[29]. 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.’ ^[30]

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. ^[31]

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^[32] 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.^[33] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power^[34]. 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^[35][36]. 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.^[37]

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.' ^[38]

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.'^[39]

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.’ ^[40]

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’. ^[41]

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 unprovoked^[42]invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state^[43] 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^[44]. 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. ^[45] 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. ^[46]

Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, 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^[47] 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'^[48] 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.^[49].

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), ^[50], 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".'^[51]

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).^[52][53] 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.^[54]

(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’ ^[55]

'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.'^[56]

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.

Further reading:-

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

                                         For an outstanding wikipedian, Doug Weller

'After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims. They balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims' fate.'Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Routledge (1973) 1990 p.361.

'Inman walked through the house and out the back door and saw a man killing a group of badly wounded Federals by striking them in the head with a hammer. The Federals had been arranged in an order, with their heads all pointing one way, and the man moved briskly down the row, making a clear effort to let one strike apiece do. Not angry, just moving from one to one like a man with a job of work to get done-' Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain1997 p.9 The allusion is something said to have taken place once nightfall set in, allowing a formal pause on the killing fields near Sunken Hill in the Battle of Fredericksburg. ^[a]

'the United States (US) dropped eight times more bomb tonnage in Indochina – over two million tons on Laos alone – in Vietnam than in World War 11, killing two to three million people, mainly civilians. When Western publics recoiled in horror from the often-televised destructive scenes of this war, air forces moved to more accurate technologies, namely guided missiles. Even then, military strategists and lawyers acknowledge that the “collateral damage” of “surgical strikes”- what drone operators call bugsplat -is unavoidable, if regrettable. ^[2]

The wiki articles I was referred to, to amend my perceived indulgence in a ‘wildly antisemitic’ distinction, reflect the POV that the Shoah and Holocaust are interchangeable terms for a phenomenon of racial victimization affecting only Jews:-

• (a) Shoah

Yom HaShoah lit. 'Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day'), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period.

That could be read, giving proper weight to 'in the Holocaust', to imply a distinction using Holocaust as the larger phenomenon of which the Jewish victims form a core reality. Any nation has a natural right to focus on its own particular perspective, in any case.

• (b)The Holocaust

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.[b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination.

This takes the terms, as is very commonplace, as interchangeable and commensurate and implicitly excludes the idea that the other half the victims of Nazi racially-designed genocidal actions are to be included in the category of the Holocaust.

Are the two terms synonyms that are denotatively exclusive of non-Jewish victims, then?

Cleave and hew are synonyms, but also antonyms at the same time (split/cling to). It is true that Shoah and Holocaust are now used as synonyms, just as it is true that Holocaust usage shows a much wider range of denotation than Shoah. Holocaust is a vintage word with usage attested for various events from genocide to devastating fires from around the turn of the 19th century down to the late 1950s^[b], and was also adopted to refer to the mass slaughter of civilian populations in WW2. Shoah was so rare in English that the OED 2nd edition of 1989 didn’t even register the term. But among the earliest uses of Holocaust, the generic sense referring to all victims of Nazi genocide was available from the outset. As early as 1945,M.R. Cohen wrote:

’Millions of surviving victims of the Nazi holocaust, Jews and non-Jews alike, will stand before us in the years to come.’^[3]

Cohen was an acute logician and analyst of language, with wide interests, playing a seminal role in the establishment and growth of the journal Jewish Social Studies, which as our article states, concerned itself with the universal (all men) and the particular (Jews). And that is precisely the issue here. Both Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman define what happened to this other half, to the Poles for example in Auschwitz, as genocide, but argue that there is a qualitative distinction to be made nonetheless.^[c] This is the premise affirmed by John Pawlikowski as we shall see.

So what does one do with the millions of other peoples who were exterminated – which no one challenges ^[d] and the larger number is widely remembered^[e] – by implementing a broader policy of liquidating inferior races, some 50 million Slavs according to Generalplan Ost.^[f] In the end, from 10 to 17 million people in Europe fell victim to actions that were inspired by genocidal racism, of whom half or a third were Jewish: 5.1 (Raul Hilberg)/ 5.3-4 (Yehuda Bauer) or 5.7^[g] (Snyder) million upwards^[h] Given that at least 5 million were Jewish, how do we classify the phenomenon comprising ‘the other half’?(whose round number is also historically grounded in hearsay, as it was pulled out of the hat by Simon Wiesenthal^[10].) To illustrate the point concretely, must the shoah at Auschwitz only refer to the 1.35 million Jews killed there, excluding the 250,000 non-Jews, (of whom 74,000^[11] -83,000 were Poles) who died in that same place, by the same means, on the same racist-ideological grounds?

There are strong grounds for arguing for the specialness of Jewish victimization. For one, in Snyder’s words, ‘The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.’^[i] In addition, numerous case studies show how local groups among Latvians, Lithuanians and the like, jumped with alacrity as war broke out, and Nazis hadn’t even set foot in their territory, to lynch, eradicate, murder, hang up on butcher hooks members of Jewish communities in their midst. Others stood by or actively approved, much as the Muhacir in Anatolia, themselves ethnically cleansed from Europe and elsewhere, did during the Armenian genocide. There is an important differentiating factor on a psychosociological plane among all those thrust into the forecourts of war, between the targeted Slavic nationalities and those, in their midst, who found themselves stripped of their primary identity as Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc.,and, as Jews did, had to suffer the lacerating existential trauma of a people who, orphaned of those customary networks of tacit solidarity that inform national identities, suddenly found themselves facing the lethal hostility of the Wehrmacht/SS and the fear, insouciance or coldness of former neighbours, with drastically reduced margins for survival.^[j][k] The problem is, however, that this feeds into a concept of exceptionalism, with its rhetoric of uniqueness, which is not only counter-productive of understanding, but methodologically inane, as the greatest comparativist historian of the last century, as Arnold Toynbee, with all his admitted faults, pointed out almost 90 years ago.

The creativity of people under genocide. Nishidani (talk) 17:00, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Hello, I'm notifying you that I have listed your name at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5/Evidence#Seven proposed parties as being among the most active editors in Palestine/Israel noticeboard disputes, and I have proposed that you participate as a party to the case. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:29, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

And I decline your proposal. I'm retired, in good part because of this kind of behaviour, which undermined my confidence in the serenity of administrative judgment, not retarded.Nishidani (talk) 20:45, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Indeed the last diff is particularly comical. I paraphrased a joke used by Sir Stephen Sedley, a distinguished EEC jurist sharing with a non-Jewish readership (The London Review of Books) a joke Jews tell among themselves to warn against the excesses of accusing indiscriminately critics of Israel as, ipso facto, antisemites. No one raised an eyebrow when I quoted this on my talkpage in 2019. By 2024, SFR thought it 'inflammatory' and was backed up by Barkeep, who said, unintelligibly, that my use of it 'weaponised antisemitism' when my use of it underscored how Jews themselves have jokes which caution the community not to weaponise antisemitism!!! And what is the result? an absurdly confused misreading of the evidence and flawed judgment and sanction is now part of the 'proof' I have a battleground mentality. That's called a disinformation feedback loop, and it is so thoroughly ingrained in the system that woe behold anyone dragged into its indefatigably superficial toils. I'll trust the judgment of admins to exercise their functions as serene IP supervisors when they can, as Slim Virgin did, write or rewrite from top to bottom a conflicted or difficult IP topic article or two, displaying mastery of the literature and respect for NPOV balancing between the two parties, an achievement all recognized, even while recognizing imperfections remained. Few of those who kibitz but refuse to help out and prefer to sit in judgment on the sidelines have the faintest idea of how conceptually, methodologically and ethically demanding a serious commitment to that area is, and to see so many good editors hauled over the coals for putative abuses or occasional slips is sad, given the impunity of the endless socks that infest the area with utter cynicism and contempt for encyclopedic aims Nishidani (talk) 21:07, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

• I am notifying you of Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5/Evidence#Request to add Nishidani. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:42, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Declined. I’m retired and stirring from the grave would aggravate rheumatic risks. I see no evidence there, unless for what looks like settling an old score/sore dating back to 19th of August 2023 where you appear to have been upset when I used the adjective ‘extraordinary’ to characterize an edit you made to Zionism, race and genetics (which I rewrote from top to bottom), an edit suggesting that 19th century science ‘provided evidence’ for the existence of races. It did no such thing, and it struck me as extraordinary for someone with a scientific background to suggest, by careless language (noting careless language has proved to be the bane of my former wikilife . It really upsets people), that science (or the pseudo-science of that day) had anything resembling evidence for its contention that ‘races’ (the ideological virus of modern history) existed. If any admin wants to make an informed judgment on the weird insinuations purported to emerge in those diffs, they’d better read the five archived discussions of that page beforehand, where they will find almost nothing from me but patience, urbanity and scholarship used to address other editors few if any of whom appear to have familiarized themselves with many if indeed any of the 103 or so academic sources I and others brought to bear to substantiate the article. Nishidani (talk) 23:06, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Since I believe the recent sanction was injurious to my bona fides here, however, and since in that request of yours to drag me into a deliberation which I think is conceptually flawed from the outset, further insinuations were made I am disruptive, I will drop a few notes in response to your 'evidence' because I like to think that, at least here, the record of my activities here should be complete. This interests no one but myself of course, so I don't desire any feedback. It may take some time since I am engaged privately in a lengthy argument over Dante's cosmology and the Timaeus, which consumes most of my leisure reading.Nishidani (talk) 13:25, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Being dragged repeatedly to AE can be evidence for every imaginable conjecture or nothing. Diffs like that look impressive, (that nothing basically happened only feeds into glancing eyes the suspicion that Nishidani must be one of the so-called Untouchables) in terms of the 'no-smoke-without-fire' effect in rumour-momgering, so I will open each up to dissect who said what of whom, in what context, and what the results were. Nishidani (talk) 13:39, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

No need, judging by this and this (altho not everyone is paying attention to that afaics). Selfstudier (talk) 13:49, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

'newly added parties have adequate time to engage in the case.'

I have no adequate time to engage with what is going on over there, which, in any case, is so humongously messy in its conceptual sprawl that to unpack the conflicting premises would take weeks, something which, given the austere word limits, is formally impossible anyway. Perhaps they have the liberty to try and drag me by the virtual short and curlies out of a contented retirement, but my gut feeling is that initiatives of this kind smack of being a kind of Invitation to a Beheading, a novel which bears some analogy to things that go wrong on wikipedia. Now, kindly leave the page to my annotations, which have no interest to anyone at this point but myself.Nishidani (talk) 15:58, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

• 'In the past two years, Nishidani has been the named subject of 5 AE cases': , , , , , although the last one was initiated by sockpuppets.

To underline the recurrency of my obnoxious behaviour as recognized at AE two precedents were cited: the second (Sandstein 2019) I deal with elsewhere down the page. The first goes back to a single, bizarre report for 2017

• 13 March 2017 "Nishidani clearly violated the consensus required sanction placed by the Committee on all ARBPIA articles."

The report arose from my adding to the List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, January–June 2017 a datum about 4 Israelis throwing a stun grenade into an apartment where two Palestinian women, a mother and her daughter, lived ( apparently to drive them out of a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood). The mayor of Petah Tikva called it an example of racist violence. It was immediately reverted on the grounds that the incident was ‘a neighbor dispute over music and criminals’. I thought (mistakenly it turned out) that I was entitled to 1 revert, especially given the bizarre contrafactual edit-summary made by the reverter. This restoration was expunged by a second editor saying the incident was not dissimilar to Palestinian stone-throwing (?!!).

Administrators all agreed that the RS confirmed this violent incident was clearly related to the I/P conflict (i.e. my addition was justified). The technicality that in my one revert I’d failed to get consensus meant I’d apparently infringed an Arbpia ruling. Getting consensus for inclusion of even obvious facts was technically impossible at that time, since from 2016 there had been a concerted ‘pro-Israeli’ majority relentlessly reverted a great number of well-sourced contributions I had made to IP pages on the most spurious or picayune of reasonings. But the technicality stands and, in those terms, I was justly blocked for 24 hours. The long-term result was (a) that nothing can be reverted if one editor challenges an addition, save by talk page consensus (a rule consistently breached since then with impunity) and (b) that this perfectly valid datum is missing from that page to this date. The case can hardly be cited mechanically as evidence for my putatively consistent bad behaviour. I had simply misunderstood the nicety of a rule.If anything it constitutes strong evidence of how rules are abused tactically both to erase legitimate data from IP articles, and to manoeuver content editors into errors that can feed AE reports and get them removed. Nishidani (talk) 14:40, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Background. Just prior to the first diff, a stub (about a baker's dozen of refs) was posted, Zionism, race and genetics, which was immediately marked for an AfD. I happened to have extensive files precisely on this topic, and was amazed to see every wikipedia negative voice thrown at it (WP:NOR, WP:SYNTH, WP:RS, WP:OTHERSTUFFDOESNTEXIST, WP:HASTE, WP:AND, WP:TNT, WP:BATTLEGROUND etc) by a handful of editors who clearly were totally unfamiliar with this topic, which has accrued a substantial scholarly literature over the past decades. I stepped in and rewrote it thoroughly, with 45 first-class references. In the AfD Tryptofish voted for deletion on the grounds it was a synthesis of 'bogus and nasty scholarship promoting antisemitism to legitimate scholarship rebutting antisemitism.’ Presumably as main drafter I was spreading ‘bogus scholarship promoting antisemitism’. Tryptofish then was miffed that I didn't take this weird claim seriously (how could important historical scholarship most of it by Jewish academics, published by the most prestigious universities and academic presses in the world be smeared as 'bogus' and a promotion for anti-semitism?), and noting his complaint personalized this by stating he felt these remarks were 'badgering' a 'career professor'. So I gave him a detailed rationale. A week later he was still upset ('offended'), despite my gesture. He made the extraordinary and offensive inference that my sardonic rejoinder implied in turn that I was effectively

caricatur(ing) my good-faith comment as some kind of laughable conspiracy theory a la the Protocols of Zion makes me uninterested in taking such a reply seriously.

Sigh. How on earth could one suddenly twist a piece of obvious irony - the technical term is reductio ad absurdum -into a wild insinuation about his intentions is beyond me. Nonetheless, I persisted in trying to mend these hurt feelings, which I found inexplicable, by apologizing if my dismissal of what struck me as a ludicrous assertion offended him and provided an even longer set of reasons for my scepticism about his claim. He apparently remained disgruntled. Nishidani (talk) 16:31, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

• Nishidani 1On the 11 August Drsmoo filed a report against me for 'bludgeoning and hostility . . . (and) making personal attacks, assuming bad faith, and casting aspersions on the talk page of Zionism, race, and genetics'.

Drsmoo cited for my ostensible bludgeoning mentality a 2019 case where Sandstein took no action against Icewhiz, reported by Nableezy, while blocking me for a week for a ‘battleground’ use of Wikipedia: I'd characterized Icewhiz as someone with extremist views. Sandstein judged that I’d given no evidence (the evidence I gave was that Icewhiz characterized ) several famous left-centrist Zionist scholars in Israel (Avishai Margalit, David Dean Shulman, Baruch Kimmerling, Zeev Sternhell and Yehuda Elkana) as people militating on ‘the fringes of the Israeli radical left’, whereas, in his view, Bezalel Smotrich and Rehavam Ze'evi, figures on the radical right, were simply on the generic right side of the political spectrum and putative opponents of the occupation (radically false). Anyone who actually knew the records of all the named figures would grasp that my inference from that evidence was more than reasonable, not an 'aspersion'. But, true, it was an inference, and Icewhiz was only permabanned six months later, surviving as a prolific sockmaster, even after his Eostrix admin candidate puppet was detected. Technically Sandstein’s sanction was understandable – reasonable inferences are not evidence, even if well-founded. But it was certainly not a battleground aspersion to note that IW’s skewering of those prominent Israeli intellectuals as fringe radical leftists in contrast to the putative moderation of far-right settlers was an ‘extreme’ distortion of the know facts about their respective profiles. Citing a prior case result as a diff, as usual, can be question-begging, since the later record arguably vindicated my inference. Nishidani (talk) 10:56, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

As to the substance, Drsmoo's relevant diffs consisted of my dismissing as 'rubbish' an assertion he made that the Zionism, race and genetics article was stating

(a)in wiki voice that modern genetic studies on Jews are both “Zionist” and “race science”

It was rubbish because it was tailored out of whole cloth because there is simple no textual evidence for any such insinuation, and to assert it suggests one didn't even read the article. The article stated in wikivoice paraphrase what scores of academic studies argued, that an early Zionist concern for 'race' left traces in post war genetics research, primarily in Israel, and a certain methodological divergence between this and broad genetic studies, a trace closely studied and criticized by Israeli scholarship itself. Etc.

Tryptofish added to Drsmoo’s list of what he deemed disruptive or aspersive remarks. I was indeed exasperated by that talk page mess. I had noted on July 24 that some editors to the page were getting it bogged down by expressing their opinions or impressions of the article as then written, rather than focusing on the nitty gritty of the analysis of sources. fiveby reasonably raised an issue of one source interpretation, and I responded addressing the sources mentioned. Having clarified them, I then concluded: ‘What’s the problem?’ Suddenly Tryptofish stepped back in. He said my source analysis was very helpful but his issue was my language.

I think what you quoted there is very helpful in addressing the concern that I had. (What's the problem? I'd say that there is a problem in your speaking to me in that tone.)’

That in my view was typical of the distracting drift on that page. One analysed sources collaboratively, and out of the blue an interjection would pop up expressive of some personal grievance. This sort of hypersensitive personalization, interrupting textual analysis one admits is illuminating by saying one is offended by some ‘tone’, to the point that an innocuous ‘what’s the problem’ is pointed out as injurious, this kind of derailing of work by petty or sniffish remarks, is incomprehensible to me. I was forced to waste time explaining that misapprehension on his part. How did Tryptofish read this? He construed my explanation as really saying that Nishidani believes that in these exchanges 'It's everyone else's fault, not (mine).' That is the extraordinary way (an AGF abuse of course) he glossed my attempt to assuage his strange sense of personal affront. With that kind susceptibility to see a plea for commonsense as an example of demeaning hostility, editing becomes impossible: the sources are lost from sight.

The result was a logged warning for both the plaintiff, Drsmoo, and myself, by Tamzin for battleground conduct on 28 August. Fair enough.I disagree with the idea that 'battleground mentality' adequately sums up an attempt (my view) to stop a page deteriorating from its rigorously source-based text into a mish-mash of tinkering by editors ignoring the sources in order to readjust a topic strictly in terms of how they understand POV. But still, when notified on my page, expressed my understanding of Tamzin’s decision. Mark. No resentment. Shit happens.

• Nishidani 2As soon as Tamzin closed the case, Tryptofish immediately submitted a report to the same AE page. What was his evidence of some putative ‘battleground mentality’? Revising the lead for precision and NPOV I had written

Late 19th century science affirmed the idea that humanity was divided into a hierarchy of races.

Tryptofish changed this key neutral word leaving us with

Beginning in the late 19th century, science provided evidence for the idea that humanity was divided into genetically distinct races

Frankly, this was flabbergasting. I opened a new section on the talk page calling this alteration ‘extraordinary’.

Tryptofish rushed to warn me on my page that my use of the single word ‘extraordinary’ was in his view problematic, given Tamzin’s warning, and I replied lightly that he should concentrate on the merits of edits, not read between the lines to trawl evidence for reports, as though warnings were tripwires. Tryptofish stated, after reporting me immediately to AE, that ‘Nishidani's reply to my message, which strikes me as defiant and lacking in self-awareness, clearly intending to continue the kind of conduct that the warning was about. So here we are.’

Just over an hour later Tamzin pagebanned me for two weeks from the article and talk page. I didn’t protest. I merely noted that if I was to be sanctioned for battlegrounding for the use of a simple exclamation intended tersely to make another editor rethink his very strange edit, then obviously working any more on Wikipedia had become impossible, since virtually any sentence I might write would be microscopically parsed, word for word, to find a similar skerrick of ‘evidence’ from ‘tone’ to make reports against me.

Fortunately, many admins and experienced editors thought both Tryptofish's report and Tamzin's quick sanction were rash and commented that my linguistic point, that ‘affirm’ means ‘to make a statement and stand by it, to maintain or assert strongly’ fitted the context precisely, whereas Tryptofish’s ostensible correction ‘science provided evidence’ attributed to antiquated racial thinking of the 19th century a scientific status it did not have, and stated effectively in wikivoice that the results of a speculative pseudo-science provided ‘evidence’, when no such evidence was ever produced about the ‘genetics’ of ‘race’ differences. His suggestion only showed he had little grasp of the history of science (genetics in the 1880s?!!), and no familiarity with the dozens of sources used on that page, all of which support ‘affirmed’ and implicitly dismiss the idea that race hypotheses had any empirical support.

To her great credit, Tamzin serenely accepted the criticisms and vacated her ban.

In short two days of admin and editors' time, and I include dear Tamzin here, were wasted clearing up an utterly misguided AE denunciation with no merit to it from the outset, because it was based on a lack of sensitivity to language (and I would suggest, oversensitivity, in reading into exchanges highly subjective, perceived feelings, things that either weren't there or had nothing to do with the hard task of getting a text accurate and neutral. More damagingly, the diff of the AE action is now repeatedly cited against me, as if there were something there which suggested there must be some fire beneath all the smoke arising from frivolous AE reports Nishidani (talk) 15:29, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

• Nishidani 3 On the 21 October Andrevan resorted to one more AE report against me. The substance was that I had crossed a bright line in terms of WP:Civil in claiming editors, in an ongoing three month long talk page discussion about Zionism, race and genetics, were clearly not doing their job of reading the sources, but rather engaged in a protracted argufying for a title change in complete insouciance to the source base, chopping and changing vagrant assertions every time they were painstakingly refuted. To me it was a ‘serial nightmare of WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT behaviour. I outlined on my page, when notified, why Andrevan was demonstrably ignoring evidence presented to him that he wasn't reading sources,

The best AE-adequate rebuttal was given by Levivich who listed 9 successive assertions by Andrevan about the page and its sources, each of which was proven to be contrafactual, with the plaintiff following up every correction of an unfounded claim, with another which likewise proved he was asserting things about sources which the sources themselves contradicted when checked. Not liking the turn of things, Andrevan then stated he would take a long break from the article in question. My impression from admin comments was that an editor cannot accuse another editor of unfamiliarity with the RS sources, even if this can be amply demonstrated, without themselves risking a charge of being uncivil: that it is uncivil to state the obvious. As a gesture of detached solidarity, I offered to do the same, and the complaint was closed on the 27th October.Nishidani (talk) 15:14, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

• Nishidani 4. Point 4 is missing from the official record because I never made a formal complaint about it (and wouldn't on principle, though it was a serious offence). Using discretion I simply notified an admin of the possibility that Andrevan had gone to a page in an area of my professional interest and edited it provocatively in such a way as to give the impression he was pressing me to deny or affirm my private identity. In short, it had all the hallmarks of an outing fishing expedition. The sequence is as follows:

At 16:17 on 26 December ScottishFinnishRadish topic-banned Andrevan, and his interlocutor Nableezy, from the Palestine/Israel conflict for 3 months.

At 21:06, 26 December 2023, 5 hours later, Andrevan turned up at the Nihonjinron page and made an extensive set of 81 revisions. He’d never edited it before. It happened to be one of the first pages I edited, coming to Wikipedia from a Japanological background, in 2006, though the page was too problematic to waste much time on and I left off a desultory tinkering with it in October 2008. Anyone checking my contributions would have noted that immediately.

Since, again, it struck me that he was messing with a topic he knew nothing about. I restored the version as it existed earlier What his edits had done was to selectively cull criticisms from reviews of a book he believed I was the author of (his identification reflected a conjecture on pro-Israeli activist sites critical of wikipedia attempting to out me), in order to skewer the author and, I presume, myself, in so far as he appeared to think we were the same person. His highly partisan cherrypicking of negative comments about that particular author in the reviews was noted, and corrected by another editor.

Andrevan claimed there were WP:COI issues. He then opened a thread on my page asking me if I had a conflict of interest there. When I, very irritated by this strategy, told him to drop it and, well, piss off, Andrevan then reported me to ANI. I refrained from participating, considering that as User:AndyTheGrump thought, this had all the hallmarks of Andrevan to trying to pick a fight and out me. In the meantime I wrote a very detailed email to ScottishFinnishRadish on that same day, 27 Dec 2023, 12:58, outlining what I believed was going on. In my view Andrevan was ‘abusing wikipedia to settle personal accounts.' Soon after Andrevan withdrew his ANI complaint. Had this behaviour been formalized in a report, given other precedents, he would almost certainly have been banned for an attempted outing of a fellow editor.

In these endlessly repeated whingeings about my putative battleground mentality there is no awareness of the many occasions where, rather than jump at potentially damaging data to 'get at' a colleague who disagrees with me, I have, as here, consistently avoided retaliation, preferring to persist on a talk page, even if irritated or, using discretion or silence. That courtesy never, never, shows up on the official record, and it embarrasses me even here to mention it. Nishidani (talk) 19:32, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

• Nishidani 5. On 14 February 2024 Drsmoo again reported me for using the phrase ‘dumb goyim’ in response to an article by Bret Stephens, The Secrets of Jewish Genius New York Times 27 December 2019, which kicked off a heated controversy because it argued Ashkenazi Jews were more intelligent than other people. Drsmoo wanted to use Stephens as a reliable source, an ‘expert’, on the UNRWA and Israel article. It should have been obvious to him that a journalist who believes the ‘Arab mind’ (whatever that is) is ‘diseased’ could never be an expert or reliable source on anything related to the I/P area. When his views on the intellectual superiority of the ‘Ashkenazi’ of which he is one were alluded to, and dismissed by Drsmoo as not an invalidating argument, I noted this phase that is a vernacular subtext in such claims, meaning that any writer who believes he belongs to a group with superior intelligence is unlikely, a priori, to be persuaded by arguments made by anyone coming from a less intelligent group. Irony. For Drsmoo, the phrase was of Hitlerian currency, and intrinsically antisemitic: I was alluding to Mein Kampf and indulging in antisemitism. Ergo, AE.

The result, after it was shown that is was current in American Jewish novels and in Israeli popular discourse, was that Drsmoo was suspended from the I/P area for a year, while I was warned against being ‘inflammatory’. I didn’t protest at this, by now, reflex adjective thrown my way. I think its growing ascendency to describe minor ticks of verbal behaviour erratic, indiscriminate (like ‘battleground mentality’) and a threat to encyclopaedic ends. In commemorating Jimmy Carter, Peter Beinart recalled how Carter and his family were mocked for their friendliness to local, and poor, Afro-Americans. Whites spoke of ‘Carter and his coons’. Coon is an ethnic slur. Citing that was important to assess the quality of Carter as a man and president.

It is one thing to sensibly permaban any racist who abused Wikipedia by flinging that word around in articles or against other editors. It is quite another matter to register the use of such phrases as a part of a particular discursive, racist tradition. One must do that to educate people about how (the language of) prejudice works. In branding indiscriminately every reminder of the existence of such terms as ‘inflammatory’, Wikipedia risks setting up an even narrower restricted code of wokist bright lines hedging any number of words: ‘Zionist’ itself, apartheid or ‘colonialism’ being recent IP examples of usage some editors want banned from that area as offensive to their identity.

One damaging example of the way this prissy mania for ‘civil discourse management’ impacts articles is afforded by the ineptly named Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence page. It cannot get beyond a dull stub stage because of two diametrically opposed POVs engaged in edit-warring. On the one hand, editors who consider claims of genetic inheritance of intelligence unscientific, racist and inflammatory and elide on sight any attempt to include a significant number of RS on this as ‘undue’. On the other, a small number of editors citing statistical evidence from research on Ashkenazim IQ performance that lends itself to the idea they are qualitatively more intelligent than (white) non-Ashkenazi. The former group (with some good reasons) suspect that the latter are, in the real world, believers in separate races. The latter believe (with some good reasons) that part of the legitimate (if minoritarian) record claiming there is evidence for such a contention is being censored for ideological (humanist) reasons.

Since I was quite familiar with the topic, I tried to mediate, and there was a certain acceptance that a third party revision could satisfy both parties: the humanists’ because personally I don’t accept any argument for ‘races’; the other side because I argued that some of the sources being elided were perfectly acceptable as RS. My point was that in these difficult POV-ridden topics, only an approach that wrote out the genealogy of an idea, its historical roots, ideological trends, and debates over the scientific status could give a neutral overview (this was precisely the misunderstood thrust of my endless niggled article Zionism, race and genetics, perhaps the core reason why, after posting it, I ended up with several frivolous AE reports).

Indeed I wrote up the article, covering the topic from WW1, when Ashkenazi IQ tests were first taken, down to 2019, and it was quite long. But I didn’t post it for two reasons. Given the atmosphere, were it put up, a renewed edit war would leave it with significant gaps, and effectively ruin its encyclopaedic character. The other one was that part of my evidence was the impeccably sourced article by Steven Pinker, Groups and Genes,’ The New Republic 26 June 2006 which contains an anecdotal overture:

My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe who owned a small necktie factory on the outskirts of Montreal. While visiting them one weekend, I found my grandfather on the factory floor, cutting shapes out of irregular stacks of cloth with a fabric saw. He explained that by carving up the remnants that were left over when the neckties had been cut out and stitching them together in places that didn't show, he could get a few extra ties out of each sheet of cloth. I asked him why he was doing this himself rather than leaving it to his employees. He shrugged, tapped his forehead, and said, "Goyishe kop," a term of condescension that literally means "gentile head."

More bluntly, in Yiddish this phrase גוייִשער קאָפּ means a 'goy's brain' i.e. a dope. That would have been either excised as embarrassing, or, on precedent, cited in just one more follow up from the 2nd Drsmoo case, where my citation of the related term ‘dumb goyim’ had me whacked with a warning about ‘inflammatory language’. Well, stiff shit. Another case where wiki's peculiar sensitivities deny a global readership access to a synthesis of what scholars say about topics deemed to be too controversial, and better left silenced or untouched. Wokism.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

• Nishidani 6.On the 26 March an hitherto unregistered editor Mschwartz1, laid out a formal complaint against me, with the bulleted (#) sign indicating I was the first in a list of (no doubt ‘regular’) editors against whom he was preparing to ask for sanctions. He lacked ther standard 500/30 qualification for I/P editors, and had been accorded an unprecedented right to skip the rigorously applied norm, a concession which aroused an almost unanimous outcry among many wikipedians, including, commendably, Tryptofish.Nishidani (talk) 14:53, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

I duly took the plaintive screed, a polemical and offensive fiasco of wild accusations -one large NPA violation, apart: it showed almost no knowledge of wikipedia practice or procedure, or of either Jewish and Israeli scholarship and history.

It was closed on the 26th of March for being posted on the wrong page and his exceptional right was revoked by Arbcom on 3 April for Mschwartz1's 'failure to come through with a report that would meet Arbcom’s expectations.'Nishidani (talk) 15:04, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

• Nishidani 7. On the 4th July 2024 Another AE complaint was made by Icebear244. Now, every 'regular' in the game cannot but have twigged that the several new editors who jumped in make up a chorus of complaint were suspect. But initially, this was taken very seriously by Red-tailed hawk who wrote:

Problems with your civility have date back to 2009, when the ArbCom found that you had engaged in incivility, personal attacks, and assumptions of bad faith. I don't think it appropriate to refer to other editors as barely qualified IP editors when they are not IP editors. At a baseline, it is not civil, and it comes off as a personal attack. You were already warned against using against using unconstructive or unnecessarily inflammatory language in the topic area earlier this year, and this sort of thing is another example of that.

My way of taking that was to infer that the writing was on the wall, after Arbcom had allowed exceptional leeway, following a request/pressure from an outside lobby, to allow its representative to attack me in the earlier Mschwartz1 case above. It would only be a matter of time, this year, as one can see from my replies.

Indeed, the reason, having withdrawn from wikipedia, I am reconstructing the 8 complaints about my behaviour in the past 16 months arises from that single synthesis of my putative incivility in Red-tailed hawk's synthesis of my blocklog.

It turned out that Icebear was a compromised, ban-evading account, and that a team of socks was supporting the accusation.Nishidani (talk) 15:37, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

• Nishidani 8. On the 24 October Barkeep suspended me for 3 weeks for, in his view, using 'a joke weaponizing antisemtism' on the talk page about such an article.' The offence was so grave that had a non EC editor mentioned it, he would have permabanned them. He was open to another admins proposing a severe sanction

The first thing I noted was several errors in the prose, misspellings 'Isreal, antisemtism, UNINOLVED', i. that was highly unusual in my experience of reading Barkeep and suggested 'haste', and perhaps not serenity. The second, if this was a rush to judgment for an edit from a very experienced contributor because it was deemed to be close to requiring 'indeffing' me, why was no common courtesy extended my way to notify me and demand that I explain either myself or the edit (advisable since my block log, which is invariably looked at, shows 5 admin blocks almost immediately undone because of a misreading), or, if the edit implied what Barkeep and Sfr (also very busy that day off-line), believed it meant (effectively a horrible antisemitic slur) why wasn't I mmediately brought to heel there, with a report asking for an indef/permaban at AE?

The short technical answer is of course that I lay under a warning that allowed any admin to sanction me discretionally if they had reason to believe I was acting inappropriately.

Further, it appears to be the case that no IP editor among those who dislike my editing presence there - some of whom are very trigger-happy over such potential issues, - found cause to complain of it. That itself should have been silent prima facie evidence that editors deep inside that area's discourse recognized the joke for what it was, an ironical Jewish awareness that accusations of antisemitism can be abused, often frivolously.

The problem remains: no grammarian in the world could ever construe that joke to be one of 'weaponizing antisemitism'. As Sedley's own use of it, which I copied, shows, the joke does the opposite: it is wryly critical of tendencies to 'weaponize antisemitism'. The only explanation of that antic contrafactual claim justifying the sanction was haste, the burden of overwork perhaps, and unfamiliarity with the topic (beyond reading talk pages).

The decision on Oct 24 on the eve of ARBPIA5 meant inadvertently but contextually that despite the dismissal of the barrage of 7 AE complaints launched frivolously my way over the preceeding 14 months, finally there was an ostensible smoking gun: Nishidani, like Jimmy Carter, must have some 'Jewish problem', one that invalidates his presence in the topic area.Nishidani (talk) 18:48, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Summation Over 12 years, despite scores of AE reports, I was suspended in 2017 for a 1R violation, and suspended in 2019 by Sandstein for a week for calling Icewhiz someone who held extremist views . Five years passed until Barkeep's 3 week suspension. My conclusion is that if groups persist in making scores and scores of AE reports, eventually, even if 99% lead to no action, some fleck of mud will stick and prejudice how my work is read. As an allusive writer almost everything I said on talk pages, if anyone cared to ask me to clarify, reflected a scholarly source (for EladKarmel's 'evidence', lebensraum is Arnold Toynbee from 1955 onwards, as I documented in replying to Mschwartz1's screed; 'religious fascists' is the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz writing for Le Monde etc).Lack of familiarity with the rich discursive world of scholarship, which thrives beyond the tight-laced corseting of wikispeak and the popular imagination of POV warriors, will continue to plague serious IP work. It didn't help that my prose style and occasional exuberant divagations look to many like 'snotty vainglory' as one plaintiff in the cases put it. It was a form of imaginative relief from the tedium of handling silly stonewalling on talk pages, and a hint to younger editors that reading scholarship can be a lifelong joy that, however much it may strip one of youthful illusions, pays one back with a sense that, in a dark world, individual voices, connected via books and articles, collectively and collegially, help their fellow(wo)men towards that illuminated road we otherwise are brainwashed not to take, even if they themselves will stumble at times while blazing the trail. Cheers and goodbye.Nishidani (talk) 22:18, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

You are receiving this message because you are on the update list for Palestine-Israel articles 5. The drafters note that the scope of the case was somewhat unclear, and clarify that the scope is The interaction of named parties in the WP:PIA topic area and examination of the WP:AE process that led to two referrals to WP:ARCA. Because this was unclear, two changes are being made:

First, the Committee will accept submissions for new parties for the next three days, until 23:59, 10 December 2024 (UTC). Anyone who wishes to suggest a party to the case may do so by creating a new section on the evidence talk page, providing a reason with WP:DIFFS as to why the user should be added, and notifying the user. After the three-day period ends, no further submission of parties will be considered except in exceptional circumstances. Because the Committee only hears disputes that have failed to be resolved by the usual means, proposed parties should have been recently taken to AE/AN/ANI, and either not sanctioned, or incompletely sanctioned. If a proposed party has not been taken to AE/AN/ANI, evidence is needed as to why such an attempt would have been ineffective.

Second, the evidence phase has been extended by a week, and will now close at 23:59, 21 December 2024 (UTC). For the Arbitration Committee, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 03:20, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

At the direction of the Arbitration Committee, you have been added as a party to Palestine-Israel articles 5. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5/Evidence. Please add your evidence by 23:59, 21 December 2024 (UTC), which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Party Guide/Introduction. For the Arbitration Committee, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 21:36, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate the courtesy but decline to participate. Still, on reflection, I owe this page a fuller explanation to explain why, and will set out several reasons why, even as a retired wikipedian, re-engaging would be pointless and a waste of everyone's time. A second point is that I do not wish whatever material I may have to cite here furnish matter to be re-cycled against editors there.

First Reflection

I have been very diffident about arbcom since, in my permaban of 2009, analysed here, the case for my putative ongoing ‘incivility, personal attacks, and assumptions of bad faith’ included this, which got my account immediately blocked by Jehochman. Several editors within hours complained and his sanction was almost immediately reverted by Bishonen because he had misread the point of my edit. Note that in Jehochman’s defense I immediately added that while wrong, Jehochman’s mistake was understandable.

One month later, Arbcom, completely ignoring or totally unaware of the fact that Jehochman and Bishonen had annulled the suspension, recognizing it had nothing to do with a personal attack, cited it as core proof of my incivility. It permabanned 5 ‘pro-Palestinian editors’ and 2 ‘pro-Israeli editors’ (not 3: every editor probably knew, as I did, NoCal and User:Canadian Monkey were one and the same person (the stylistic thumbprints and tagteaming were a dead giveaway but at that time I certainly doubted that was sufficient to report the sock), still highly active under other names on wikipedia. My mere 8 reverts over 45 days of the politically explosive ‘Judea and Samaria’ for the default term in international literature ‘West Bank’ consisted of desultory but reasoned restorations of proper text (in terms of thick RS evidence) not some mindlessly mechanical and partisan ‘edit-warring’. Indeed I wrote an extended scholarly article on the whole issue of that naming, which still remains at the top of this talk page. Of course, arbitrators probably, and understandably, did not read it. TLDR, and perhaps to many, looking like a personal divagation, mere 'opinion', irrelevant to evidence, rather than a comprehensive academically orientated background paper to Arbcom's deliberations.

Within months, the overwhelming evidence for this led to an obvious consensus that ‘West Bank’ was the default neutral term for Wikipedia. Had arbitrators any knowledge of the state of the considerable literature on that consensus, they probably would not have taken those rare reverts as indicative of edit-warring. But they are formally under no obligation to read up on the topic and consider that such things are just 'content disputes'). The result was that the I/P area was 'gutted' of most of its regular 'pro-Palestinian' (ugh) editors, with only very minor damage to the editors whose POV invariably favoured a 'pro-Israeli' (ugh) POV. Not malice, just sheer disattention.

My diffidence is, furthermore, based on principles of method.

• (a)an admin cannot be expected to be familiar with the topic literature (immense in the I/P area);
• (b) no diff elicited in ‘evidence’ can be properly evaluated unless the original thread (often long) in which it is embedded, is read closely. If that is not done exhaustively, the likelihood of small but persistent misreadings of what is apparently going wrong increases exponentially;
• (c) the most common forms of abuse are not verbal incivility but an obstinate refusal by editwarring parties to read the sources while dilating at length on their views about the article, and comments made by others about their equally source-insouciant impressions (WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT).
• (e) if an editor fully fluent in the high quality RS literature, (which editors have imposed as an I/P area article sine qua non, thank god), complies with the obligation at WP:Consensus to negotiate in these endemic stonewalling threads by replying to the manifold of vagrant assertions at length, that gets them nowhere except risking a sanction as someone who spiflicates
• (f) If you show and state that a persistently objecting editor doesn’t appear to have read the sources, that will be cited as an WP:NPA attack, something which encourages the practice to continue with impunity. The result is that the way we are obliged to achieve consensus, under these conditions, resolves nothing, but lends itself to AE reports of the serious editors’ incivility per occasional outbursts of frustration. An Arbcom5 review, covering several hundred diffs at a minimum, cannot afford the time to read all of the pages where the implicating diffs are embedded. So everything is reduced to ostensible ‘conduct issues’ in the words contributors used. And that MissManners approach totally disregards what we are supposed to be here for, i.e., not to pass the time opining on an interesting social medium, but to muster the finest available sources in such a way that the global public can trust the high quality of its encyclopedic articles.Nishidani (talk) 14:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Second Reflection

Mention has been made that Sandstein banned me from appearing at AE. That has been in effect since June 2019. I may only appear there if I am reported, i.e. to defend myself, but otherwise no. The implication there is that I abused that arbitration process. Since that right is universal in Wikipedia, it looks like a very black mark, indicative of some horrendous behavioural trait. It was odd, however. To my memory (I will stand corrected), from the very outset of my wikiwork here I had undertaken to never resort to arbitration by reporting another editor as a means of settling differences. No matter how incomprehensibly stressful a talk page might be, differences must be thrashed out by careful argument on the talk page. I thought I must allow myself no margin for weaponizing AE etc to get at my interlocutors (though I fully understand that this system is indispensable otherwise). This, even though many of them were to relentlessly pursue me there. I was faithful to that decision from 2006 to the time Sandstein banned me in 2019 save for one exception. I reported Galassi in 2016, only because Sandstein himself suggested I do so after warning Galassi that he was breaking his topic ban at Khazars by challenging me and my edits at that page, which I had managed to retrieve from a messy slough of conflicting POV clashes to bring it to its present, close to FA state.

In short, though often quoted at face value against me, there was no need for Sandstein to deny me the right to make reports to AE because on principle I had denied myself recourse to that instrument before that decision and afterwards. I think what happened is that Sandstein’s way of phrasing his decision created an ambiguity. He did not want me to participate, as a commentator on reports against other editors made by third parties in the IP area, which, from his strictly decontextualizing legalistic perspective (i.e., no interpretations please, only diff data, to be measured strictly against the rule book), quite understandable. But it cancelled in theory, inadvertently, a natural right all other wikipedians have to exercise. The anomaly persists. Any editor or sock can, as they have done repeatedly for 16 years, make reports against me, but I, uniquely, cannot exercise that right in their regard. That, and my own refusal from the outset to use that forum, has given potential harassers a very strong advantage, particularly over the last five years. I'm not troubled by that unique ruling against me. Together with a probable doubling of a permaban, I might even feel somewhat tickled that my work here has been skewered as so 'toxic' (a 'net negative' as one admin insists) that otherwise unexampled measures must be taken against me to bring serenity back to this place, a kind of backhanded honour:) Nishidani (talk) 15:01, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Third Reflection

When the ARCA discussion opened, I noted, while objecting to be sucked into it, that 10 contributors drew dire pictures of utter chaos in the IP area, all of which struck me (impression) as uniformly ill-informed and almost all blaming this putative abusive morass on a small core of highly experienced ‘regular editors’.I’ve been reading that invariable impression by people who rarely if ever engage in editing there, for 15 years. It is one of wikipedia’s clichés. But, reading between the lines, the intimation was that the IP area had been hijacked by ‘pro-Palestinian’ POV pushers. FOARP wrote of these putative POVwarriors as being editors ‘seeking to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS.’

Like all acronymic links, this has its uses, but often begs the question. It suggests that the ‘pro-Palestinian’ editors are abusing Wikipedia, by trying to twist the known facts in order to secure justice for Palestinians, in civil POV-pushing. If one concedes there might have been a 'great wrong' (i.e. since 1948 at least 3 million Palestinians have lost their land, homes and livelihoods, with 55,000 homes bulldozed in the West Bank alone, as a byblow of the establishment and development of Israel as a homeland for the diaspora), that ‘wrong’ cannot be righted. I have consistently asserted this, advising potential editors not to work in the I/P area if they have succumbed to the naïve notion that such contributions can change the outcome.

Yet, history is not, contrary to Hermann Göring ’s view, written by the judges among the victors. It is written retrospectively by the descendants of both victors and vanquished. There is a remarkable overlap between Israeli/diaspora and ‘pro-Palestinian’ approaches in the scholarship on this history, reflecting the greater detachment of retrospective learning. A large number of pages where key issues of summary judgement and phrasing are contested reflect the contentions between the abbreviated generalizations of contemporary mainstream media overviews and that shared body of historical research, which lives in a far more complex universe.

The associated implication, again, that the putative 'pro-Palestinian' 'regulars' (a bad word whose military connotations seem to have slipped past the attention of too many here, vie to wrest control of the narrative, never collaborate, and in editing do so with such violence that they deter new editors, and discomfort 'pro-Israeli' colleagues, is undermined by the fact that whenever a promising new editor, espousing a strong pro-Zionist view, shows care over RS, erudition and a commitment to rational talk page dialogue but still gets into hot water, they have been consistently defended by their ostensible ‘pro-Palestinian’ ‘adversaries’. Suffice it to glance through the AE records of cases involving Arminden (here),Monochrome Monitor here, Bolter here, or what happened at AE in the frequent cases against Davidbena but his importance to the project, given his erudition, has been defended by his so-called POV adversaries to mitigate the severity of sanctions. Nableezy indeed took over the role of mentorship The problem amongthe slandered regular 'core' has never been what POV an editor may entertain, but the potentials for improving the quality of the encyclopedia. I myself even had an informal agreement with Irondome, who mentored ‘pro-Israeli’ editors aspiring to work in the IP area, to help him out to that end. All this is lost from view in simplistic snippety diff histories, as is the fact that reciprocal gestures of this kind seem unexampled among editors identified with the other POV, with the outstanding exception of Irondome, who stepped in to defend me at just one more frivolous AE report in 2016 –the year I was so repeatedly reverted over numerous pages by several mostly tagteaming editors that I was close to throwing in the towel. Nishidani (talk) 18:21, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Fourth Reflection

Tryptofish insisted I be listed at ARBPIA5 as a problematic editor, and this proposal was accepted. There is a long story behind this which goes back to strong differences of opinion that emerged between us when I rewrote the article Zionism, race and genetics that had been put up, when a stub, for immediate deletion.

People upset at the article dealt almost exclusively with a phrase or two in the lead, or the title. Almost all objecting editors showed themselves wholly indifferent to the extensive scholarship underpinning that article. Andrevan and Tryptofish in particular vigorously argued that genetics and race should be removed from the title (which I didn’t invent), and were successful, following standard procedures, and now we have ‘Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism.’ It was renamed but the title remains a glaring misnomer: that article has nothing to do with the very broad concept of ‘racial conceptions of Jewish identity’ : it is narrowly focused on the scholarly documentation of how early Zionist ideas about race later inflected quite a bit of Israeli research on Jewish origins, a subject intensively analysed over the last two decades by Israeli scholars. The fact that half of the article is about traces of the earlier thinking about a 'Jewish race' in Israeli genetic studies has been buried from sight by its elision from the original title. Between the lines, I think one editor at least, sincerely believed that the scientific discipline nof genetics was being unfairly 'tainted' by the original title, however strong the academic evidence for this might have been.

In that discussion for the proposed name change discussion the breakdown of the main editors’ comments is

• Andrevan 59 comments
• Tryptofish 45
• Nishidani 27

The same two editors, each took me to AE subsequently, and now participate in the evidence section at ARBPIA5, where I was not listed. Tryptofish in particular insisted I be included. His argument is that I appear to suggest that their views coincided throughout an extenuating thread of sheer argufying in which there is little evidence of their displaying any familiarity with the topic’s literature. Much of this irrationality (my view) appears to be linked to a common perception that I am pushing an ‘anti-Israel’ POV ‘agenda’. That particular abused phrase, in operative terms, means that an editor focused on the culture,history and experiences of the 7 million Palestinians who constitute the demographic other half of the IP area must by that very fact, with its core concern for international law, be hostile to the state of Israel, and half at least one foot in the antisemitic cesspit for that spurious insinuation. Throwing that 'anti-Israel agenda' slogan around functions only if one accepts the presmise that Palestinians don't 'signify', as the 19th century idiom has it.Nishidani (talk) 17:21, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

That diff shows no such thing. It reveals on my talk page an acute and troubled sense, shared with an Israeli and based on scholarship, that Israel’s systemic political choices, in the name of Jews, half of whom live by choice in a diaspora, will exacerbate common perceptions that Israel and Jewry are synonyms, and what is done by the former will be blamed on the latter, and feed anti-Semitism. All these careful discriminations are lost when editors persist in thinking that criticism of actions taken by an occupying power of territory outside Israel against a people militarily occupied for 57 years, are read as delegitimizing Israel proper. This blurring of precise conceptual distinctions is inscribed in the politics of language vigorously promoted in attempts to get the (notoriously unworkable) Working definition of antisemitism translated into many legal systems, so that work in various media, Wikipedia included, to document human rights abuses, can be spun as intrinsically anti-Semitic, if Israel is mentioned. In the IP area, Israel is not the focus, but Israel's occupying policies in the Palestinian territories. There are two subjects - an occupying power acting outside of its recognized borders and an occupied people both of whose rationales must be represented with equal weight per NPOV. It is an uncomfortable topic, but must be covered whatever the intense, intimidating pressures may be, also here, to 'normalise' this as a struggle by a democracy against terrorism, or as a result of resistance to the unilateral right of one people to self-determination, whatever the expense may be to the rights to self-determination of people in the other half of the equation may be.

Tryptofish challenged the suggestion of something that looks close to tagteaming, by citing one diff, from a combined 104, where he disagreed with Andrevan. Note that Andre and I did not always agree with one another

Andrevan, I actually don't agree with you about the SYNTH

He had evidently forgotten that he originally voted for deletion of the article on the grounds it violated WP:Synth (aside from the absurd claim that it ‘promoted antisemitic pseudoscholarship’ which, when asked for diffs, he couldn’t corroborate.

Evidence makes a huge issue of POV inconsistency. There is merit in examining this, but, over a manifold of pages across years, it is not hard for even the most self-aware editor to slip up. POV-pushing is said to be where double standards are evident. That doesn’t worry me overly. You can point it out on talk pages without harassing the editor by an immediate AE report. A real problem emerges only when the POV-pushing editor repeatedly returns to his notion despite being reminded it is incoherent. All one gets are further recycling, at length, of arguments already disposed of, often at tedious length when the simple solution is to admit one's fallability. I'll give but one example related to the aftermath of the Zionism, race and genetics page dispute.

At Zionism, Andre removed material by the (Palestinian) anthropologist Nadia Abu El Haj on the grounds that an anthropologist cannot be RS on a point of Jewish genetic origins because ‘she is not a geneticist.’

At Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism he introduces here the Israel historian Anita Shapira’s view that genetic studies confirm a Jewish view that they all have common Middle Eastern roots. Shapira is not a geneticist. A scholar without specific qualifications in genetics can therefore comment on that topic is she is Israeli, but not if she is Palestinian.

A year earlier he made much of Abu-Haj being Palestinian (invalidating her scholarship) and imputed that she was a political activist, and possibly therefore associated with antisemitism.here,here, here and here, to cite just a handful. Cf my comment.

There is no evidence for that contention or its anti-Semitic insinuation. The whole thread on the exchanges in those two days has to be read to be believed for its WP:Stonewalling and aspersions about the competence of a Palestinian anthropologist. A year later, this ‘resolved’ issue is still be exhumed with the same intensity of argufying on numerous pages, at Zionism, and on the Arbpia5 workshop page,where he is still worrying this dead and buried non-issue, by arguing insistentloy in the thread that, (unlike Shapira) her presence as a reliable source is an instance/proof of some putative bias, and pressing still to get her removed. The assumption, I assume, is that he is above some POV 'fray' whereas on his own record he has here himself a decided POV, to exclude a scholar because of her ethnicity. Sigh.

I raise this here, after the Evidence page has closed, because I do not want to be involved there and have no interest in providing diff evidence that might embarrass or complicate the wikilives of other colleagues. Apart from socks, no differences among regular contributors on talk pages should lead to AE actions except in exceptional circumstances. Nishidani (talk) 15:10, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

That's a very long thank you but I decline! Far far longer than mine :-) Are you sure you wouldn't fit in with them? 😀 NadVolum (talk) 15:42, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

It strikes me as self-evident that participating in a case when three admins had determined, by totally misreading one diff, that I was either a spreader of antisemitic hate (leeky cauldron) or a weaponizing purveyor of antisemitism (SFR and Barkeep)- all being, with good cause, highly respected-would be pointless. There is no logic in imagining a punishable distinction between

• Sir Stephen Sedley telling a non-sectarian global audience a joke underscoring Jewish awareness that antisemitism can be weaponized, and
• Nishidani reminding one English editor on wikipedia of that same joke, a joke underscoring Jewish awareness that antisemitism can be weaponized

Since the propositional values in the two statements are identical, either Sedley was also being 'inflammatory' by weaponizing antisemitism, or I was, like the distinguished English jurist, trying to bring to the discussion the same illuminating reminder that Jews themselves take care to not weaponize antisemitic accusations. Being inadvertently but objectively smeared on the eve of ARBPIA5 with that insinuation by a sanction blotting a record that shows just two minor infringements since 2017 spells the end of my wikiwork. We peons are held to the highest standards in the IP area, a standard, unfortunately here, which those who govern us don't have to live up to on those rare occasions where an indisputable error of judgment occurs .Nishidani (talk) 18:15, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Fifth Reflection

Going back to Foarp's suggestion that the editors may not use wikipedia to right great wrongs, a wiki issue often and invariably cited exclusively to skewer any edit or editor who may take an interest in the Palestinian realities in the IP equation, more or less following the example of that noted 'person with a Jewish problem', sigh Jimmy Carter. Following up from this note the following reflection is perhaps due.

An official Israeli perception is that over recent times, despite intensive efforts to win over the hearts and minds of the world, hasbara has failed to achieve any such goal. To the contrary, there has been a distinct deterioration in its image across the globe (a 'great wrong'). To remedy this failure, the Israeli government has just made a dramatic increase in one budgetry provision, allotting $150 million, a 20-fold increase in its normal hasbara outlay, with the aim of influencing world opinion, through diplomatic and legal actions, intervention on American colleage campuses and on social media. (Asaf Elia-Shalev, Israel has spent millions trying win hearts and minds abroad. It’s about to spend 20 times more, The Forward 28 December 2024

The Ma’ariv report cites the official Israeli government announcement that calls part of this initiative ‘cognitive warfare’(התודעה לוחמת lochamet hatoda 'a), lit. ‘consciousness warfare’ (Anna Barsky, here Maariv 24 November 2024)

'funds were also allocated to an organization called National Vision, which was set up by Likud MK Ariel Kallner – and is currently being run by other Likud activists. The funding was designed to highlight the Israeli government’s narrative on the English Wikipedia.'Uri Blau, ‘A Failure by Every Conceivable Parameter’: The Government’s Campaign Against the Global Delegitimization of Israel, Shomrim:The Center for Media and Democracy 31 October 2024

Of course, as in the past, none of this will have the slightest impact on wikipedia, the one social medium which, we must confidently infer, that government scrupulously avoids meddling with. Nishidani (talk) 15:55, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani, in the open Palestine-Israel articles 5 arbitration case, a remedy or finding of fact has been proposed which relates to you. Please review this decision and draw the arbitrators' attention to any relevant material or statements. Comments may be brought to the attention of the committee on the proposed decision talk page. For a guide to the proposed decision, see Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Party Guide/Proposed decision. For the Arbitration Committee, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 21:00, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Interesting. The historical precedent for the present case is Arbpia1 (2009) where 37.5% of the blame for disruptive editing was assigned to editors identified with a pro-Israeli POV. But since 2 of those 3 were socks of each other, the actual result worked out at 25% ratio of blame associated with the pro-Israel POV, and 75% laid at the feet of editors not sharing that POV.

Of 11 editors named here now as the major culprits deemed responsible for the perceived toxically problematical area, 3 are usually identified with a pro-Israeli position, one of whom is an underperforming, more or less, throw-away account. The rest are the notorious 'regulars' usually if haplessly identified as 'pro-Palestinian'. So 80% of the core problem is implicitly traced back to the latter group. Statistically, this vindicates what scores of hasbara sites have complained of with urgent intensity over the past year and the proposed distribution of blame shows a distinct reduction of responsibility (2009 =37%:2025 =20%) for the perceived disruptiveness considered as arising from 'pro-Israel' editors. Either 'pro-Israel' editors, unlike their peers, have improved markedly their moral commitment to the best wikipedian standards of NPOV over the last 15 years*, or, as was argued in the ARCA discussion, WP:Systemic bias was inscribed at the very outset in the way the case list was drawn up.Nishidani (talk) 00:29, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

• What little research we have that might cast light on this comes from a wikipedian academic, Shira Klein, who is a member of Wiki Education’s Humanities and Social Justice Advisory Committee, and whose earlier research article criticizing wikipedia’s representation of Poland and the holocaust and the subsequent Arbitration case, is familiar to all. She is now engaged in a study of the Hebrew Wikipedia and states that the latter has been ‘taken over by the nationalist rightwing among Israeli Jews.’ She argues that the bias she detected on (the English) wikipedia was ‘solely related to the topic of Jews and Poland and has no bearing whatsoever on what is happening in the Middle East . .’

I’ll go further than that and I’ll say that in the minds of most scholars of anti-Semitism, critique of Israel is not anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism not anti-Semitism and that is what the Jerusalem Declaration is all about. It is a declaration of 350 scholars of Jewish history and anti-Semitism, genocide and the Holocaust who have decoupled this association between criticizing what Israel is doing and anti-semitism. So I am among those scholars. I don’t think that the criticism that we’re seeing in the wake of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, I don’t think that, . it isn’t necessarily anti-Semitism and it certainly does not relate to this distortion I’ve made out on Wikipedia (re Poland). . .

I think Wikipedia is actually a pretty trustworthy place to get information on Israel/Palestine and again when I look at the Hebrew Wikipedia its coverage of the war right now versus English Wikipedia, its coverage of the war where the distortions are on Hebrew wikipedia and that is something that is noted by a whole lot of Hebrew Wikipedia editors as well. Again there is no consensus in Hebrew Wikipedia but there is a war between right and left on Hebrew Wikipedia.' Shira Klein, 'Antisemitism on Wikipedia: Distorting the History of the Holocaust,' USC Shoah Foundation June 2024, 44:26-50:00 seconds in the interview.

So, remarkably, if this studied impression is close to the realities of the two versions of wikipedia, the English version has (so far) managed to do quite a good job in representing the conflict, as compared to its Israeli confrère. Other inferences are also possible, but one should ask oneself why has the English wikipedia IP area been singled out as some distinctively toxic lusus naturae,- with those 'regulars' who have worked its numerous articles for two decades being targeted as the main problem - if it has, comparatively in academic hindsight, nonetheless performed so well?Nishidani (talk) 13:29, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

Unfortunately, a final clarification in response to this

• I retired. I notified this page. I haven't touched any article since Barkleep's misreading and suspension on Oct.24.
• Tryptofish convinced arbs to include me in Arbpia5.
• I declined to participate. I am totally incapable of adapting the way I analyse evidence to the terseness required there. That has always been obvious.
• Every time since, when an Arbpia5 notification has been dropped on my page, I have responded here. I didn't initiate sections. If I am talked about, and notified, I respond here, as someone retired. When I was kicked off the bus for 3 weeks, or out of the tent, on Oct 7 (when a conductor misunderstanding a remark I'd made to another passenger thought it would offend everybody in the bus, when no passenger had protested), everytime the bus passes the kerb where I was left, I reply to the noise directed my way from its windows. That doesn't mean I am pissing on the bus, or in the nomadic tent. I have made the reasonable decision to no longer take that bus. It was reasonable to assume that, since the conductor remained convinced I had made an injurious assault on people's sensivities and no colleague doubted his (skewed) mishearing, anything I said would probably been brushed off in similar wise. Particularly since I had foreseen in late August the inevitable result now emerging (there is no malice here, simply that is the way the ramshackle wikipedian oversight machinery grinds through article talk page complexities, ignoring content and competence in its hunt for uncivil remarks), and the procedural bias that blames 80% of the disruption on people identified as having a 'pro-Palestinian' POV, in a year that has seen a massive influx of pro-Israeli socks.
• I see that my very responses are now being read as disowning my retirement at the Proposal Page and constituting as such even more 'evidence' against me.' Oh, for fuck's sake!' is the proper stylistic exclamation for that.
• Once this nonsense is wound up that's it. By all means, feel free to toss the biggest technical shitbucket my way in passing judgment on my totally obnoxious presence here for 18 years (how I ever had time to write close to 1,000 articles, even on this controversial area where they remain NPOV models, when I was so focused on lashing out abusively, is a mystery, unless you accept the schizophrenic hypothesis), but don't misread this page's last responsive sections as some snarky kibitizing game, rather than as responses arising from successive Arbpia5 elicitations on this page, and as such a simple exercise of a right to set the record right on the evidence used to permaban me again. Nishidani (talk) 17:41, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

This says it all succinctly Nishidani (talk) 15:24, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

'the entire concatenation is based on an erroneous observation of facts, and an erroneous deduction from that erroneous observation.' George Meredith, The Egoist, Penguin ed.George Woodcock (1869) 1974 p.171

The arbitration case Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5 has now closed and the final decision is viewable at the link above. The following remedies have been enacted:

• All articles whose topic is strictly within the Arab-Israeli conflict topic area shall be extended confirmed protected by default, without requiring prior disruption on the article.
• AndreJustAndre, BilledMammal, Iskandar323, Levivich, Makeandtoss, Nableezy, Nishidani, and Selfstudier are indefinitely topic banned from the Palestine-Israel conflict, broadly construed. These restrictions may be appealed twelve months after the enactment of this remedy, and every twelve months thereafter.
• Zero0000 is warned for their behavior in the Palestine-Israel topic area, which falls short of the conduct expected of an administrator.
• Should the Arbitration Committee receive a complaint at WP:ARCA about AndreJustAndre, within 12 months of the conclusion of this case, AndreJustAndre may be banned from the English Wikipedia by motion.
• WP:Contentious topics/Arab–Israeli conflict#Word limits (discretionary) and WP:Contentious topics/Arab–Israeli conflict#Word limits (1,000 words) are both modified to add as a new second sentence to each: Citations and quotations (whether from sources, Wikipedia articles, Wikipedia discussions, or elsewhere) do not count toward the word limit.
• Any AE report is limited to a max of two parties: the party being reported, and the filer. If additional editors are to be reported, separate AE reports must be opened for each. AE admins may waive this rule if the particular issue warrants doing so.
• The community is encouraged to run a Request for Comment aimed at better addressing or preventing POV forks, after appropriate workshopping.
• The Committee recognizes that working at AE can be a thankless and demanding task, especially in the busy PIA topic area. We thus extend our appreciation to the many administrators who have volunteered their time to help out at AE.
• Editors are reminded that outside actors have a vested interest in this topic area, and might engage in behaviors such as doxxing in an attempt to influence content and editors. The digital security resources page contains information that may help.
• Within this topic area, the balanced editing restriction is added as one of the sanctions that may be imposed by an individual administrator or rough consensus of admins at AE.

• If a sockpuppet investigations clerk or member of the CheckUser team feels that third-party input is not helpful at an investigation, they are encouraged to use their existing authority to ask users to stop posting to that investigation or to SPI as a whole. In addition to clerks and members of the CheckUser team, patrolling administrators may remove or collapse contributions that impede the efficient resolution of investigations without warning.

For the Arbitration Committee, SilverLocust 💬 23:58, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard § Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5 closed

*Maiore forsan cum fastidio sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam. Cf.Robert Hughes, Rome 2011 p.5

*Mr Pinch is an item in the vast total of humanity, . .and we have a right, it is our duty, to expect in Mr Pinch some development of those better qualities, the possession of which in our own person inspires out humble self-respect.’ Pecksniff in Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) 1968 p.68.

*No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance (mechanisierte Versteinerung, mit einer Art von krampfhaftem Sich-wichtig-Nehmen verbrämt ). For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (1930), Routledge 2001 p.124

*The problem of bureaucratization was one of Max Weber's main preoccupations throughout his scholarly work. Already his famous essay on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, probably the best-known of his works in the English-speaking world, ends with an almost apocalyptic vision of the possibility of an eventual 'mechanized petrification' of Western individualistic societies, directly inspired by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. For fully developed capitalism, despite its origins in religious Weltbilder of a specific individualistic character, appeared to him of necessity to be allied to the force of rationalization and bureaucratization, and, if not inhibited by counter forces of whatever nature, might well in the end create a social order in which there would no longer be any room for individual initiative, let alone a sophisticated personal culture like the one which at least the intellectual elites of Western societies were devoted to. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, 'Toward the Iron Cage of Future Serfdom'? On the Methodological Status of Max Weber's Ideal-Typical Concept of Bureaucratization Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1980, Vol. 30 pp. 157-181, p.158

*’The jury then retired, and in about a half an hour, returned a verdict of guilty upon all the indictments, being eleven in number. The next morning the children came . . and quite restored to their usual health, being asked at what time their health began to improve, replied, that they were quite well in half an hour after the conviction of the prisoners.’Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) 1869 vol.2 p.152.re a witch hunt.

*δεινὸν γὰρ οὕτως ὀμφακίαν πεφυκέναι

τὸν θυμὸν ἀνδρῶν ὥστε βάλλειν καὶ βοᾶν
ἐθέλειν τ᾽ ἀκοῦσαι μηδὲν ἴσον ἴσῳ φέρον,

Dikaiopolis in Aristophanes, The Acharnians ll.352-354

*(a)知者不言，言者不知。

塞其兑,閉其門.
(b)和大怨，必有餘怨；
安可以為善
是以聖人執左契，
而不責於人.

Chad Hansen (ed.) Laozi, Tao Te Ching: On the Art of Harmony, 2009 pp.151,200 (sections 56,79):(56):’Those who know how do not hold forth./Those who hold forth do not know how./Treat its openings as blocked, Treat its gateways as closed.’(79)In reconciling massive resentments/Inevitably some rancour will be left over/. Where can that be treated as mastery?/For this reason, sages/Grasp the left side of the agreement,/ Yet do not demand satisfaction from the other.

* речи дар в глухонемой вселенной. Joseph Brodsky in David M.Bethea, Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile, 1994 p.15.

*Det enda jag vill säga

Glimmar utom räckhåll
Som silvret.
Hos pantlånaren.
Tomas Tranströmer, ‘April och tystnad,’ in Sorgegondolen, 1996:1.

Tom Pinch (talk) 11:24, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

'Minding your language for fear of offending a vindictive despot is a habit well known to subjects of authoritarian rule.' Rafael Behr, 'Is Starmer’s reluctance to criticise Trump smart tactics – or the sign of a man without a plan?,' The Guardian 7 January 2026 Nishidani (talk) 10:40, 8 January 2026 (UTC)

Nishidani, I just noticed that you have now completely retired. It was a pleasure working with you over many years. Wikipedia is now a smaller, more meager, and sadder place. Whatever your future brings, I wish you the best. --Alan W (talk) 05:10, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Dear Alan, your voice and note bring back fond memories of what wiki can do when astute admins can read past the facade of ostensibly impeccable good manners for the underlying disruptive energy of POV pushing, and rally and challenge area-competent scholars like you, Tom and Paul to produce the FA quality article we now have, the Shakespeare Authorship Question. In such ideal circumstances no one grudged several months of their respective time to achieve that result. By the way, I've never worked out how to use the retired script to describe what befell me, i.e. 'expelled'. My retirement was forced on me by a sanction disinformed by utter illiteracy. My very best wishes Nishidani (talk) 17:44, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

+1 to this. I never worked with you but I used to occasionally stalk your talk page just for the enjoyment of reading your humorous and unconventional but always thoughtful and scholarly prose. It is to Wikipedia’s great discredit that a unique contributor like you ends up feeling compelled to leave. Your departure will make this place more drab and mediocre, less truthful and compassionate. Harold the Sheep (talk) 05:34, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Actually, I am neither here nor there in this. I was actually transitioning from the area I specialized in to revising many articles on Dante and his circle, confident that relatively new editors like Levivich, vying uncompetitively with Zero to earn a guernsey as the most policy-compliant and textually acute, informed contributor the area had ever had, would ensure that the exacting standards set against marauding slapdash editing were upheld. His summary dismissal on the most frivolous of grounds was shameful, makes sense only as a tacit caving in to an atmosphere created by stooges and outside political pressure and seriously injured the project. Very Trumpian ante litteram, seeing that Making America Great Again consists also in programmatic downdumbing, purging the United States Department of Education of ca 2,000, i.e. half of its employers.Nishidani (talk) 17:47, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

As my uncle used to say of his wife, neither deserved the other. There are many, many other areas that could benefit from your time and erudition (Cool Japan), Maculosae tegmine lyncis (talk) 05:43, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

I read these three friendly notes after returning from my daily morning constitutional ramble round the circuit encompassing the lakes of the Palace of Versailles. The meditative theme I set myself was on the demise of the Enlightenment. The grounds were appropriate: as Harari reminds us, (with a minor error: he was not dallying with his mistresses at Versailles since Madame de Maintenon, the de facto reine, held a tight rein on his loins (rênes)) 15% of the French population (2.8 million) starved to death between the Sun king's siege of Namur and Brussels' urbicide. Bellicose and monumental national exhibitionism going hand in hand with the immiseration of hoi polloi. By the time of the Enlightenment, 40,000 peasants still died annually, but what we worry about, since Edmund Burke, is the 2 and a half thousand aristocrats et al., guillotined in Paris during a year or so of the Reign of Terror. Unfortunately, I was just getting into the meat of a proposed analogy between that period and ours when my attention was distracted by what I was tempted to call a Trompe-l'oreille effect. Other than the sound made by my walking boots on the gravel paths, there was an ostensible echo five metres to my left, where drainage canals ran parallel to the pathways, like a squelchy tick-tock beating out the measure of my footsteps. One can't call that trompe-l'oreille in French however because that phrase bears another meaning. In any case, after 10 kms of fast footwork and a lunch of quiche, it was nice to be distracted from such retiring elucubrations and be reminded of fine times of collaborative work with bracingly gifted editors. Best wishesNishidani (talk) 17:44, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Best wishes to you, too, Nish. After reading the background you just supplied, now I'm not just sad, I'm depressed. I do feel good for you in one way, though. You are not living in what I now think of as the Divided States of America. I am. The darkness thickens. --Alan W (talk) 00:19, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

There are worse places to have to sit out these toxic shenanigans than Brooklyn, my dear friend. Nihil illegitimus carborundum (WW2 soldiers' dog Latin for 'never let the bastards grind you down'). I caught sight of a brilliant vox populi banner on the news last night

Elect a clown, expect a circus.

Or as our beloved Hazlitt would have quipped of the contemporary Sundown King in question:

He took up any topic by chance, and played with it at will, like a juggler with his cups and balls. He had rather an ill-natured delight in contradiction, and in perplexing the understandings of others, without leaving them any clue to guide them out of the labyrinth into which he had led them. He understood in its perfection, the great art of throwing the onus probandi on his adversary; and so could maintain almost any opinion, however absurd or fantastical, with fearless impunity.'William Hazlitt,The Spirit of the Age London 1825 pp.108-109.

Un abbraccio.Nishidani (talk) 10:05, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Nishidani, I echo those thoughts (as I said at the time). But re. your 'Retirement' thing, the template is your oyster  :) here's an example...

Take care of yourself. Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi 11:41, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

This was a violation of your topic ban, please do not do that again. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 20:37, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

You will appreciate of course that as someone who has never claimed to know much about the byzantine world of wiki policy interpretations I had no idea that my topic ban extended to mentioning that I was topic-banned. No reply needed.Nishidani (talk) 21:18, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

It is their final, most essential command. See you soon old friend. nableezy - 23:27, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

Looking forward to our sitting on a stoop to con-cur, say on the one outside Sant'Ignazio or even better, just around the corner, outside Santa Maria sopra Minerva. On the latter at least one can, while batting the breeze, gaze on an elephant which will unfortunately remind us of our shared Russellian contretemps* when struggling futilely to grasp the rhinocerus of wiki protocol pettifogging by the horns and wrestle it down to some reasonable ground. By the way, that sweet little elephant -an unravished groom of quietness if ever there was- is redolent of one of your own cultural forebears, the late pharaoh Wahibre Haaibre, -in whose reign it was crafted - who rallied an Egyptian force in a desperate endeavour, in vain, to defend Jerusalem (which I will sing about on the occasion -so bring some earplugs!) and save it from Babylonian destruction. And then, - before ambling over to have a pizza and beer or three for lunch, like old times, at the outdoor tables of the tavern near Pasquino, - that monumental neck of the inner Roman woods celebrating the poetic reprovals of endemic power-mongering later crystallized in the massive and masterful sonnetry oeuvre of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, - we can step round one further corner to admire the Pantheon, while thinking of Apollodorus of Damascus's Syrian contribution to Roman imperial architecture, present also there, sheltering the tombs of Corelli and Raphael).

There! I'm sure that allusiveness also could get up the nose of some sniffish reading on my permaban and be called a violation, in its nastily recondite deviousness- but who gives a fuck? (rhetorical: not many to judge by recent events here and abroad).

• My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable - I asked him to admit that there is no rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't. [Wittgenstein] was refusing to admit the existence of anything except asserted propositions.'Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Free Press 1990 p.40.

Cheers, Nab. À bientôt.Nishidani (talk) 08:55, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

Orwellian indeed. Selfstudier (talk) 11:43, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

Orwell is overused. Think rather of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Gregory Bateson’s Double Bind, standard concepts whose cogency for contemporary discourse's noisiness no longer figures on the radar. The point here, administratively, is rather Talleyrand's surtout pas trop de zèle, or, for my own purposes, the vacuity of communication in a post-literate world where all purchase on grammar, close construal and (con)textual logic has been lost.Nishidani (talk) 13:02, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

To enforce an arbitration decision, and for violating your topic ban at on the page Talk:Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, you have been blocked from editing Wikipedia for a period of 1 month. You are welcome to edit once the block expires; however, please note that the repetition of similar behavior may result in a longer block or other sanctions.

If you believe this block is unjustified, please read the guide to appealing blocks (specifically this section) before appealing. Place the following on your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Please copy my appeal to the [[WP:AE|arbitration enforcement noticeboard]] or [[WP:AN|administrators' noticeboard]]. Your reason here OR place the reason below this template. ~~~~}}. If you intend to appeal on the arbitration enforcement noticeboard, I suggest you use the arbitration enforcement appeals template on your talk page so it can be copied over easily. You may also appeal directly to me (by email), before or instead of appealing on your talk page. 

ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 15:21, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

---

Reminder to administrators: In May 2014, ArbCom adopted the following procedure instructing administrators regarding Arbitration Enforcement blocks: "No administrator may modify a sanction placed by another administrator without: (1) the explicit prior affirmative consent of the enforcing administrator; or (2) prior affirmative agreement for the modification at (a) AE or (b) AN or (c) ARCA (see "Important notes"). Administrators modifying sanctions out of process may at the discretion of the committee be desysopped."

Additionally, per Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5#Motion 1: Appeals only to ArbCom this sanction may only be appealed to the Arbitration Committee. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 15:23, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't protest blocks or bans. For the record,an editor asserted on the 17 June 2025 on my page that an edit I made to Khazars on precisely this issue violated my topic ban. I didn’t agree but left that posted there so that the several administrators watching this page, in particular you, could act on it, were Eliezar’s claim correct. I left it there for a full two months (until 19 August) when, since absolutely no action had been taken, I archived it. Naturally I drew the conclusion that my edits on this highly specific point did not constitute an infraction. As with your original complaint about my edit (which led to the current permaban) you are once more remiss in not notifying me civilly before acting, or getting someone to act on your behalf, against me. Well, shit happens and this page is getting more and more like a toilet. Have a nice day.Nishidani (talk) 15:55, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

As a general comment, it is unwise to try to feel your way around a topic ban. If you received a warning about a previous edit, that was warning enough. That you disagreed with the warning is immaterial. SFR did not need to give you a further warning. FOARP (talk) 08:26, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

I have no temptation to 'feel my way round a topic ban', because I don't care to edit wikipedia after the travesty of seeing subjectivity and general impressions, personal dislike (understandable: after all I did cut a figure as a pompous cunt/insufferable bore in the eyes of many), trump clear-sighted attention to the weight of evidence in the matter. No resentment, just contempt for the superficiality of arbcom. On reviewing what occurred, I can see that indeed SFR is quite correct technically. I had the impression SFR disliked my editing from my earliest encounters but that is neither here nor there, because in the area he specializes in, behavioural niceties, he is technically very good, though he can effortlessly miss arguably identical violations on Jewish origins, if one wants to hair-split as here, when done by others under the same ban. And the ban leaves me indifferent because, except for some very rare moments for these several months, I have happily abstained from even looking at wikipedia let alone editing it, which I have no intention of doing.

The Khazar article had no ARBPIA ban, the other article did have a notification of the IP issue on its talk page, which I missed. I noted, no one else did, as often, people without the 500/30 qualifications disrupting a page, on something that deals with historical issues, and this was passing unchallenged. That is how wikipedia deteriorates, by slow incremental messing by editors with no topic knowledge but a political beef, as we cleansweep any number of articles of editors who do know the topic intimately but are seen as failing to live up to the sweet standard of editorial ingratiation in dialogue which is taken to be the only thing that can secure one's presence here. One does not recruit 'minds' to work here, but only people whose priority is to mind their and other editors' manners.

The prior editorial warning was a patent nonsense. I listen to people who know a topic, not to editors who play games, as appeared to me to be the case with the so-called warning, about reverting an edit which was a massive disgrace by an untutored blowin on what was a very important article. When editors out of left field ignore the patent damage done by others, but use the necessary corrective edit overturning it exclusively to niggle about the 'rules', one gets once more the abiding flaw in these jejune modes of operating, concern for impeccable adhesion to rules about 'behaviour' and an olympian insouciance to the real point of all our endeavours here, to ensure accurate, reliable information is retained. Now back to somethings more important: planting tarragon cuttings, picking blackberries for pie-making, and getting in a new supply of 餃子 from the Ajinomoto factory at Neubourg.Nishidani (talk) 09:52, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

I find it interesting that I was permabanned on the basis of 'evidence' of incivility presented by Tryptofish,who can still employ this kind of language, vulgar and vituperative, which I have never adopted. As a linguist, I therefore have noted that in wikipedia usage, incivility means 'giving the appearance of condescending' and excludes telling another editor to get fucked. Go figure. Nishidani (talk) 17:39, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

null edit to say that I'm aware of this, and that you don't understand the context in which that happened Tryptofish (talk) 22:12, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

'Civility is part of Wikipedia's code of conduct and one of its five pillars. Stated simply, editors should always treat each other with consideration and respect. They should focus on improving the encyclopedia while maintaining a pleasant editing environment by behaving politely, calmly and reasonably, even during heated debates. (Examples)'Direct rudeness' rudeness, insults, name-calling, gross profanity or indecent suggestions.'Wikipedia:CivilityNishidani (talk) 23:31, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Nishidani, sorry you are going through all of this, but the diff you showed of Tryptofish's "incivility" is foolish banter between two friends. Would you consider striking your comment as it doesn't show what you think it does? Viriditas (talk) 22:44, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Am I going through something? Your remark is ambiguous. 'to go through' is what I do professionally, i.e., I go through a book, an article, etc., usually with a fine toothcomb. As your 'sorry' suggests, you take it in a different sense, 'to go through' a state of suffering, to endure an unhappy situation', etc. My equanimity is not troubled by such pettiness as this. Rather, if I am experiencing some emotional state this evening, it is that of impatience as I await the start of the Guardian's over by over coverage of the 4th day of the 3rd Test in Adelaide, where the English bazball style of cricket is 'going through' (so far) the wringers.Nishidani (talk) 23:31, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

This can end here. Both Tryptofish and yourself state, respectively, that I 'don't understand' and that you know what I think the diff shows. I.e., you know my mind better than I do. The diff shows (for me) many things, in and outside of its context (which is the whole thread). On principle, I never take seriously (other than as indexes of the state of mind of those who say or write) such things, from trivial to major insults/harsh language in others even when, which is not the case here, they may be directed my way, so there is no risk of this going any further than this page. The concept of civility is highly slippery and subjective in wikipractice, in that it is not determined by any objective criteria, but by the consensus of those impressions dunked on a talk page or administrative forum by anyone who cares to blow in there. At worst, it is a numbers game. So point made, at least for my own illumination. Enough.Nishidani (talk) 23:31, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

It appears you misunderstood and misinterpreted what was written in both my comment and in Trytpofish's. Context matters. In any event, I want to wish you happy holidays and happy new year, and hope the new year brings you increased happiness and peace of mind. Viriditas (talk) 23:36, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Appearances can be deceptive. I appreciate your augury, but I never take holidays, and happiness is not something I've ever cared for much, perhaps because it has thrust itself on me so often, undeservedly and gratuitously for most of my life that I take it for granted, and, if I were to seek it wittingly, I would feel slightly uneasy. 'Peace of mind' is something I would never wish anyone, let alone myself, though I understand the good intentions in this customary usage and the misimpression it tacitly embodies (that I am not at peace with myself). Though I early discovered, were I religious, that I would be a Buddhist by inclination, I prefer mental states sufficiently alert to themselves and the world in which they are embedded that they provoke one out of man's natural complacency, that deathliness of avoiding the discomfort of thinking. In Italian 'pensiero' means primarily (a) 'thought' but also means (b) a 'gift' and (c) 'anxiety'. One could write a short book on the implications of this wonderful semantic ambivalence afforded us by the language of Dante. Still, best wishes.Nishidani (talk) 00:02, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

• 'At Texas A&M University, we stand to be the best for the world.' (website)

• 'A university in Texas banned a professor from teaching Plato,' Protothema 25 January 2026 Nishidani (talk) 20:55, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Just a little anecdote: a friend of mine (female!) was accepted for a PhD program in a STEM-field back in the 1970s at T A&M; with the acceptance came a list of suggestions about what the candidates wife (my friend has a very English female first name) could do.... The possibility of the candidate being female had eluded (is that the word?) them. Thankfully, her husband had a sense of humour. She did not accept, went to the West Coast instead, cheers, Huldra (talk) 21:31, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Patriarchal prejudice yes, but worse still, illiteracy, seeing a female personal name and yet not registering the obvious implication because a woman couldn't possibly be so intelligent, and undoubtedly all done with a deep sense of being courteous and helpful beyond the call of duty typical of the worst kind of condescension. Nishidani (talk) 22:08, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Microaggression, I believe it is called today. Back then the word wasn't invented (or known to the wider audience), Cheers, and take care, Huldra (talk) 22:33, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I read the link on microaggression, disagreed that that is the appropriate term for what happened, and decided I'd go for a walk and think it through (it fitted neatly into my recent studies on discursive aggression in Plato's early dialogues). I ended up walking several miles, writing in my head a long answer. The result was I got home finding several people eating desert at a lunch in my honour, which I'd forgotten about, insulting them as if my forgetting the appointment was a deliberate snub: microaggression. Sigh. I did remember a second appointment for the day, an art exhibition, and was duly punished by discovering the show was booked out. Sigh. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 10:06, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

But in short, the STEM case looks like bureaucratic carelessness arising from and reflecting a widespread assumption at that time. Microaggression, instead, is personal, and with regard to women was marvellously captured as early as Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. The novel I recently read, Meredith's The Egoist, has a masterly description and analysis of microaggression simmering almost invisibly (to third parties) underneath the behaviour of the otherwise widely admired protagonist, Willoughby, who subtly manipulates events and tortures his young fiancée with the most exquisitely aggressive condescension, in a curated kindness that veils a monstruous obtusity to the girl's real feelings. Not a novel I'd recommend however: the unique prose style does not make for ready comprehension, I gather, even for experienced readers. Nishidani (talk) 12:53, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you. Get over yourselves. ~2026-39206-80 (talk) 13:14, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

It isn't always a presumption by people who try to make this type of sniping remark that they themselves have a 'self' identifiable as one that stands out enough to be noticeable. But if they do, growing up, they still might get over it.

Trolls cocking their legs at every wiki page they feel like relieving themselves on should be told to piss off, but no. Reflecting under a sweltering sun as I mowed three lawns to leave things tidy while I enjoy my second summer vacation (Ravenna and now Normandy), I pursued this limp attempt to offer condescending advice in terms of the header in the section where it appears, dumped witlessly in a context that assumes logic is important for what remains of 'Western' civilisation.

In plain man's words, the proverbial adage you offer implies, as do all traditional forms of elliptical wisdom, far more than its users suspect. I won't trouble your powers of concentration by going through the formal propositional breakdown of the proverb. I'll simply illustrate one of the dangerous turns its application can take, of which you appear wholly unaware.

Antisemitic remarks offend Jews. So, hypothetically, any antisemitic loudmouth one might remonstrate with for deliberately hurting people's feelings, could come back with your comfortably unexamined adage in tow, and tell any Jew who is the butt of their pernicious and cheap enmity:

'Hey, don't be so sensitive! I didn't throw a stick or a stone your way, just a series of words, and, as commonsense should tell you, 'names will never hurt you'.

See? You haven't a clue about the meanings and implications of the very words you toss about, and only succeed in self-goaling, if, again, we can assume, which is doubtful, that a self of any weight lies behind them, as opposed to a congeries of cliches scaffolding the emptiness of what we customarily talk of as a 'mind'. So, there's a good chap: try to learn to be mindful.Nishidani (talk) 17:11, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

'he hadn't realized how tricky thinking could be, Probably thinking was a little bit like mountain climbing-you had to give yourself time to adjust to the altitude. He wasn't used to thinking-particularly about himself.' Larry McMurtry, Duane's Depressed (1999) Simon & Schuster 2007 pp.119-120.

If you're in Normandy, stay cool! I heard Europe was under a heat wave (hopefully that has passed). --Kansas Bear (talk) 20:46, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. My companion tells me it hit 40 in her coastal village a few weeks back, in June, and we've not yet entered the hottest month. Rome is suffocating from mid-June onwards so climate change, as commonsense told one 4 decades ago, is here to stay. Duty and affection oblige me to tour guide some friends in Greece in September, which will be discomforting. Fortunately, I'm old so like the Pacific gray whales I won't have to put up with what's to come over the next decade. :)The positive side is that under the new temperature regime, one doesn't feel tempted to get hot under the collar since the weather sees to that. Nishidani (talk) 22:07, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

I did think of writing "You're an idiot" to it but it hardly seemed worthwhile spending the imaginary ink or electrons or whatever. Words obviously can hurt and the world is full of idiots. NadVolum (talk) 10:54, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

I think everyone of us is an idiot, given circumstances and the odd occasion. We should know that from the fact that wikipedia pullulates with otherwise admirably intelligent people who still manage to be laughably obtuse when they venture, policy-confident, into discussions where they sift off the wheat while gleaning approvingly the chaff.

Catching a train in from Orly to Châtelet–Les Halles, I thought I'd be a clever dick by lumping my way across the Seine to Saint-Michel to catch a connection to Versailles, rather than waste time in a crowded underground looking for a train link between the two. Raised to consider it a courtesy to fellow travellers to dress formally for a flight, I was wearing a shirt and tie and pants, and heavy climbing shoes (to avoid adding their weight to my backpack which already weighed 10 kilos at the check-in). But I was thinking in wintry or springy terms, forgetting the heat of Paris, and it proved to be quite an adventurous traipse, too goal-focused to do the sensible thing and break the sweaty saunter by p(l)unking down in a shady bar or two along the way to quaff a few restorative beers.

I came through okay of course since I am writing this refreshed by booze in comfortable digs, none the worse for wear. But while I tend to enjoy discomforting experiences - they are so instructive (on the train to Versailles a young woman spent a full 30 minutes wiping her brow and eyes, drinking two cans of water, and spraying her face, arms and legs with a cooling moisturizer without stop)- I did what the idiot or silly git/sirry iriot in me suggested I do regardless of the fairish odds that I might keel over.:)Nishidani (talk) 23:17, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

In your face, de Vere! I can't help it, when an article I started is spiking, I find it interesting. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:30, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

As Chris Hedges, one of the few intelligent journalists still active today reminded one recently, Barbara Tuchman once wrote of 'the bellicose frivolity of senile empires', and applied the formulation to our present age. In such a Zeitgeist, one would expect inanity to exercise itself more robustly in an area like Shakespearean counter-theories. The pathetic afficionados of the genre are far too constrained by lip-service to standard chronological assumptions, which means the range of alternative candidates is still restricted to contemporary Elizabethan figures. They ought to reconsider these approaches according to the vast possibilities opened up by speculating about the feasibility of later writers being the real authors of the Shakespearean canon. All one need do is document the existence of séances for that period, and make a case that the works were paid for by that crafty Stratford bumpkin who hired a medium to conjure up the spirit of someone like Bernard Shaw and have them regularly furnish the theatres, with complete plots and plays.

After all, the 'Shakespeare' of the Folios was far too in advance of his times to be a product of them. And only scholars generations and centuries after the Elizabethan period appear to know much more about him (or her) than his contemp[oraries cared to jot down. In any case, since this stuff is a combination of cognitive disorders and a certain mercantile nose for playing the profitable shyster's racket that preys on the gudgeon gullibilities of the ignorant, I'm tempted, as dementia beckons, to make the best of it and make a fast quid by running up a quickie to compete with this latest Lanier crap and ease my retirement with an extra bit of nicker. It shouldn't be too hard to dash off a 150 pages musing on how a hick from the Stratford sticks struck up a friendship with a figure like John Dee and got him to channel say, the spirit of James Joyce and ask it to provide the text of, for one, Hamlet. Perhaps one could jigger in a theoretical framework by plagiarizing the ideas of J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time to seduce the sophisticated sceptics out there. It would all fit (and have me in fits writing it). The play would salve dumb Will's grievance for the loss of his son Hamnet. And John Dee, some suspect, furnished the model for Prospero (a conjuror), in The Tempest. Hmnn. .

Nah. I came across a bag of golfsticks a few weeks back in an attic in Normandy, and it's probably healthier to get back into shape. No chance of repeating the miracle of making a hole-in-one I managed with a freak shot on the links in Box Hill in 1981, -a three iron on the ninth - but certainly a friskier way of doodling out one's late life rather than shooting holes in dipwit donkey ideas, even if by parody. Cheers and keep up the good work, all the more important now that the fringe lunatics occupy centre stage and we need to throw light on these invasive spheres of darkness.Nishidani (talk) 09:37, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

Wordings like "Wench, I'll put mine nails to thine eyes" and "Villain, I have done thy mother" does hint that Shakespeare had access to modern pop-cult. Or, that some human characteristics are pretty enduring. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:51, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

Darwinbish's variations suggest those characteristics are alive and well on Wikipedia also. Make sure to activate the Insultspout! Very nice article, Mr Fröding, and hello, Nishidani! I wonder if the Plato problem in the section above could be fixed by putting TRUMP in large gold lettering on the Plato bust*? Bishonen | tålk 10:22, 26 January 2026 (UTC).

Nope, but it's worth considering placing his mugshot on the frontespiece of all future editions of the Euthydemus, since that is a satire on narcissistic wranglers whose provocations are just bullshit outbursts. Nishidani (talk) 13:22, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

@Bishonen, two videos for you: Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:30, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

Thank you! (Big admirer of David Mitchell here.) Bishonen | tålk 10:37, 26 January 2026 (UTC).

...Are we the baddies? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:58, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

The starkest offensive expressions in Shagspère often slip past contemporary readers because not overtly turpiloquent, like telling Ophelia to hie to a nunnery (brothel). When the poor lass later says she thinks 'nothing', Hamlet adds insult to injury by quipping 'That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs', 'nothing' being contemporary slang for the origin of the world. Nishidani (talk) 13:11, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Have to say, my go-to interpretation of "Venus's 'excellencies'," would be "tits". Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:40, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

She wrote 'best parts' of all of Venus's 'excellencies', not 'breast parts':) So I think, to adopt another line from Lanier on Elizabeth, we are 'vouchsafed to view (imagine) that which is seldom seen'. On the other hand those were rhetorically tropicalized times, and perhap[s somewhere in all this there is an example of synecdoche, parts for a a hole.Nishidani (talk) 10:58, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

So you'd use the hole to refer to the whole? Simile and metaphor. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:03, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Is that what holes are there for, metafur or not? From a purely male chauvinist pig perspective this concerns what Frederick Rolfe wrote about in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. That is a verbally exact allusion of course to words in Plato's Symposium (192e-193a), to that passage where Aristofannies/funnies defines love in that way: τοῦ ὅλου οὖν τῇ ἐπιθυμίᾳ καὶ διώξει ἔρως ὄνομα. 'Eros is the name for craving for and chasing up the (w)hole'. No wonder those puritanical dingbats in the The Air-Conditioned Nightmare that is now Levland's 'Howl'ing landscape have banned the teaching of the Symposium. One should note that there is an uncanny coincidence between a subplot of Rolfe's novel and Thomas Mann's main theme in Der Tod in Venedig). No chance of plagiarism either way since their composition overlaps temporally.Nishidani (talk) 12:44, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

We are a family show and I will not allow smut into your home. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:33, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

At first sight that looked like a sour grapes reaction, esp. since 'smut' is an anadrome of both stum and must. Thank god I clicked on. Ah, for the old daze of ripe raw vulgar comedy beamed into homes before a combination of political correctness and wokish crap hit the fan. Thanks Nishidani (talk) 14:10, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

I think you'll like this by Andrew Doyle (comedian):

"Though if we’re really going to play this game, it might be worth pointing out that Irene Coslet is a precise anagram of le crétin ose, which is French for “the idiot dares”. Is she trying to tell us something? ... It could be that this conspiracy theorist is so ingenious that she has gulled me into concocting one of my own. But whatever Coslet’s intentions, she (or he) definitely knows how to sell a book."

Hmm, maybe Andrew Doyle is actually a pseudonym of yours. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:18, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

If Irene Coslet works out anagramically as le crétin ose (and not as 'la crétine ose') she's declaring a latent masculine identity in her public, feminine pseudonym, much as in her/his 'theory', Emilia Lanier is the woman behind 'William Shakespeare' (or Willy Shagspère). So it's all transgender stuff after all. As for Andrew Doyle, nah. I'd pick some pseud's name less amenable to come-back sniping from truculent readers, since his name anagramically comes out as yodel warden' (a guardian of singing 'snatches')

At this point in our deliberations, I think the authoress should take a hint from the real anagram in her name, 'reselection' and opt for a new monicker (Mo(a)nica? as in the 'moan wraith's outgreyed'

Now the obligatory footnote (cousins kept joshing me when I tried to join in their joke sessions: mine, they said, always required a footnote). 'la crétine ose' or 'the dim-witted sheila dares' could also mean 'the lady with myxedema shows courage'.Nishidani (talk) 13:18, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing The Panther. It's amazing how words written lifetimes ago can remain so relevant today. This past year, being an American, I've had the opening line of an old American classic stuck in my head: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." That was written four generations ago, about a post-WWII society, and yet almost a century later, here we are again. Couldn't agree more with your eloquent statement, that "Poetry is useless, but remembered, is a solace more powerful than any medicine." Laughter, too, is poetry's peer in that regard. Levivich (talk) 15:45, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm really distressed by what's happening to you. I won't enter into the merits because you said it all succinctly on your page and a buen entendedor pocas palabras. I don't give a rodent's rectum for my own case, if that's the way the cockeyed grumble, stiff cheddar, because in my circumstances it's just shitwater off a duck's back and not consequential in real life terms, unlike what you are undergoing, and in an environment that is seeing a word-perfect rerun of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

Apropos Ginsberg. I always got stuck over that first line. When I heard him recite Howl, I came away grumbling that the best minds of that period were either designing thermonuclear bombs that would destroy us, or polio vaccines that would uncripple the world. The 'best minds of my (provincial world's) generation' were raised, by contrast, on stuff like this, which I cite because the subject is poetry, and you rightly add the adjunctive anodyne of laughter (for which a bedside copy of Gershon Legman's collection of limericks is worth getting: a third leg in staying sane is, at least for me, pop music from the late 50s to the late 80s). Having a rambunctiously and imaginatively vulger idiom at one's fingertips does wonders, if one spots nonsense (as one cannot but do listening to the spawned discursive inflation debasing the currency of language and the increasing incoherence of even intelligent people) and must keep mum, one can still open an escape valve to relieve the stress by muttering (mothering?) saucy rejoinders, sheathed in 'ripe' language under one's breath. In the final analysis, I think you're right to challenge that evidence and ask for review. If, as is probable, you get the same verdict confirmed, at least the solid grounds for your complaint will remain on the public record. But remember Socrates made a magnificent speech in his Apology that has been recalled for nearly 2 and a half millennia, but the public voted for his death. Best regards and good luck. Nishidani (talk) 21:41, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Any lady page watchers should avoid clicking on that link. It's foul-mouthed.Nishidani (talk) 21:45, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

While out walking the dog, or, to gather by the strain on the leash, being walked by the dog, tonight, a poem by Pasternak, first encountered in the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry over a half a century ago, came to mind. I asked myself why, and the answer was:'Lev.' I can't find the version I did anymore, nothing to write home about (but that is a way of learning to see how a poem works, as you struggle to capture all of its nuances in a different language). But I see there are two decent versions at least on line.

               Hamlet (1)

I think part of this captures the stress in your predicament, and hope that, unlike the comical 'Bastard from the Bush' thrown in for light relief, there is some solace here. Best Nishidani (talk) 21:50, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, Nish, much appreciated solace! :-) Also, count me jealous that you got to hear Ginsberg recite live! I guess I should be happy that I'm too young to have had the opportunity. It's not that I want to be older, but sometimes I wish I had been younger sooner. Levivich (talk) 21:58, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

No need to be jealous. Ageing just makes one dumber, or elsewise just sobers up the conceited wisdom of years by making one realize how dumb one used to be in one's (relative) youth. Don't let wiki spoil yours. Let me close off this rude distraction of your time and pressing problems with the purest lyricism ever imagined.

In lieu of hearing Ginsberg, perhaps I can offer you this, a recording of James Joyce reading a few pages of Finnegans Wake. Apart from the sheer musicality of this oneiric sdream of unconciousness, it retains a contemporary ring (cf. your allusion to our present times from Ginsberg's incipit) because it writes prophetically, 'Icis on us' (sung as 'Ice is on us').* Its wonderfully contrived folly/madness outstrips by a long (s)mile the Ginsberg I heard. (The actual passage is on p.214 of the 1939 Viking edition of FW)

• ICE is at our doorstep. But riffing at liberty as Joyce did composing his text, we can also hear the chaunt of the usual paranoid over these last decades raving about 'ISIS on us' - more or less the same thugs as the Minneapolis Icemen who executed Alex Pretti,- only with different ideologies. Now that I guess you are frozen in by the weather, one could well, while shovelling with one's neighbours the snowdrift on the avenues, sigh about the Ice on us.

Take care. Nishidani (talk) 23:06, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

Should finish with a serious technical note. Icis on us (a) 'I' in plural (Ego), 'is' (vernacular = 'are') 'on us' (b) 'Eyes on us' (surveillance) (c) 'I' sown us'= we are all seeded by a 'primal' Self/or/I the narrator admits he is conjuring up the plurality of voices (d) I's own us. (e) And eyes/I's are all a burden cf.Latin, 'on us' heard as one word, namely onus burden. Nishidani (talk) 09:37, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

There is now a page about Arsen Ostrovsky, I saw you added something about him on another page before his page existed. Late Night Coffee (talk) 16:34, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Thank you but as you may observe from the above. I am banned from editing anything on that specific topic area, a minor if important subset of my general lifelong, and professional, focus on morology, the analysis of nonsense.Nishidani (talk) 18:04, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

You've come to the right place. Jehochman ^Talk 10:31, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Please do not edit war, and refer to WP:RFC. The RFC has been responded to by 4 editors. You already responded "No." You may not add notes to the question. Andre🚐 16:09, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

You are misusing language, as you do frequently. I am not edit-warring. Indeed I have desisted from editing the article and limited my comments, on the talk page alone, to an absolute minimum (12), compared to you who are all over the page (90+).

In the case in question, finding yourself in a minority position of one against 3, you formulated an RfC that, in the view of two editors (of we three), distorted the situation.

When this was pointed out by the two other active editors, you persisted in retaining the bias in the framing of your formulation, which assumes that the text in question is RS, when both Lancaster and I, together with an earlier editor, challenged this assumption.

This therefore looks as though you are trying to get your way, with a minority opinion, by manipulating the way the RfC question is framed (which presumes that the text in question is RS). You have no right to edit in such a way as to control what can and cannot be said on the page.

So it was quite appropriate to add a note to that effect under your formulation, and your removing it twice is, indeed, edit-warring. If you want proof that you are engaged in POV-pushing on the article, by keeping out excellent material that contradicts your personal beliefs, while promoting dubious or inferior material that underscore the same belief, I will happily supply it.Nishidani (talk) 16:41, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

You are edit warring to insert a "note" into a running RFC.

Please read Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment#Changing_the_RfC_question

The question is clear, unambiguous, short, neutral, and means what it says.

It presumes nothing. The question is if the source is reliable and due for inclusion.

If it resolves no, the first is moot and the second will be no inclusion.

It is a normal and typical RFC formulation. You are not permitted to modify it. You may opine below.

Do not modify it again. Andre🚐 16:44, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

Okay. Since you take to admonishing me, I will reciprocate. Since two of four editors complain that the ' question is anything but clear, unambiguous, short, neutral, and means what it says,' and you doughtily refuse to compromise with them on the language, you are abusing the RfC process and as is patently obvious, strongarming the article and its talk page. What you are doing attritionally and otherwise on that page is egregious POV-pushing, and since I have no confidence in the way these issues are surveilled or arbitrated, I just leave the proof here.

You favoured excluding from this article the use of Aram Yardumian, Theodore George Schurr, Geography of Jewish Ethnogenesis, Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 75, Number 2 Summer 2019

That paper argued for a mosaic of origins for the Jewish people. You said it was unacceptable because it was a 'controversial contrarian paper with a consensus against (it)' here and also here.

Yet the authors are distinguished experts in population studies and one,Theodore Schurr, is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a graduate in zoology. To date his work has 16194 google scholar citations.

In 2013 17 molecular biologists wrote an impeccable RS (Costa et al.) which argued for a mosaic theory of Jewish origins (arguing that half of Jews, the Ashkenazi had majority European neolithic maternal DNA). That could not be removed but when a certain Joseph Livni, with Karl Skorecki, published in a low-ranking (4th quartile) publication their paper “Distinguishing between founder and host population mtDNA lineages in the Ashkenazi population” Human Gene,45 2025, which attacked the 2013 paper by Costa et al., you jumped with alacrity at it and flooded the talk page with justifications for its inclusion.

Livni is some mathematician whom you originally and falsely claimed was a 'genetics consultant' though it emerged he was just an 'independent rersearcher'. You militate against the use of Schurr et al (publishing in a first quartile venue) because they don't specialize in 'Jewish genetics' and their presence is therefore 'distortive'. You press for including Livni, with zero competence in genetics, and his co-author, a retired nephrologist, neither who 'specialize in genetics' (Schurr has written multiple pages on genetics)

So, it would appear that your private belief is that there is a consensus about unified Jewish origins that cannot be countenanced and if it is (Costa et al) then any publication which can be scraped from the barrel miraculously supersedes any RS objections and qualifies as usable. You challenge the acceptability of a paper which questions this, and deny its inclusion despite the clear competence of its authors and the excellence of its publishing venue. And, at the same time, you vigorously promote a paper written primarily by a rank amateur with no genetics competence in a venue that is mediocre.

Why the difference? The rejected paper claims Jews have a multiplicity of origins (not acceptable even as a minority position), the promoted paper asserts a single unified origin, and therefore underwrites your own apparent convictions. That is POV-pushing of the most egregious kind, and one all editors have all been severely warned against. I have no idea where the truth lies. You apparently do. Go figure why this obvious militant partisanship case is ignored.

By the way, don't answer here if you are tempted to. Everything you might say in defence of that Livni screed has already been written down on the other talk page, at tedious length. I have no time to waste on parsing nonsense, and even Jehochman apparently deplores me doing so, since the result is just more nonsense. Just take the above as a remonstrance from my point of view to reflect quietly on what you are doing over there. It appears obvious to others Nishidani (talk) 18:01, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

addendum. Told not to reply, Andre did. Then after 3 minutes removed his reply, as if, in reading the above, he had not noticed that I asked him not to. The reply of course was a ruse to get round the interdiction, consisting in an attempt to teach granny to suck eggs when not indulging in gaming with a partisan spin that assumes one's interlocutor doesn't know the score. Keep away from this page, even with these jejune tricks of pretense and pretentiousness.Nishidani (talk) 18:54, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

Hi Nish, good to see you are in generally good spirits and enjoying your summer. I enjoyed this short TV movie from 1989, hope you like it too. My little pup and kitten send their love to their granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:40, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

I've only glanced at the first minute of that Nakokov imitation because the rented house here has a lousy internet connection, and I have had to reserve the spare online access time to following just a few sporting articles on the World Cup, on Ryan Fox's win at the US Open, and Josh Kerr's astonishing mile-record run.

It seems to have clipped a minute or so from the beginning because, at least as I recall seeing it some years ago, the film starts with Nabokov walking down from the top of the lecture room, halting mid-way, and then proceeding to the podium where, in your clip, he takes up his talk. I'd better post this before the line drops. Later Nishidani (talk) 07:21, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

I'm thankful for you letting me have a pup to frisk and pat virtually. A dog as companion is the one thing I miss, since I cannot at my age get one and, out of sheer interim egoism, leave it bereaved. I do have my wife's cat, which fortunately is autistic, and copes well with neighbours during my frequent long absences. Though, trained like a dog, she does go wild when I return, racing into the closed house after a month or two outside, and scrambling around every room on all three floors to jump on the beds, and retrieve a sense of cosiness, waiting patiently by my heels till midnight or later to leap onto my bed to sleep the night beside me. Once that rite is accomplished, she returns to her normal asocial ways.Nishidani (talk) 07:34, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

Though I consider wiki a lost cause, occasional edits to correct egregious misstatments in the few pages I consult are needed. But, at least in my recent experience, some new system is in place. When I click on'edit', the relevant section offers me no means to make references or links. The wiki markup option is no longer visible at the bottom of the page. (cf. {{}}, {{{}}},|,[],[[]]). What is odd is that these options remain if I edit my own page. I'd appreciate it if anyone could enlighten me into what the fuck is going on, show up my ignorance or clarify why the new system seems, like most innovations ostensibly introduced to help people, only to make the simple earlier practices more arduous. Nishidani (talk) 10:16, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

It's not like that for me, but that proves nada. In your preferences there are tons of options that change appearance and editing experience, so you might find something there that you can tweak there to get back to sanity. If all else fails, send me a screenshot of the whole window. Zero^talk 14:49, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

The thing about 'preference' options is that I have never tinkered with them. I accepted how the system I found worked and left it at that, until now when it has broken down. How does one do a screen shot?

In any case, the two times over the last weeks when I have been tempted to edit a page, when I click edit, before my eyes the page does a momentary frazzy dance and then represents itself as it was before, with the difference that I can now alter any sentence, just by posting the change. But there is no way I can add a ref or link. Doesn't matter since I've better things to do. Thanks anyway.Nishidani (talk) 18:38, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

I've found a workaround solution. Put the source in the edit summary cf. Japanese beetle here. Sigh.Nishidani (talk) 12:56, 4 August 2026 (UTC)