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Wikipedia’s Information Intifada
Nuseir Yassin, of “Nas Daily” fame. Photo: Screenshot.
Wikipedia describes itself as “a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” guided by a “neutral point of view” and built on “verifiable, reliable sources.”
It aspires to collect and disseminate “the sum of all human knowledge.” That promise — open, collaborative, neutral — is what gives it authority. It is also what makes the erosion of that neutrality so consequential.
In many fields, Wikipedia muddles along imperfectly but credibly.
On Israel and Jewish history — and other politically charged flashpoints — the claim of neutrality collapses under scrutiny.
The problem is not criticism. Democratic states invite criticism. The problem is structural asymmetry: highly motivated ideological editors, operating fluently within Wikipedia’s rules, steadily tilt the terrain while insisting it remains level.
The recent episode involving Nas Daily and its creator, Nuseir Yassin, offered a public glimpse into how this works.
In a Facebook video, Yassin — who has more than 70 million followers — described how a small group of anonymous editors reshaped his Wikipedia biography after he became more vocal in condemning Hamas and advocating peace with Israel.
Because he is an Israeli Arab increasingly viewed as “too positive on Israel,” edits were inserted reframing an otherwise positive biography in a sharply negative light. Attempts to revise what he characterized as inaccuracies were reverted. The page was eventually locked with the disputed edits intact. What prevailed was not neutral adjudication but persistence — who could marshal citations that satisfied Wikipedia’s sourcing hierarchy and outlast opponents in procedural trench warfare?
If a globally recognized public figure can watch his biography bend in real time, what chance does a small state with barely one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population have when the same machinery turns against it?
Spend time on major entries — Zionism, Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Apartheid, Gaza genocide accusation — and a pattern emerges.
Zionism, the modern national movement of the Jewish people, is framed primarily through the lens of European settler colonialism, despite the historical record that Jewish religious, linguistic, cultural, and legal traditions originated in the Land of Israel and that Jewish communities maintained a continuous presence there for millennia. The indigenous dimension is acknowledged but subordinated to colonial terminology as the dominant interpretive frame.
The term “apartheid” appears not simply as an allegation advanced by bitterly biased activists, but in ways that blur the line between advocacy and adjudicated legal finding — even though no international court has determined that Israel constitutes an apartheid state, and the application of the 1973 Apartheid Convention remains disputed.
Strikingly, Wikipedia rarely situates the term within a regional context where gender-based legal discrimination, religious supremacy, and criminalization of apostasy are codified in the laws of multiple Arab states
Across much of the Middle East, women inherit half of what men inherit under formal legal systems, religious minorities face structural discrimination, and conversion away from Islam can carry legal penalties. In Wikipedia, this entrenched hierarchy seldom anchors discussions of “apartheid.” The label is reserved almost exclusively for the region’s lone Jewish state.
Most jarring is the treatment of “genocide.” The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.
That specific intent requirement is central. Allegations that Israel’s war against Hamas constitutes genocide hinge on proving an intent to destroy Palestinian Arabs as a group. Israel’s conduct during the war — including advance warnings to civilians, establishment of humanitarian corridors, facilitation of aid deliveries, and coordination of a 2024 polio vaccination campaign reaching more than one million Gazans — certainly complicates (really, eviscerates) any claim of group-destruction intent. Yet across Wikipedia entries, “genocide” often appears less as a contested legal allegation and more as an emerging consensus. The definitional threshold recedes, activist language advances.
Other examples are more granular but telling. On the Zionism page, the movement’s 19th-century articulation by Theodor Herzl as Jewish self-determination in a historic homeland is juxtaposed with colonial analogies implying foreign implantation, despite the First Zionist Congress (1897) explicitly defining its aim as establishing a home for the Jewish people in Eretz-Israel.
On the Hamas Charter entry, the organization’s 1988 covenant — which calls for Israel’s destruction and invokes many antisemitic conspiracy tropes — is summarized, but its eliminationist doctrine is softened by emphasis on a 2017 political document that did not recognize Israel’s legitimacy and that Hamas leaders have not treated as superseding their foundational objective.
This is not accidental drift. Research on Wikipedia governance shows how a relatively small number of highly active editors can dominate contentious areas. Policies emphasizing consensus and “reliable sourcing” can be navigated — and exploited — by organized activists. Advocacy NGOs are cited as authoritative. Broader context is dismissed as “undue weight.” Editors who resist face procedural attrition. Over time, ideological stamina begins to resemble institutional authority.
Conflicts are fought with narratives as much as weapons.
On Wikipedia, narrative compression is visible. A Mideast century shaped by Ottoman collapse, British administration, the 1937 Peel Commission proposal, the 1947 UN Partition Plan and its rejection by Arab leadership, and multiple interstate wars is flattened into a morality tale with a single Jewish aggressor.
Meanwhile, uncomfortable chapters of Palestinian Arab political history receive less narrative gravity.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, met Adolf Hitler in Berlin in November 1941, lived in Germany during the war, broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda in Arabic, and recruited Muslims for Waffen-SS units in the Balkans. These ideological crosscurrents between European fascism and segments of Arab nationalist and later Islamist movements are historical facts. They are acknowledged on Wikipedia. But they are rarely treated as structurally significant.
Similarly, Hamas’ founding charter invokes hadiths about killing Jews and frames its struggle in explicitly religious and eliminationist terms. Those elements are central to understanding the conflict. Yet they occupy less narrative weight than allegations leveled against Israel.
Wikipedia’s defenders argue that it merely reflects “reliable sources.” But source designation itself is political.
Wikipedia considers outlets like Al Jazeera — funded by the Qatari state — generally reliable for news reporting, while treating some US outlets, including Fox News, as generally unreliable for factual claims outside opinion content. When advocacy organizations are elevated and contextual scholarship is marginalized, neutrality becomes branding rather than practice. Wikipedia does not invent accusations; it curates them. Curation is power.
The consequences extend far beyond one website. Wikipedia is often the first stop for students, journalists, diplomats, and policymakers. Artificial intelligence systems ingest its summaries as baseline knowledge. When framing tilts there, the tilt does not dissipate; it amplifies.
History offers reminders. Medieval blood libels were recorded as fact before they became pretexts for violence. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulated as documentary evidence before it was exposed as fabrication. Both were dressed in the language of scholarship. Both hardened into assumed truth before they cracked.
Racist distortion rarely arrives announcing itself. It condenses quietly.
This is not a plea to shield Israel from criticism. It is a warning about structural asymmetry — and a call to stop treating Wikipedia as a neutral authority until it confronts and corrects its institutional failures. When Jewish indigeneity is minimized, when eliminationist ideologies are relegated to footnotes, and when grave legal terms are repurposed as political weapons, neutrality has already been compromised.
Neutrality is not a branding exercise. It is a discipline that requires enforcement, transparency, and accountability. If Wikipedia cannot uphold that discipline in politically charged domains, then universities, media outlets, policymakers, technology companies, and researchers should stop defaulting to it as an authoritative source.
Conventional wisdom is formed in real time on its pages. If those who value intellectual integrity continue to outsource their baseline knowledge to a system structurally vulnerable to ideological capture, they become complicit in the distortion. Wikipedia reform must precede Wikipedia reliance.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.
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Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him
Piers Morgan’s online debate about Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed containing allegations of Israeli dog rape was loud, chaotic and unenlightening — and I couldn’t stop watching it.
That’s a problem. Morgan’s format is a trap. On his YouTube talk show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, he pits people holding intransigent, often extreme positions against each other, goads them to yell at one another across Zoom, and positions himself as the voice of reason in the middle. It’s hateporn — addictive, and not reflective of reality.
And yet Piers Morgan Uncensored and many similar YouTube- and social-media based news programs are where people increasingly get their information and engage with controversial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
These programs rack up views by persuading viewers there is no middle ground, no moderate position, no alternative to conflict. And their strategy is working.
The Kristof episode, which racked up 340,000 views in a day, is titled, “Torture Does NOT Work!” — all Morgan show names have one word in all caps and end in an exclamation point.
It begins with people shouting. “You are not a journalist!” Ana Kasparian, a commentator on another YouTube show, shouts at podcaster and online anchor Emily Schrader — before Morgan comes on to introduce the segment.
He quickly recaps the lurid details from Kristof’s New York Times oped, “The Silence That meets the Rape of Palestinians,” and a newly issued nearly-300 page Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence.
“As far as I’m concerned, the only cause is basic human decency,” Morgan says in his cool British accent, “If your first instinct about either report is to look for ways to smear them, you might have run out of that yourself.”
Yet the six deeply partisan guests spend the next 45 minutes smearing the reports, and each other.
Morgan’s introductory call for human decency is not a plea, it’s a ploy. He plays the mature voice of reason standing between the extremist pro-Israelis and the pro-Palestinians — not to persuade them to come to a moderate position, but rather to exploit the most virulent voices in order to generate clicks, while still claiming the cover of journalism. This approach causes real harm by giving extremists a megaphone, and a degree of exposure that all but guarantees that people actually trying to build a better future go unheard.
A recipe for drama
Morgan repeats this formula over and again. In an episode entitled, “Netanyahu CONNED Trump!” Dave Smith, a sidekick to Joe Rogan, accuses Israel of dragging the United States into the Iran war. In “I’m SICK of it!” commentator Megyn Kelly launches into a similar attack on Israel.
Morgan has had long interviews with white supremacist and proud antisemite Nick Fuentes (“What a crock of S***!”). In “STAND for Dead Soldiers!” Morgan hosted four Israelis at the extreme ends of the political spectrum and watched them fight when one refused to stand as a siren sounded to honor Israel’s fallen soldiers.
Not extreme or dramatic enough? How about the time Morgan hosted Crackhead Barney, a Black pro-Palestinian street activist, to explain why she harasses celebrities to get them to say, “Free Palestine.”
“I’m truly shocked/disgusted that @piersmorgan would have this nutjob & clearly unwell person to go on his show and even remotely try to talk about Palestine or the war,” wrote the Gazan-born activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
Alkhatib is a moderate Palestinian who works for a peaceful solution to the conflict. He has, unsurprisingly, not been on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Instead, Morgan’s choice of guests is calculated for maximum friction, a function of an attention economy that monetizes the time people like me spend watching the fights.
From ‘Animal House’ to Piers Morgan
Luring viewers this way isn’t exactly new. President Ronald Reagan called The McLaughlin Group, a current affairs program that ran on public television for 34 years beginning in 1982, “the political equivalent of Animal House”— more drunken frat house than graduate seminar. McLaughlin begat Crossfire, a CNN political debate program hosted by a younger Tucker Carlson that Jon Stewart once compared to pro-wrestling.
In 2025, Morgan, who came up in British tabloids before a long stint at CNN, moved away from traditional broadcast TV and went all in on social media and his YouTube channel.
His success on that platform is part of a larger shift in media from major institutions to independent personalities, and from actual news — the dutiful and expensive process of finding out and relaying what’s actually happening in the world — to opinion that spins itself as reporting, which is far cheaper and more entertaining.
That shift has come as audiences have moved from loyalty to long established institutions to following enterprising, independent personalities. The podcaster Joe Rogan has 20.9 million subscribers; Carlson has 5.6 million; Morgan’s show has 4.42 million subscribers and over 1.36 billion total views.
In other words, Morgan is not some guy some people watch now. He is what people will be watching in the future.
A bias toward extremes
That prospect should alarm us. Morgan’s shows rarely feature people working toward compromise or reconciliation. A Piers Morgan Uncensored discussion spotlighting the many civil society groups in Israel working toward coexistence? A show where he sits down with Arab and Jewish Israelis who share a vision for a common future? A segment that highlights the actual, albeit rare, instances of cooperation?
Pipe dreams. All that is also happening in Israel and the West Bank — but Piers Morgan Uncensored effectively censors it.
Compare that to Jon Stewart, who on The Daily Show last month conducted a long interview with the Palestinian and Israeli co-authors of The Future Is Peace, a book that calls for moving beyond violence and stalemate to a shared future. Same approach — a streaming interview on a hot-button topic, with an eye toward entertainment — but radically different editorial choices.
That episode garnered a mere 400,000 views. Morgan’s comparative millions of eyeballs may, in his mind, justify his guttersweeping approach to international conflict. And in his defense — and mine, for watching — it’s never boring. He can be a thoughtful and provocative interviewer, and his not-ready-for-primetime, self-created show allows him, when he so chooses, to platform voices that more mainstream venues overlook, like former Israeli Speaker of the Knesset and longtime peace activist Avrum Burg.
Alas, he stuck the erudite former statesman with a diehard evangelical and a firebreathing American Jewish conservative pundit. That episode is called, “A SHAME on Judaism!”
Whatever this is, it’s not journalism. But it is the future.
The post Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him appeared first on The Forward.
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Rashida Tlaib Introduces Resolution ‘Recognizing Ongoing Nakba’
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Thursday reintroduced a congressional resolution recognizing the 78th anniversary of what she described as the “ongoing nakba,” using the Arabic term for “catastrophe” deployed by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
The resolution, introduced on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, accuses the Jewish state of carrying out “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” against Palestinians, language that many pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress and advocacy groups strongly reject as inflammatory and inaccurate. The measure also calls for renewed US support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an agency that has faced mounting scrutiny from Israel and several Western governments over allegations that employees participated in or supported Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
In a statement announcing the resolution, Tlaib argued that the so-called nakba “did not end” with the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and continues today through Israeli military operations and settlement expansion.
“War criminal Netanyahu and his cabinet have repeatedly threatened to ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, annex the land, and permanently occupy it. Today, they are extending these same threats towards southern Lebanon,” she said, referring to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military operations against US-designated terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. “As we mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, we honor all of those killed since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and all those who have been forced from their homes and violently displaced from their land.”
Activists often invoke the term “nakba” when discussing the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs following Israel’s War of Independence, many of whom left the nascent state for varied reasons, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. At the same time, about 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, primarily in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Tlaib’s resolution is co-sponsored by several prominent progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), and Summer Lee (PA).
The move is likely to draw fierce criticism from pro-Israel lawmakers and Jewish organizations, many of whom argue the resolution ignores the historical context surrounding Israel’s founding and the 1948 war. Israel accepted the United Nations partition plan in 1947 to create two states, one Jewish and one Arab, while neighboring Arab states rejected it and launched a military invasion after Israel declared independence.
The resolution also calls for a so-called Palestinian “right of return,” a demand insisting that potentially millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees should be able to return to the land of Israel, a step that, according to proponents, would result in the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state.
“This immense trauma, including the loss of their loved ones and connections to the communities they grew up in, needs to be repaired. True peace must be built on justice and the inalienable right of return for Palestinian refugees,” Tlaib said in her statement.
While refugees are generally defined as those who flee a country out of credible fear of persecution, UNRWA uniquely defines Palestinian refugees to include all descendants of those who left the land, regardless of where they were born.
Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of the US Congress, has emerged as one of Israel’s loudest critics on Capitol Hill, repeatedly accusing the Jewish state of genocide and drawing rebuke from fellow lawmakers.
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Toronto Sees 50% Drop in 2025 Hate Crimes, Yet 82% of Religiously Motivated Attacks Target Jews
A member of law enforcement personnel works at the scene outside the US Consulate after shots were fired, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, March 10, 2026. Picture taken with a mobile phone. Photo: REUTERS/Kyaw Soe Oo
Even as Toronto recorded an overall decline in reported hate crimes last year, newly released data shows the city’s Jewish community continued to face disproportionately high levels of targeted antisemitism and violence amid an increasingly concerning social climate.
On Thursday, Toronto Police released its annual hate crime statistical report, showing that Jews accounted for 82 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in 2025, compared to 14 percent targeting Muslims.
Even though the Jewish community makes up less than 3 percent of Toronto’s population, officials now warn that Jewish residents are 14 times more likely than other residents to be targeted in a hate incident.
With 81 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded, Jews and Israelis were the targets of 35 percent of all reported hate incidents in the city.
Despite a 50 percent overall decline in reported hate crimes, from 443 in 2024 to 231 in 2025, Toronto has seen a 40 percent increase in such incidents so far this year compared with the same period last year.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw noted that, even with the overall decline, the Jewish community continued to be the primary target of hate-motivated offenses.
“We are steadfast in our commitment to confronting hate in all its forms and making it easier for people to come forward and report incidents of hate,” Demkiw said in a press release.
Because police-reported hate crime data only includes incidents that come to the attention of authorities and are later confirmed or suspected to be hate-driven, official figures likely underestimate the true scale of such incidents.
Over the past two years, Toronto authorities have expanded law enforcement capacity and resources to investigate hate crimes by establishing a Counter-Terrorism Security Unit and increasing specialized training for officers, while also strengthening Holocaust education initiatives and introducing digital literacy programs for youth aimed at countering online radicalization.
Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Vice President Michelle Stock called the latest statistics “deeply alarming,” warning of a broader reality of hostility that Jewish families across the city are confronting on a daily basis.
“Toronto prides itself on being a city where people of all backgrounds can live openly, safely and without fear. Those values are undermined when any community no longer feels secure expressing its identity in public,” Stock said in a statement.
“From synagogues to schools to public displays of Jewish identity, blatant attacks against the Jewish community are becoming more frequent and more brazen,” she continued. “Jewish Canadians are being targeted simply for who they are. No one should have to think twice about wearing a kippah, attending synagogue, sending their children to Jewish schools or participating openly in Jewish life.”
The city’s figures reflect a broader nationwide rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility, with the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada reporting a record high in anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2025 for the second consecutive year, documenting 6,800 such cases across the country.
According to the latest report, antisemitic incidents nationwide increased by 9.3 percent last year, surpassing the previous record total of 6,219 set in 2024.
With an average of 18.6 incidents per day, this figure represents a 145.6 percent increase from 2022, before the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Early 2026 data already indicate the country is now on track to see its most violent year against the Jewish community in recent memory, with more violent antisemitic attacks recorded so far this year than during all of 2025, B’nai Brith Canada reported.
In total, 11 violent antisemitic incidents have already been recorded across the country since January, surpassing the 10 violent cases documented during all of last year
“These brazen attacks on Jewish Canadians are a sign of a crisis of antisemitism that has spiraled out of control,” Simon Wolle, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement.
“Violence such as this, which has escalated from targeting synagogues to targeting Jewish people directly, does not occur in a vacuum. It is what happens when governments fail to act despite mounting evidence that antisemitism is becoming more normalized and dangerous,” Wolle continued.
Last week, a group of Jewish worshippers standing outside the Congregation Chasidei Bobov synagogue in Montreal was targeted in a drive-by shooting, leaving one person with minor injuries.
A week earlier, three visibly Jewish residents were targeted in a separate antisemitic attack when suspects opened fire with a gel-pellet gun, causing minor injuries.