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Wikipedia’s ‘Supreme Court’ tackles alleged conspiracy to distort articles on Holocaust
(JTA) — When a pair of professors earlier this month published a paper accusing a group of Wikipedia editors from Poland of revising articles to distort the history of the Holocaust, their research went viral.
Most academic articles are seen by dozens or hundreds of people at best. This one, published in The Journal of Holocaust Research, hit more than 27,000 pageviews within weeks.
The paper’s reach was fueled by its analysis, unprecedented in the academic literature on Wikipedia, and its finding that a dedicated group has for some 15 years manipulated a source of information used by millions in ways that lay blame for the Holocaust on Jews and absolve Poland of almost any responsibility for its record of antisemitism.
The paper caught the eye of not just scholars and journalists but of the people in charge of resolving disputes over editing on crowd-sourced Wikipedia, the seventh-most popular website on the internet and one that is seen as the last bastion of shared truth in an ever-fracturing online environment.
Typically, disputes among Wikipedia editors are resolved through community consensus mechanisms, but occasionally those mechanisms fail and allegations are brought to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, a panel of elected editors known as Wikipedia’s Supreme Court.
“Wikipedia is not exactly democratic but anarchistic in a way that actively discourages any sort of an authority coming to solve a dispute,” said Joe Roe, a veteran Wikipedia editor who served on the committee in 2019 and 2020. “The Arbitration Committee is a very limited exception.”
In this case, something especially unusual happened. The Arbitration Committee, or ArbCom, decided to look into the allegations without receiving a formal request to do so. No one could recall the committee taking such a step in its nearly two decades of existence.
“A myopic decision here could result in untold numbers of people being fed a distorted view of Jewish/WWII history, which could have very real consequences given the recent amplification of violently antisemitic rhetoric by mainstream public figures,” wrote a user named SamX in a public post about the case. “ArbCom needs to get this right.”
The article that triggered the opening of the case was published under the title, “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust.” It accused 11 current and former editors of intentional distortions to numerous articles relating to the Holocaust in Poland. The paper referred to the editors by their usernames but also provided their real names if they had publicly identified themselves on Wikipedia message boards.
“Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles, blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis,” wrote co-authors Jan Grabowski, a historian at the University of Ottawa, and Shira Klein of the history department at Chapman University in Orange, California.
Normally, mistakes on Wikipedia, whether intentional or not, can be quickly fixed by experienced editors who deploy a set of rules regarding sourcing and style. But in this case, the alleged distortionists know Wikipedia’s mechanisms well enough to at least appear to follow the rules and are willing to spend time arguing with other editors who step in to intervene. It becomes harder to get to the truth because they work to discredit established historians and prop up fringe voices to create the semblance of a real-world debate over historical events, according to the article.
In one of the dozens of examples documented in the study, the alleged distortionists have tried to pass the self-published work of an antisemitic Polish writer named Ewa Kurek as a reliable source. Kurek has said that COVID-19 is a cover for an attempt by Jews to take over Europe and that Jews enjoyed life in Nazi ghettos. An editor named Volunteer Marek argued in a backstage conversation among editors that Kurek should be cited as any “mainstream scholar” would be. And another editor, working on an article about a 1941 massacre of Jews in Poland, added Kurek’s claim that minimized the number of Jewish victims and exonerated Polish perpetrators.
Jewish school children pose for a portrait in the 1930s in Wizna, near Jedwabne, Poland. New research revealed that members of the Polish community killed their Jewish neighbors on July 10, 1941 during World War ll despite previous claims that Nazi Germans were entirely responsible. Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski apologized for the massacre of hundreds of Jews by their neighbors during ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the murders. (Laski Diffusion/Getty Images)
One thing the research didn’t discuss is what motivates these editors to invest so much time and effort into distorting Wikipedia. Klein said the omission was deliberate.
“We’ve been very careful not to make any assumptions on what drives them or what their politics are,” Klein said. “Instead, we’ve tried to focus just on what they’ve done, which is in the written record. And as we say in the article, we don’t see any evidence of them being tied to a government or being in the service of anyone else.”
Klein’s disclaimer obliquely points to a larger challenge around the historical record of the Holocaust in Poland. A central tenet of the country’s ruling Law and Justice party is defending the image of ethnic Poles and imposing nationalist narratives on the past, especially the period of World War II. While history shows that many Poles participated in the persecution of Jews, Poland’s nationalist right insists on portraying Poles only as victims or heroes.
In 2018, the Polish government passed what’s known as the Polish Holocaust Law, which makes it illegal to slander the Polish nation or blame the country for Nazi crimes. In practice, the law has served to censor scholars and chill debate.
Grabowski, Klein’s co-author on the paper, has for years sparred with the nationalist right over Poland’s historical memory. He sued a Polish group that accused him of publishing lies about Polish history in 2018, and in 2021 was ordered by a Polish court to apologize for his research before an appeals court ultimately overturned the order.
Domestically, Poland’s ultranationalists have largely won the war over the public discourse, which has freed them to focus on the global scene, where English-language Wikipedia is regarded as a major battlefront.
In this atmosphere, even something as basic as the background of Yiddish novelist and Nobel prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer can become fodder for debate. For years, Singer was at the center of a fight between two editors over whether Singer was best described in the first line of his Wikipedia article as a Jewish or Polish author. The eventual compromise — “Polish-born Jewish American” — lasted for almost two years until Feb. 23 when someone again dropped the “Jewish.”
The Wikipedia editors now being accused of distorting articles to further nationalist narratives have rejected the allegations against them.
“I have not engaged in any ‘Holocaust distortion,’ on Wikipedia or anywhere else. I am not a ‘right-wing Polish nationalist,’” said Volunteer Marek in a public comment on a Wikipedia message board that was endorsed by at least one other alleged distortionist. “I am not part of some nefarious ‘Polish conspiracy’ on Wikipedia which seeks to manipulate content. All of these accusations are ridiculous and absurd. They are particularly disgusting and vile since they go against everything I believe in.”
In the debate about how to handle the case, dozens of arbitrators and ordinary Wikipedia editors — all volunteers — spoke of the situation on a Wikipedia message board as something close to an existential crisis for Wikipedia. Not only was the website accused of being used to spread antisemitic propaganda, but it was also alleged to be vulnerable to large-scale manipulation by a small group of bad-faith actors.
There is little confidence in the community that a solution is within reach. By its own rules, the committee isn’t supposed to decide on disputed information. It’s more of a disciplinary body that evaluates the behavior of Wikipedia editors and can ultimately decide whether to restrict their editing privileges or ban them outright.
But figuring out if the accused editors have indeed evaded safeguards and undermined Wikipedia’s integrity would seem to require that the arbitrators become experts on the history of the Holocaust in Poland.
The decision to take up the case serves to acknowledge that the committee failed to solve the problem when it last considered complaints about editing related to the Holocaust in Poland about two years ago. That was during Roe’s tenure and he says the committee was distracted by another dispute at the time.
“It can’t be escalated further than it already has in our mechanisms,” Roe said. “The best we can do is what’s currently happening now — just put it through those mechanisms again, and hope that something better will come out on the other side.”
In explaining why the committee must nevertheless take on the case, an arbitrator who goes by Wugapodes commented that the only other choice is to kick the can down the road.
“This will not be an easy issue to resolve, but the committee was not convened to solve easy issues,” Wugapodes wrote, pointing out that the timing is right given the attention and involvement of outside experts and editors. “We can leverage these resources now or wait for this decade-long problem to get still worse.”
By a vote of nine to one on Feb. 13, the committee decided to open the case. The proceedings, which start with an evidence-gathering phase, are expected to last up to six weeks, after which they can decide to ban and restrict offending editors.
Beyond that, an unorthodox last resort option is also available. Wikipedia’s so-called Supreme Court could ask for help from an even higher authority: the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit that owns the encyclopedia. The foundation intervened in 2021 in what some see as a similar scenario of a far-right takeover on the Croatian-language Wikipedia, hiring an outside expert to disentangle the web of obfuscation and banning a set of editors.
Roe said that his tenure on the committee in 2019 and 2020, which featured related complaints about the editing of articles on the Holocaust in Poland, helped lead him to believe that Wikipedia should embrace change, at least when it comes to controversial political topics.
“I would like to see these difficult and politically charged content problems be referred to a new body made up of external experts, and that we don’t insist on doing everything internally among the community volunteers,” Roe said.
But he acknowledged that such a scenario is unlikely to result from the Poland dispute.
“It’s not a popular view and it kind of goes against the general idea of Wikipedia,” he said.
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The post Wikipedia’s ‘Supreme Court’ tackles alleged conspiracy to distort articles on Holocaust appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The BBC Tried to Blame Israel — but Exposed Hezbollah Instead
Men carry Hezbollah flags while riding on two wheelers, at the entrance of Beirut’s southern suburbs, in Lebanon, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani
It is well established that Hezbollah has not only turned southern Lebanon into a base for terrorism targeting Israel but also embedded itself deep within Beirut’s civilian suburbs.
Yet when the BBC reports from those same areas, it appears determined to obscure that reality.
That may not be surprising. As HonestReporting previously documented, Hezbollah tightly controls access and information available to foreign journalists. What reporters see — and therefore what international audiences are shown — is often filtered through Hezbollah’s interests.
When a Sky News crew reported from Lebanon earlier this year, journalists openly acknowledged the restrictions imposed on them. Hezbollah limited where they could go and what they could film following Israeli airstrikes, likely to conceal evidence of terrorist activity.
So, when BBC reporters arrive in Lebanon two months later and somehow fail to find evidence of Hezbollah’s presence, it is hardly coincidental.
The “BBC traces how 10 minutes of Israeli bombing brought devastation to Lebanon” investigation attempts to portray Israel as deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians. But the report itself repeatedly undermines that narrative.
1/
Even as @BBCNews wanders around Beirut attempting to prove that Israel deliberately targets civilians, it can’t avoid revealing some inconvenient truths.Let’s take a closer look at how the BBC can’t help covering for Hezbollah.
pic.twitter.com/WWs14Xwuwd
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 6, 2026
The very case study the BBC highlights gives the game away.
In Beirut’s Hay el Sellom suburb, a BBC journalist interviews Mohammed, whose son Abbas was killed in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in April 2026.
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We meet Mohammed, whose son was killed after Israel struck their apartment building.He tells the BBC he would never have stayed there had he known Hezbollah operatives were in the building… before showing his support for them when interviewed by local media. pic.twitter.com/Q6c8cDI09K
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 6, 2026
Mohammed claims that, had he known Hezbollah operatives were nearby, he would have left. But that admission directly undermines the BBC’s broader framing. It reinforces the reality that Israel’s operations are linked to Hezbollah’s presence, not random or indiscriminate attacks against civilians.
Another interviewee claims Israel is bombing Lebanon in an attempt to “take over” the country. Yet the report’s own details point to something else entirely: a campaign directed at Hezbollah infrastructure and operatives in an effort to restore security along Israel’s northern border.
According to the IDF, the April 8 strikes that reportedly killed Abbas also targeted more than 250 Hezbollah terrorists.
Ironically, while touring the suburb, the BBC journalist also filmed martyr posters of Ali Mohammed Ghulam Dahini, reportedly killed in the same strikes — corroborating Israeli media reports identifying him as a Hezbollah operative.
Yet the BBC still avoids acknowledging the obvious implication: these strikes were targeting Hezbollah personnel embedded within civilian areas.
Civilian deaths in war are tragic. But tragedy alone does not determine intent.
Under the laws of armed conflict, counterterrorism operations require assessing proportionality — weighing anticipated military advantage against potential civilian harm. In each example highlighted by the BBC, evidence of Hezbollah’s presence at the strike locations is difficult to ignore.
The report itself notes that Mohammed expressed support for Hezbollah in Arabic-language interviews, praising the group for “defending Lebanon.” But Lebanon would not require “defending” from repeated wars had Hezbollah not transformed civilian neighborhoods into military infrastructure.
The BBC acknowledges that Mohammed gave pro-Hezbollah views when speaking to local media. Yet Mohammed presents himself differently to international English-speaking audiences. That discrepancy raises an obvious question: why?
The answer may lie even closer to home.
Investigative journalist David Collier revealed that Mohammed’s son, Abbas Khair al-Din, was himself affiliated with Hezbollah, citing martyr posters and Hezbollah imagery at his grave.
Well I found him – and I found his son. This is his son’s grave – full of martyr images and clear Hezbollah affiliation.
These are Hezbollah’s people.
Did your journalist not bother to look at all? Why are you spreading terrorist propaganda? 3/5 pic.twitter.com/Kcm5bJjerF
— David Collier (@mishtal) May 6, 2026
Had the BBC acknowledged these Hezbollah ties, its central framing — that Israel was recklessly targeting civilians — would have become far more difficult to sustain.
This is not the first time the BBC has minimized or erased Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon.
By omitting Hezbollah’s systematic use of civilian infrastructure, the outlet constructs a narrative in which responsibility falls almost exclusively on Israel while Hezbollah’s role fades into the background.
Most remarkably, despite the evidence presented throughout the report, the BBC still repeats Hezbollah’s denial that it embeds itself among civilians.
5/
The report also repeats Hezbollah’s denial that it embeds itself among civilians.Instead, the terror group claims Israel deliberately targets civilians to pressure them.
The problem? Mohammed’s own words undermine that narrative. pic.twitter.com/nWelmpCFjL
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 6, 2026
The contradiction is striking: the BBC’s own reporting repeatedly points to Hezbollah activity within civilian areas, yet the outlet still amplifies Hezbollah’s denials with minimal scrutiny.
Not all Lebanese civilians support Hezbollah. But the BBC’s inability — or unwillingness — to feature meaningful Lebanese criticism of the terrorist organization reveals how selective the report truly is.
Hezbollah has effectively held Lebanon hostage, exploiting civilians while dragging the country into repeated cycles of conflict.
There is genuine dissent within Lebanon. Many Lebanese are exhausted by Hezbollah’s dominance and want a future free from perpetual war. Yet those voices are almost entirely absent from the BBC’s report.
The BBC intended its report to portray Israel as conducting a campaign against Lebanese civilians.
Instead, it inadvertently documented something else entirely: Hezbollah’s deep entrenchment within civilian infrastructure.
The report repeatedly presents evidence of Hezbollah activity, Hezbollah support, and Hezbollah-linked individuals in the very locations Israel targeted — while simultaneously attempting to deny or downplay the implications.
When media outlets obscure Hezbollah’s use of civilian areas, they do more than distort the story. They sanitize the conditions Hezbollah itself created.
And in this case, the BBC’s own reporting ultimately undermines the narrative it set out to build.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Miss Israel Melanie Shiraz Says Mamdani’s Wife Snubbed Her Because She’s From Jewish State
Melanie Shiraz being crowned Miss Israel 2025. Photo: Simon Soong | Edgar Entertainment
Melanie Shiraz, who represented Israel in the 2025 Miss Universe pageant, said on Wednesday that the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani refused to take a photograph with her because the beauty queen is from the Jewish state.
Shiraz posted on Instagram a video that features a short clip of herself with Rama Duwaji, the first lady of New York City. The Israel native said in the video’s voice-over that she met Mamdani’s wife by chance in a coffee shop in New York City and the two sat next to each other. Duwaji was willing to take a photo with the beauty queen “until she found out that I was Miss Israel; until I told her that as an Israeli, I was disappointed in seeing the kind of rhetoric she was promoting online,” Shiraz said.
“I told her as part of my ideology as an Israeli is to have productive dialogue in which not one side is constantly dehumanized. But despite that, despite the setting being calm, the moment she found out I was Israeli, she refused to have a conversation with me,” continued the graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.
“If you can publicly apologize for dehumanizing Israelis, but you can’t get yourself to humanize one when you come face-to-face with them in real life, what does that say about you and what does that say about the state of our politics considering that is the wife of the mayor of New York City?” Shiraz added.
A Texas-born illustrator with Syrian roots, Duwaji has previously uploaded or “liked” numerous anti-Israel posts on social media. She has also “liked” several online posts that celebrated the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and even defended the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, describing it as Palestinian “resistance.”
It was discovered that Duwaji shared social media posts praising female Palestinian terrorists who participated in plane hijackings and bombings in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2015, she shared a post in which someone else wrote that Tel Aviv was occupying Palestinian land and “shouldn’t exist.” Duwaji also illustrated an essay co-edited by a Palestinian-American activist author who described the Oct. 7 attack as “spectacular” and called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls.”
In April, Duwaji apologized for “harmful” social media posts she made as a teenager, which included anti-gay and anti-Black language, but did not directly address her more recent anti-Israel social media activity.
Mamdani, who has faced his own share of criticism for anti-Israel comments and actions, has previously defended his wife by saying she is a “private person.”
In the caption of her Instagram video, Shiraz said she was “not particularly” surprised by her interaction with Duwaji at the coffee shop in New York City.
“It is easy to apologize without meaningfully changing one’s behavior,” Shiraz explained. “It is easy to claim opposition to dehumanization in principle, but far more difficult to embody that in practice. She was polite throughout. But the shift in demeanor was evident, and the lack of willingness to engage even more so.”
“I approached the interaction with openness to a genuine, respectful conversation. That openness was not reciprocated,” Shiraz added. “And that, perhaps, is the more telling point: how often this disconnect appears, and how normalized it has become.”
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Rubio Questions Allies’ Support on Iran Following Italy Talks
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press at the US Embassy in Rome, Italy on May 8, 2026. Photo: STEFANO RELLANDINI/Pool via REUTERS
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Friday and afterwards questioned why allies including Italy were not backing Washington’s efforts to confront Iran and re-open the Strait of Hormuz.
“I don’t understand why anybody would not be supportive,” Rubio told reporters, adding that countries needed “something more than just strongly worded statements” if they opposed Iran‘s actions.
Rubio was wrapping up a two-day trip aimed at easing ties with Pope Leo after attacks on the pontiff by President Donald Trump, while also addressing Washington’s frustration over Italy‘s refusal to support the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Meloni had been one of Trump’s firmest allies in Europe, cultivating close ties with him and presenting herself as a natural bridge between Washington and other EU states that had no natural political affinity with the Republican US leader.
But that alignment has come under increasing strain in recent months, as the Iran war has forced her to balance loyalty to the United States against Italian public animosity to the war and the growing economic cost of the conflict.
Meloni and Rubio met for 1-1/2 hours, in what she described in a post on social media platform X as “an extensive and constructive discussion,” saying the talks included the Middle East, Libya, and the peace processes in Lebanon and Ukraine.
“It was a frank dialogue between allies who defend their own national interests while fully recognizing the value of western unity,” Meloni said.
Rubio declined to give full details. However, he warned that Tehran’s claim to control access to Hormuz risked setting a dangerous precedent.
“The fundamental question every country, not just Italy … needs to ask themselves is, are you going to normalize a country claiming to control an international waterway? Because if you normalize that, you’ve set a precedent that’s going to get repeated in a dozen other places,” he said.
‘THE UNITED STATES NEEDS EUROPE AND ITALY‘
Italy and other European allies have said they would be willing to help keep the strait open once there was a lasting ceasefire or the conflict ends, but have refused to be drawn into direct confrontation with Iran.
Before seeing Meloni, Rubio met Italy‘s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, who said he hoped the visit had helped calm tensions with the United States.
“I am convinced Europe needs America, Italy needs America, but also that the United States needs Europe and Italy,” Tajani told reporters.
Besides the war in the Gulf, Meloni and Rubio had also been expected to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine, US tariffs on European goods, and the outlook for Cuba, which Washington is seeking to isolate both diplomatically and economically.
The Italians were also keen for a readout on Rubio‘s meetings at the Vatican. Trump’s recent attacks on Pope Leo crossed a sensitive line in overwhelmingly Catholic Italy and prompted Meloni to call them “unacceptable.”
Her criticism in turn drew a sharp rebuke from Trump, who said she lacked courage. He subsequently threatened to withdraw US troops from Italy.
Rubio said he didn’t get into specifics about US bases, saying it was a decision for Trump to make.
Italy last month refused to allow US aircraft to use the Sigonella air base in Sicily for combat operations linked to the Iran conflict. Italian officials said Washington had not sought prior authorization from Rome for the use of the site.
Rubio did not mention this incident, but pointed to Spain’s decision not to allow its bases or airspace to be used to attack Iran. He said one of the main attractions of NATO for the US was to have forces in Europe that could be swiftly deployed elsewhere.
“Now that’s no longer the case, at least when it comes to some NATO members, that’s a problem and has to be examined,” he said.