Jimmy Wales the Zionist comes out from hiding again

I wrote six years ago about how Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was a Jeremy Corbyn slandering Zionist. (Wales owns, or then owned, a residence in greater London as well as one or more in the U.S.)

Well, we aren't getting six more weeks of winter, but after six years, the groundhog has popped up again. 

Now, he has personally intervened at Wikipedia to "freeze" its article on the genocide in Gaza. 

Why? This: 

Calling the page a “particularly egregious” example of an issue with neutrality on Wikipedia, Wales added: “At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested.” He said this was a violation of Wikipedia rules requiring neutrality of voice and attribution for claims.

And, it's pissed off editors. 

Before I get to some of their comments, very few people who aren't Zionist hasbara flak-runners highly dispute this claim. The International Criminal Court, and here in the U.S., Human Rights Watch and its former executive director, Kenneth Roth, have long called it genocide.

Or, per the piece at hand?

Experts including the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and a UN Human Rights Council commission led by former president of the Rwanda genocide international tribunal Navi Pillay, have all concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

There you go, "Jimbo." 

But, per that first link? 

Wales, whether because he hates Labour's anti-neoliberal turn under Jeremy Corbyn, or he really does believe that antizionism is antisemitism, promoted  smears running around Corbyn. And even signed a group op-ed in The Guardian about that.

When I called him out on Twitter, he claimed to not be conflating the two, but posted a new piece from Medium that did just that.

I responded with:

Read this: https://t.co/Ee7X737yqf
And this: https://t.co/gzXf8OSK6u
And this: https://t.co/t7w3unLI7j
Maybe you just hate Corbyn and a non-#neoliberal Labour?

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) December 10, 2019

And he blocked me.

 

Now let's quote those editors. Here's one:

The intervention has been met with anger by other Wikipedia editors, with one accusing Wales of coming “under political pressure and asking us to betray scholarship”.

And others:

Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well” 

Another said: “I have been editing in the [Israel Palestine] area for just over 20 years, and [as far as I know] there has never been as much outside focus on Wikipedia's cover of the area as now. Much of it negative, from pro-Israeli opinionators, X.com, blogs, you name it … 

“Jimbo Wales writes: ‘The neutrality of this article is disputed, and there are very good reasons for that’. Could you please tell us one or two of those ‘good reasons’?”

There you go. 

 

This is not the only case of Wales putting his thumb on the scales of a Wikipedia article in service of Zionism. Here's another from four years ago. 

Because he went to private prep school in the US, the dual-citizenship Wales may be a New Labour version of a Tory toff as much as anything. That still doesn't excuse him. Oh, Jimmy? The Guardian piece I link has about 5x the signatures of yours.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg of sleaziness in the name of Wales and his empire. That link is longform, but WELL worth reading. Wales personally seems to have a decade-plus of sleaziness that means his Corbyn smears are par for his course. No, it does more than that.

 [Tony] Blair is a close friend of Wales, whose wife Kate Garvey previously worked as his diary secretary. Wales is fiercely defensive of his famous friends, and Blair’s own Wikipedia entry barely mentions Blair’s vast financial wealth (37 homes — 10 houses and 27 flats — worth £27 million, plus millions of pounds distributed through a network of companies); his PR work on behalf of dictators and human rights abusers in Kuwait, the UAE, Colombia, Egypt, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan; his utter failure to support Palestinian rights during his time as Middle Eastern peace envoy; and the human consequences — over half a million civilian casualties — of the Iraq invasion he continues to defend.

Well, there you have it. Read on. There's lots of good stuff about him palling around with dictators, stiffing winners of prizes he has created, and more. (You can skip most of the last one-quarter; the author, Helen Buyniski, is pretty much wrong about alt-medicine, most of which is actually pseudomedicine. [She's also, per Google search, a bit of a nutter. She's written for places like Global Research, which is, for the unknowing, full-on nutbar.] The rest, though, is spot on.) I'll add that it used to be at Medium, that piece, but the corporate overlords deleted the account.

Sounds like Jimmy Wales never really moved beyond his Bomis roots.