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The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem

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.'

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.. .'

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

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

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.’

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’. 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.. 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.'

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 ). 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.”

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’, 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’

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.’

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 , 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.

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.

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.

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.. 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'.. 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.'

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 Misplaced Pages 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 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.' 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.

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.” <

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.

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’

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 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 ’

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). 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.’

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.

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 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. The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power. 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. 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.

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.'

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.'

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.’

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’.

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 unprovokedinvasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state 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. 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. 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.

Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Misplaced Pages, 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 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' 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..

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), , 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".'

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). 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.

(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’

'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.'

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.

1. T.G.H.Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia,Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971 p.126; cited by Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H.Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, 2002 pp.436f.
2. Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
3. For a fascinating study on both the figure of Adam in Islamic tradition, and on commentaries on this particular text specifically, see M.J.Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr and Hadīt Literature,’ in Joel L. Kraemer (ed.) Israel Oriental Studies, Volume XIII, BRILL, 1993 pp.112-174, p.140
4. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
5. George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
6. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,, vol.1, tr.Ralph Manheim, Yale UP 1955 pp.119ff.,p.122
7. Isaiah 5:11. For this and other passages, see S.J.Tambiah ’s 1968 Malinowsky lecture, "The Magical Power of Words," (the ancient Egyptians, the Semites and Sumerians all believed that “the world and its objects were created by the word of God; and the Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names (pp.182-3). My attention was drawn to this particular essay by Tambiah by Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984 p.96
8. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
9. John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
10. Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
11. Regis Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject, University Of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 p.169 gives many Papuan examples. Compare his remark elsewhere in the same book, ‘In indigenous cultures . .(t)he most important means of taking control of the landscape is by naming, Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known.’ Ibid pp. 40-41
12. M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
13. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
14. ‘Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them. They are, in this sense, less a representation of part of the earth’s surface than a representation of the system of cognitive mapping which produced them,’ N.Penn, “Mapping the Cape: John Barrow and the First British Occupation of the Colony, 1794-1803.” in Pretexts 4 (2) Summer 1993, pp.20-43 p.23
15. John Atchison, ‘Naming Outback Australia,’ in Actes du XVI Congrès international des sciences onomastiques, Québec, Université Laval, 16-22 August 1987, Presses Université Laval, 1987 : pp.151-162 p.154-5
16. Susan Gay Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1997 p.32 .
17. Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
18. Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
19. Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2000 pp.12-13 cf.'Suffused with the sense that “it is impossible for a present-day Hebrew map not to identify by name the places of Hebrew settlement mentioned in the Bible and in post-biblical Hebrew literature,” they set about identifying these sites and putting them on “Hebrew maps,” which they placed opposite the official Mandatory maps.’
20. Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
21. Benvenisti, ibid, p.19
22. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, op.cit.p.14. The Arabic names were also found ‘morose’ and ‘offensive’ . As one member put it: ‘Many of the names are offensive in their gloomy and morose meanings, which reflect the powerlessness of the nomads and their self-denigration in the face of the harshness of nature’ (ibid.p.17). On the committee see also his memoir, Meron Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2007 p.72.
23. Amar Dahamshe Off the linguistic map. Are Arab place names derived from Hebrew? in Haaretz 30.06.10
24. Benvenisti, ibid. p.17, p.18
25. ‘The name of the Ramon Crater, for example, perhaps the most dramatic geological formation in the Negev, “is derived from the Hebrew adjective ram (meaning elevated), “states an Israeli guidebook. The fact that its name in Arabic was Wadi Rumman (Pomegranate Arroyo), . . was not considered worthy of mention’ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.19
26. Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
27. cf.Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn,, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1930, Meridian Book reprint 1962. Shalom Spiegel was Sam Spiegel's more distinguished and erudite brother.
28. Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words, ibid p.140
29. Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
30. Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
31. 'The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948'. Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Warner Books, (1993) 2000 p.20. Netanyahu's dislike of the term (and his faulty memory for dates), is mirrored by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, evidence if ever of the neutrality of the term: cf.‘I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassanah and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defense forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than when concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location, not a country, not a homeland. The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word, it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. . .The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank or call its Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say the Territories! Brilliant! I am a Palestinian, but my homeland is the Territories! What is happening here? By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history.’ Mourid Barghouti, 'The Servants of War and their Language', in International parliament of Writers, Autodafe, Seven Stories Press, 2003 pp.139-147 pp140-1
32. Emma Playfair, International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 41.
33. Ran HaCohen, 'Influence of the Middle East Peace Process on the Hebrew Language' (1992), reprinted in Michael G. Clyne (ed.), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp.385-414, p.397.
34. Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
35. 'The terms “occupied territory” or “West Bank” were forbidden in news reports.'Ian S. Lustick, 'The Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectic of Religion and Nationalism in the Middle East', Logos, Vol.1, No.3, Summer 2002 pp.18-44, p. 39
36. 'Begin was happy to castigate the media and the intelligentsia for their views, real and imaginary, and their use of politically incorrect language. Israeli television was now instructed to use “Judea and Samaria’ for the administered territories, annexation became ‘incorporation’ and the Green Line suddenly disappeared from maps of Israel and the West Bank'. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2008 p.174
37. 'The successful gaining of the popular acceptance of these terms was a prelude to gaining popular acceptance of the government’s settlement policies'.Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict, Transaction Publishers, 1991. p. 10.
38. Gideon Aran, 'Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Block of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Enumin),', in American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 1994 pp.265-344, p.291, p.337
39. Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
40. William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
41. William B.Quandt, Peace process, ibid. p.134. This was then accompanied by a formal note to Begin (September 22,1978), it which it was registered that ‘(A) In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian People” are being and will be construed and understood by you as “Palestinian Arabs”. (B)In each paragraph in which the expression “West Bank” appears, it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.’ William B. Quandt, Camp David: peacemaking and politics, Brookings Institution Press, 1986 p.387
42. Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
43. Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
44. James Ron, Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel, University of California Press, 2003 p.180. Decoded, the statement means, 'invading Lebanon secures the West Bank for Israel and thus achieves the Biblical borders set forth more or less in the Tanakh's account of the early kingdoms'
45. Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
46. See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
47. Numbers, 32:18
48. David C. Jacobson, Does David still play before you? Israeli poetry and the Bible, Wayne State University Press, 1997 p.50
49. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1998 p.14
50. Nigel Craig Parsons,The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa, Routledge, 2005 p.299
51. Michael Sfard, Occupation double-speak,' at Haaretz, 12 June 2012.
52. Jonathan Cook, Israeli Road Signs, Counterpunch 17-19, July 2009
53. Nir Hasson, Give Arab train stations Hebrew names, says Israeli linguist, Haaretz 28/12/2009
54. Yossi Sarid 'Israel is not killing the Palestinian people - it's killing their culture,' Haaretz 3 Octobr 2014
55. John Brian Harley, David Woodward, The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Humana Press, 1987 p.506, cited Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid.p.13
56. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.13

Further reading:-

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

Things to be done/Notes to self (or what pieces are left of that hypothetical entity)

• Huldra trans Talk:Bardala‎
• Huldra trans Talk:Nisf Jubeil
• Sabah as per promise to Doug Weller
• Abu Iyad as per promise to Al Ameer
• The Ashkenazi Jews/Khazarian origins theory
• Werner Muensterberger
• 中里介山 and also his 大菩薩峠, which have no wiki article. ('to call him Dickensian would be utterly inadequate, to call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be to flatter him greatly' William E. Naff, The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Tōson, University of Hawai'i Press, 2011 p.4.) Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

(2)'To call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be an over-statement of his considerable gift for for creating memorable characters, while to call Kaizan "Dickensian" would be a seriously misleading understatement. This richness became all the more impressive when set against the national drive towards human standardization.' ibid. p.430

To be kept close to the bottom of this page because I forget the agenda as time scurries on Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

• • e.g.<ref="Horowitz" /> Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Note

Yonatan Mendel, Diary, London Review of Books, Vol. 37 No. 6 -19 March, 6 March 2015.

Palestinian population statistics Pro memoria

here,

Notice of Admin noticeboard discussion

This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.84.1.2 (talk)

Children

• New report: Palestinian children in Israeli military detention experience violence, coerced confessions (14 April 2016), Middle East Monitor.

• Ex-Abu Ghraib Interrogator: Israelis Trained U.S. to Use "Palestinian Chair" Torture Device

Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:12, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I.e.Brad Parker et al.,'No Way To Treat a Child: Palestinian Children in the Israeli Military Detention System,' Defense for Children International April 2016. This is evidently an anti-Semitic smear. Firstly Israel has a unique conviction rate, 99% of the indicted, which shows it only detains the guilty. (b) The guilty are a chronic plague in that area, they swarm everywhere, which is why the system has had to convict 700,000 Palestinians. That's over 10% of the population, which means you have an exceptionally high incidence of criminality among those folks. (c) Thirdly, these are not children. Of this spurious report's so-called evidence only one child in 429 cited as witnesses, was detained in an Israeli prison from 2012-2015. The rest were 12 or over, i.e., adults. 1 in 429 is statistically meaningless. It's just one slip-up in Anat Berko's proposed law. 'Shit happens', and this was a minor skidmark.(d) This is war, not a matter, therefore, of prissy human rights fussing. But even in war, civilized nations, meaning those where a lot of English is spoken, there are rules, and these things fall strictly within the remit of Military Order 1651 (e) Brad Parker is an 'Advocacy Officer, and advocacy for a cause means he's biased, and his work probably indictable as incitement. (f) all parents need do is have the mukhtar conduct a whip-around, preferably by getting the muezzin to hand over his prayer broadcast system (and give the landscape some peace:we've had to close down 59 calls to prayer at Hebron this last month to allow the settlers at Kiryat Arba an uninterrupted clear audio reception of Arutz Sheva) and pony up the US$2,580 fine for stone-throwing, which is what most of this juvenile criminal element that survives rubber-coated steel bullets and toxic inhalation of suffocation gases is caught for. From a more general philosophic perspective informed by a deeper knowledge of the region's history, these folks should thank their neighbours that they are (for the moment) still alive. As Edward Luttwak, a distinguished historian, put it in an erudite letter to the Times Literary Supplement (19 February 2016 p.6) while expressing admiration for the restraint Israel had exercised in its so called assault on Gaza, in killing just 551 children,and permanently disabling only 1,000 of the 3,374 wounded kids,'if a Palestinian state had been established in 1947 or any other time, by now it would have machine-gunned many more Palestinians than the Israelis have every killed.' They're getting kid-glove treatment compared to what history would have dealt out to them had they ruled themselves, and should be grateful for the restraint. An Amora like Simeon bar Yochai must be writhing in his grave at our restraint in these unfortunate circumstances (Talmud Sofrim 15:10). Come to think of it, in this earthquake-prone zone, something ought to be done to calm things down. Nishidani (talk) 17:17, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Great analysis Nish, very insightful. Captures the brutality, viciousness, criminality, insanity and massive hypocrisy of the colonialists.

Does WP have an article along the lines of Imprisonment and torture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? If not, it may be a good idea to start such an article, using, among many other sources, the two sources I included above, and the sources in your comment above, and high-quality analysis from additional reliable sources, hopefully as high in quality as the quality of the insights/ analysis in your comment.

Ijon Tichy (talk) 13:50, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. The problem in the I/P area is not making more new articles, but improving the existing ones, which cover most things, more extensively (and of course my own views and analysis would have no place there). What really worries me is the amount of known facts and material generally existing, that never even gets into reliable secondary sources, or at least in those I examine to see if the topic is handled. In any case, we're into spring, and I intend to enjoy it. Apart from a few remaining duties, I'm thinking of taking a leaf out of your commonsensical book, and mucking about more in the non-wiki world. This was impressed on me the other day when I noted the kaleidoscopic imbrication at one focal point of my gaze of a colour mosaic of a thrush, a bee and an admiral butterfly all crossing the same point more or less simultaneously from different directions, only at different depths within the garden. See those things often enough, and reading ought to take a back seat. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 14:08, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Enjoyed reading your description of the bird, bee and butterfly. I have been enjoying the wildlife around here. And some of the cherry trees around here are already bearing delicious fruit.

You have been doing great work on WP. Keep up the good work.

• If Not Now, When? Young Jews Refuse to Stay Silent on the Occupation This Passover

• A quick tour of water and the Arab-Israeli conflict. From 2003, but appears to still be relevant today. Written by Franklin C. Spinney

Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:21, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

I've followed Frank Spinney's articles for several years, since he retired (if only because he did a sensible think and played Ulysses round the Mediterrean in a small yacht, a very sane thing to do). A lot of ex-CIA folks say interesting things afterwards! Thanks also for the other. I'll offer in exchange these all too brief remarks by a fine writer Michael Chabon, recorded at Hebron, where he had the same reaction more or less as did Mario Vargas Llosa (see Tel Rumeida page)- Naomi Zeveloff Q&A 'Michael Chabon Talks Occupation, Injustice and Literature After Visit to West Bank,' The Forward April 24, 2016. Best Nishidani (talk) 20:03, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I guess you've caught 'Varoufakis and Chomsky,', but if not, it's here. I particularly liked the former's definition of modern economics as 'a religion with equations'.Nishidani (talk) 12:32, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, modern economics is mostly pseudo-science. It is almost entirely a cover, a fig-leaf, a Kashrut certificate, for the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches.

You may be interested in this: Musician Roger Waters and a documentary film director discuss their documentary on Israel's Hasbarah efforts. (See the right-hand-side panel for all three parts of the conversation.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:59, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

IjonTichyIjonTichy The above is a disturbing post. Classic anti-semitic tropes populate the wording.I am sorry Nish, but I have been reflecting on the above for over 24 hours, and I must protest. Simon Irondome (talk) 02:19, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

No need to apologize, Simon. I'm logging in late from another computer as my own is being reengineered to rid it of the totalitarian intrusive claws of a self-installed Windows10 update which, despite my 95% successful attempt to get rid of it, still persists in little tricks to get me back on (their) updated ('date' means anus in Australian dialect) side. As to Tichy's post, I didn't see it in context, as antisemitic, unless the kashrut certificate is taken to signal that the kleptocracy has Jewish connections. An idiom like that would come naturally to someone like T who grew up, I assume, in Israel. We all have differently sensitized noses for these things, and even here in writing 'noses' I immediately realized that my choice of 'noses' could easily lend itself to a negative construal ('And the Lord said unto Moses...') implying an antisemitic mindset. Language is a death trap to the best of us (suffice it to follow the debate between Christopher Ricks and Julius re T S Eliot's antisemitism) However, when I wrote it, I had in mind Bloch's beautiful words on the task of an historian being that of have an acute ability to scent his prey and track it down. If 'kleptocracy', well that is almost the default word to describe post-Soviet Russia, and kleptocratic is fairly objective for describing the way the multi-trillion dollar private debt crashes in 2008 onwards were transferred to the public debit ledger, most recently in the absolutely hallucinating case of Greece, which has been utterly bankrupted for generations by 'loans' that are actually rerouted back to Germany and France etc.etc. To think, everytime a kleptocratic 'rort' of these epochal kinds is duly noted that the Protocols are in the background of the annotator's thinking, is dangerous

In short, saying that 'modern economics is a figleaf or whatever for 'the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches, ' seems to me both empirical and well-grounded theoretically (Michael Hudson, Piketty etc.). Most people don't think that way.There's nothing 'Jewish' about it: indeed, it is merely a late extension in terms of financial 'engineering' of the logic that impelled very unJewish empires like those of Great Britain and the United States to extract wealth from the rest of the world - this occurred formatively when Jews were still excluded from the said establishments.

Antisemitism can be very subtle, but diagnosing its pathologies is getting very difficult perhaps because it is now thrown around (I exclude yourself from this: you have proven consistently lynx-eyed in your discriminations here) so endlessly, not a little abetted by the narrative obsession in so many Israeli and diaspora newspapers of trying to highlight some ostensible 'Jewish' angle in anything from people in the news, Mickey Mouse, falafel, to Superman, comic books, beauty contests, gay society, whatever - I take this all as a sign of the negative effect of diaspora traditions- an unfamiliarity with what it is like to be a nationalist, nationalism being organically natural in a new state like Israel to create a common identity, since the diaspora experience was basically one of being on the receiving end of other nationalists-this made Jews great exponents of universal human rights) The sum effect is that anytime anything comes up for discussion a constituency is been unwittingly attuned to construe it ethnically, and read it for any potential political innuendoes or susurrations from the old whispering echo chambers that 'lie' in all historically mindful readers' minds. This worries me a lot.And I have always taken Tichy's exchanges as a reflection of similar concerns by someone 'on the inside'. Best Nishidani (talk) 14:01, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

As all can see, I have removed words from the original posting which are dramatic and unnecessary. I have forgotten how to strike out comments, and I have to be out in a bit to the bank to pay off some of my creditors in a somewhat painful monthly ritual. (Oh the irony, based on some of the above) so I cannot trawl through endless guides on how to do it. The diffs are there for all to see. The post is unfortunately worded at first sight, and not in character with the editor who made them, the many positive contributions here of which I am aware of. I almost never use such a line, as you are well aware Nish, and others who "know my style". You have more than adequately summed up my concerns in your above post. Your friend and colleague, Simon. Irondome (talk) 14:32, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Dear Irondome, am I correct in assuming you do not read Hebrew? Or, if you do, that you don't spend much time reading Hebrew-language mass media, including e.g. Israeli online newspapers and magazines, Israeli online TV and radio, Israeli videos on YouTube, books written by Israeli authors, etc? Because, as Nishidani tried to explain above, the term 'Providing a Kashrut Certificate' is commonly used in Israel as a general expression to denote 'bestowing legitimacy upon.' The term is used often (or at least not rarely) by average people in the street as well as by writers, journalists etc in a wide variety of contexts that have nothing to do with any religion.

(Of course, there is nothing wrong with not reading Hebrew, and Hebrew language skills are not a requirement, nor do I believe that they should ever be a formal requirement, for editing WP in the I-P area.)

In other words:

• The vast majority of Christian economists, in the history of economics as well as today, worked or work to provide a cover, a fig-leaf, a Kashrut certificate, a Halal certificate, to bestow legitimacy on the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches. A relatively small (but perhaps non-trivial) minority of brave, courageous Christian economists worked or work today to strongly oppose this looting.
• The vast majority of Muslim economists, in the history of economics as well as today, worked or work to provide a cover, a fig-leaf, a Kashrut certificate, a Halal certificate, to bestow legitimacy on the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches. A relatively small (but perhaps non-trivial) minority of courageous, brave Muslim economists worked or work today to strongly oppose this looting.
• The vast majority of Jewish economists, in the history of economics as well as today, worked or work to provide a cover, a fig-leaf, a Kashrut certificate, a Halal certificate, to bestow legitimacy on the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches. A relatively small (but perhaps non-trivial) minority of brave, courageous Jewish economists worked or work today to strongly oppose this looting.
• The same applies to all other major religions in the history of humanity. In other words, providing a fig-leaf/ cover is independent of religion.
• Of course the picture is even more complicated. I am not blaming the vast majority of economists for the severe historical and current problems with the global socio-economic system. Economists are just people like you and me, just trying to survive and thrive and feed and house and clothe themselves and their families. And it is not only the economists who are providing cover for the global theft of the public wealth, it is practically every person who has ever lived or who lives now: the prevailing global socio-economic system is embedded deeply inside all of us, and we are all both victims as well as perpetrators, of the global system.

You may also be interested in watching this scene from Network (film). In my view, it's the most important scene in an excellent film that has many important scenes. In fact I strongly recommend renting and watching the entire film.

Best regards, and continued enjoyment and happiness in life (hope you are enjoying watching the exciting UEFA football, although I wish Iceland would have won it all ...), Ijon Tichy (talk) 23:49, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Your words are appreciated IjonTichyIjonTichy. I freely admit to overreacting to your well-meant comment. I was feeling thin skinned that day. It happens. I find your comments very interesting. I am only beginning to study Hebrew, so I fear I could barely struggle through the simplest paragraph at the moment. Shame on me, but give it a year, and I may be able to understand the nuances of simpler newspaper articles and the like. My ambition is to read an Amoz Oz novel in the original. Then I will understand. I hope all is well with you and yours. Hopefully we can discuss your points further very soon. Nish is a patient host so hopefully we can expound further. With all good wishes, Simon. Irondome (talk) 01:02, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Simon, no offense taken. I fully realize your intentions are pure and honorable. And I admire your aim to learn Hebrew - it is not an easy language to learn at any age, especially not at a later stage in life. When we immigrated to Israel many decades ago, I was only 5 years old and I learned to read and write Hebrew relatively quickly, my older siblings had a somewhat harder time learning to read and write the language although they eventually mastered it, and my parents had a very difficult time learning the language, although they eventually learned it well enough to understand most of what they were reading. My parents attended an Ulpan, which helped. Best wishes to you and yours, Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:25, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

There are some languages which, if we don't learn them, leave part of our potential selfs unread, to our loss. I've always felt that way with Hebrew. I could hitchhike round Israel, and even the Gaza Strip with a grasp of the idiomatic basics a half a century ago, but since then, when I have time, reserve it for parsing the Tanakh. I really should pull my finger out and do that extraordinary idiom's claim on me more justice. I helped a sister-in-law several years older than myself, with it a decade ago, and now her daily practice leaves me ashamed (joyfully). Pity that her being only Jewish on her father's side makes her, despite these valiant efforts in poverty, not formally (as opposed to informally) accepted as one of the tribe. So, S, do apply yourself. These moments of our day, stressed or otherwise, take on a different tincture of light when we recite to ourselves verses and words that take us out of mean time into a different universe. Best to both of you.Nishidani (talk) 08:04, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Ijon. This is stuff we've known for 13 years (parallel universes of modern information - the engineered moodosphere via the press vs. the ground, and underlying political calculations), but I've never seen it so meticulously documented as it is here. If you haven't see it, Jeffrey St. Clair How the Iraq War Was Sold CounterPunch July 8, 2016.Nishidani (talk) 15:25, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

I would also recommend Eliot Weinberger, 'They could have picked...,' The London Review of Books, Vol. 38 No. 15 28 July 2016. It's a useful wake-up corrective for those of us who focus so intensely on Israel's problems, to be reminded that the Glicks and Qarims are small beer compared to the 'mainstream' lunacy in the Empire's 'Christian' heartland whose greatest pathologists are, perhaps coincidentally but nonetheless, Jewish, like the doyen of them all, Noam Chomsky. The diff is that that tradition has the language of Mein Kampf too close at home not to escape its resonance in the rhetoric of these little, for the moment, avatars of Hitlerism. Why is it in this harsh climate, my small orchard and vegetable plots promise abundance, apart from the perfume? RegardsNishidani (talk) 16:51, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the links to the articles. Indeed, these articles are informative, and frightening, and humorous all at the same time in that they expose the insanity of human so-called "society".

You may be interested in the following:

• The New European Fascists, by Chris Hedges. "Poland offers a frightening example of the right-wing populism sweeping through many nations. Neoliberalism is wrecking economies, creating rage among the working class, devastating cultural institutions and eroding liberal democracy across Europe and in the United States." (And, may I add, in Israel, in the occupied West Bank, in Egypt, in many Arab countries, and in fact in many countries around the globe ...)
• Why many poor white people have voted for Trump. Interview with J. D. Vance, a book author. Vance is a Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty of Appalachia. Offers good insights.
• Ur Fascism, by Umberto Eco in the NY Review of Books. From 1995 but still very relevant today.

Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:14, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Bit late getting back to this. I actually missed it, with intervening edits being made by others. Thanks for the links, esp. Umberto Eco. I discovered I have a trace of the Ur-Fascist - 1/14th of me corresponds to no.11, since I often imagine that it would be useful, when dying, to use the inevitability for some useful end. Talking of fascists, I see Philippe Sands, has just reviewed the evidence for Bliar in A Grand and Disastrous Deceit, LRB Vol. 38 No. 15,28 July 2016 pp.9-11. buried inside there's a good joke of the Iron Lady having dinner with her aides. They enter a restaurant, and the waiter asks her:

Waitress: ‘Would you like to order, Sir?’

Thatcher: ‘Yes, I will have a steak.’

Waitress: ‘How’d you like it?’

Thatcher: ‘Raw please.’

Waitress: ‘And what about the vegetables?’

Thatcher: ‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me.’

That pretty much sums up modern politicians. A megalomaniac surrounded by brownnosers. There's one exception. Elizabeth Wilmshurst.Nishidani (talk) 15:21, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

This joke comes from an episode, some thirty years ago, of the much-missed Spitting Image. RolandR (talk) 19:10, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Roland. The fact that The Simpsons anticipated Trump's victory, and the Putin connection, 16 years ago, together with this vignette, is proof of the old rule of thumb. If you want to understand the world, read comics or watch the best comedians, or parodists of genius. They are almost invariably way ahead of the commentariat by several years. The reason for that is that, like reality itself, they are not bound by rules of 'common sense'. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 20:10, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Roland, thanks. I was not aware of Spitting Image. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I enjoyed very much watching the Spitting Image Election Special 1987. Absolutely brilliant satire/ parody, adhering to the highest production values in writing, directing, craftsmanship, etc. And still highly relevant today, for example the most-recent bread-and-circuses affair in my neck of the woods. Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:17, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

I highly recommend The Onion. I've enjoyed reading their twitter feed every day over the last 6 years, they do a great job satirizing and parodying many key aspects of human society. Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:15, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Loved the joke involving the Iron Lady.

The following is interesting: Green Party of Canada Challenges Israeli Apartheid. "Green Party shadow cabinet member Dimitri Lascaris says the passage of the resolution in support of BDS could embolden other Canadian parties to take on the occupation." Also discusses a second, separate resolution by the Green Party, regarding the Jewish National Fund (JNF). --Ijon Tichy (talk) 03:58, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

An interesting article: The Cold War Is Over. Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:10, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Yes indeed. I can't think of many other populations, save modern Palestinians, who have been comprehensively fucked over by history as have the Russians. I'm sure they must have a word as evocative as sumud, but can't think of one. Mind you I'm losing touch and have been boozing and shoving the snout into the feeding trough for several hours in a farmlet built on top of a Roman villa. Best Nishidani (talk) 22:16, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Glad you are enjoying life. Keep up the merriment. Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:42, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

Opinion: Russia is now top wheat exporter, proving sanctions won’t work, by Amotz Asa-El. By the way, the author has a Hebrew name, are you familiar with his work? Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:11, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

I"ve seen his works several times. He literally write in every single news paper/website he can. I never really understood what is his political agenda (didn't read too much of his articles) but it seems he is in the Israeli center-left side. He was the main editor of the Jerusalem Post, which is a mostly right-wing newspaper, but he was there ten years ago and at that time I could barely read so I don't know how was JP then. Anyway his articles usually full of historical references and examples instead of straight forward comments on spesific current events. He seems like one of the "good guys".--Bolter21 (talk to me) 18:31, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

(ec.) Thanks Stav. On the button, and informative as often. No, not familiar with him, IJ. I never take note of names like that, Hebrew or Arabic, except when the argument is specifically focused on the I/P area, the only place where often it can often assume a potential background relevance. It sounds like the forecasts given the Russian economy back in 1914: in fact perhaps the key factor deciding Germany for war were calculations that unless the rapidly industrializing neighbor to its East were destroyed, it would, given the developmental indexes, outproduce Germany in 2 decades. One point. We get a lot of eastern grain that is contaminated, even radioactive, through southern Italian ports. I once read in the 1990s that 16% of the Russian landscape was toxically affected. Indeed, I joined a programme to take in for several months a year children from the areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout. We had to feed them a special diet for 3 months,to rid them of the poison they absorbed from eating produce from local farms. Our child got on well with me, except for one dispute over which he was passionate - the superiority of a Lada to a Ferrari, but had nightmares suggesting he believed my wife was part of a plot to steal him from his mother. Jeezus. Didn't work out, but he went back with enough currency sewn into his trousers to tide them over for a year or so.Nishidani (talk) 18:43, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

Imperialism and Class in the Arab World. Published in Monthly Review by Max Ajl, a friend of Vittorio Arrigoni. -- Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:41, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

Very good review, because it invites at least two rereadings (not that it's hard to read - I grew up with that style of analysis, just covers so many complex issues). I'll keep my eye out for Max Ajl's work, so thanks for the tip. Nishidani (talk) 19:10, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

Sorry to hear about the passing of your cat. I'm the proud daddy of two small dogs which I love dearly, and you have my sympathies. How do you feel about your cat?

Here are some articles that I think you may find interesting:

• Israel and Academic Freedom: a Closed Book, published in CounterPunch Sept. 30, 2016
• Elon Musk unveils plan to colonise Mars, Sept 27, 2016
• Excellent, in-depth analysis and criticism of humanity's plans to colonize the cosmos, published in Monthly Review in 2010, still highly relevant today. And an additional article by the same authors from 2008, again still as relevant today as it was 8 years ago.

Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:24, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

Not quite my cat. I have only one, 17 years old, with Alzheimer's and a massive Garfieldian appetite but a local woman, somewhat aspergeristic, used to buy creatures to cater to her daughter's whims, keep them in the house, then throw them out after a week. Evicted baby turtles and kittens ended up in our gardens, so I looked after them, reluctantly. 'Pirate' was a famished strayling who insisted on pouncing in to put on the nosebag when food was placed outside for the other two. Aggressive of necessity, ferocious, it eventually was tamed, and just as, after 1 year, I managed to stroke it, and it stopped hunting and just slept around the gardens till breakfast or dinner. I should have read the behavioural change and taken it to the vet, but it was quietly dying, I now see. We found it under a shrub while gardening, scenting the stench of death. It joins another 12 animals in a cemetery near my vegetable patch. I'm not an ailurophile. I remember, on reading the great Vladimir Georgiev 's Introduction to the History of the Indo-European languages in 1981, stopping in my mental tracks at p.232 at seeing him gloss the Etruscan word krankru as 'cat'. Very odd, I thought. Cats didn't exist in Italy at that time. Indeed, as anyone of his stature should have known, the Latin word feles from which we derive 'feline' actually refers to species like the polecat or weasel, which Romans kept as housepets. Indeed A.E. Housman once wrote a witheringly funny review lambasting a German scholar for reading the line, illic caelureos . .(venerantur) at Juvenal's Satires 15.7:'there (in Egypt) the heavenly ones are worshipped'. That was the received manuscript reading but had long been emended to aeluros ('There cats . . are worshipped'). Since there was no native name for the foreign cat Juvenal took the term from Greek αἴλουρος, and monks, unfortunately the text never fell before the eyes of the anonymous Irish monk who wrote the exquisite Pangur Bán, transcribing the text throughout the ages altered the strange word by conjecturing it was a corruption of the more familiar 'caeruleus' (the bluish ones, the sky creatures, gods)

The one kitten I took into the house, when I found its gravid mother shivering in the snow at Christmas, and gave it sanctuary as it went into labour, has been raised as a dog. My first impulse was to shut the door, and leave it to its own resources, but my conscience and wife prevailed. The former because I was raised where cats were disliked, so much so that I once, aged 7,witnessed a gang of kids failing to drown a batch of kittens in a laundry tub: they struggled hard, clawing the water. So they took them outside and smashed them against the wall. A buried memory, of grief, came to remind me I was obliged to make amends, even though I hadn’t been involved. All silent bystanders to evil must work it through, make recompense in the future.

Thanks for the links. I actually follow Elon Musk's work regularly, the cars and transit system are highly intelligent: going to Mars is stupid. As a pub-crawler told me in 1969 while watching the moon-landing: 'if they'd spent that money making life on earth decent, . . ' I replied along the lines,'Theology, and it's a theological project, has a longer hold on our imagination than humanism, and now we’re seeing its secular reincarnation’. Pat the pups for me.Nishidani (talk) 20:00, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

"We have not approached the time when we may speak to each other, but in the mornings sometimes I have heard, echoing far off, the sound of a trumpet. It is apparent that nations cannot exist for us. They are the playthings of children, such toys as children break from boredom and weariness. The branch of a tree is my country. My freedom sleeps in a mulberry bush. My country is in the shivering legs of a little lost dog." Sherwood Anderson, A New Testament (1927)

By the way, both my pups are rescue dogs. They are sending their love to their uncle Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 05:00, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

• Israel and Academic Freedom: a Closed Book
• U.S. Admits Israel Is Building Permanent Apartheid Regime — Weeks After Giving It $38 Billion
• New Discovery About Persians in Ancient Japan Generates Excitement

--Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:33, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for that one, I haven't been following the Japanese papers recently (by the way, some of the world's foremost experts on the North Eastern tribes of Australia and their languages are Japanese, god bless'em). Newspapers need sensations, I guess, but the fact that Sassanids were in Japan has been known for a century in scholarship at least, and was duly noted in the Nihon Shoki (720). Mind you, it's very important confirmation. We underestimate in our popular imagination how integrated trading was in antiquity: Egyptian lapis lazuli from the Pamir or Afghanistan region found i9ts way to pre-dynastic Egypt. China got their amber through Roman intermediaries. The Tarim mummies and Tocharians attest to viable I.E. speaking linkages. Christopher Beckwith's Empires of the Silk Road, steps out at times on a limb, but it's as good a guide as any to the Eurasian globailization in pre-globalized times. Thanks.(Tell the rescue pups to practice retrieving granpa Nish from the morasses he gets himself into!)Nishidani (talk) 19:10, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment, including the links. It's all very interesting.

What are your thoughts on this: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures (7 Oct 2016)

The pups are saying hello to granpa Nish. Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:21, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

(Wagging my tales in return:)) Generally I think that is odd. Terentius’s line in one of his plays, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,’Being a man myself, I regard nothing human to be beyond my understanding.' Bi/trilingualism was very common at the historical crossroads, and among tribal societies all over the world, even markedly different in moeurs, so that many 'primitives' could grasp societies that were otherwise profoundly different from the one they lived in. One could write a book that wariness of strangers, while natural, only took on its plenitude of incomprehension when accelerated wealth accrual led to elite isolates which, once their power and the reach of their centripetal imagination consolidated over centuries to become an aristocratic sense of cosmic privilege, lost all purchase on the countervailing instinct of sympathy.

Montaigne on reading all of those Spanish reports, extracted a fundamental conclusion which one can find in Book 1, No 31 of the Essays, generally takes the line that our own customs are, seen in reverse perspective, just as weird, bizarre and aleatory as those which the Christians deplored among 'savages'. We deplored their rites of cannibalism, while going to church every day to dine on the body of God, in the communion service, etc. What makes civilized violence (from the Aztecs to us) so much more incomprehensible is that it doesn’t consist in just killing your enemies pellmell, as in a tribal fight. No. It is justified by a whole series of rationales, racial, strategic, theological (the Book of Joshua is foundational). We develop a metaphysics of murder, and give it legal cover by erudite distinctions about just wars, extrajudicial killings, turning a blind eye to genocides caused to people by the collateral damage of our own vibrant economic system's developmental impetus or 'civilising mission' (the French colonial army killed a third of Algeria's population from 1830 to 1880). We maxim-gunned 10,000-15,000 tribesman in an hour or two at Omdurman, for the loss of two score men; a few years later von Trotha wiped out up to 100,000 Herero tribesman and, as if that wasn't enough, Roger Casement, whether reporting on South America or the Congo, exposed the industrial and imperial genocides underway, as King 11 Leopold (just take a look at that fatuous photo and compare the man inside the party costume to the photo portrait of Sitting Bull. ) to entertained European royalty while his men killed at a minimum 1,000,000 Congolese, etc,etc,. I guess WW1 was a relief to the third world - for a brief interim, the mass murders stopped abroad as the whites decimated each other. I can understand murder at the elementary level: it’s massacres for a sophisticated reason which are odd. Not the massacres themselves, but the self-delusional mechanisms people who engage in great civilization's mass killings to provide a warrant or charter for what they are doing (I disagree with Jared Diamond's recent middle class book on this). If you read Steven Runciman’s Crusades, and then read Prescott’s account of the Conquests in Mexico and Peru, the ‘incomprehension that anthropologist feels for Aztecs is not a mater of a psychocultural divide, it’s just that he hasn’t familiarized himself with history, and Western history, or the obvious fact that there’s a little Nazi infant hidden even in the most civilized person, ready to morph given the ‘right’ circumstances.

I was much taken by Marvin Harris’s books, esp. Cannibals and Kings when it first came out, and his cultural Marxist theory applied to cannibalism. Have a look at what he says of the Aztecs pp.99ff.He makes the point that ‘The Jews, Christians, the Moslems, the Hindus, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Roman all went to war to please their gods’(p.107) and provides ecological constraint rationales for things like Central American cannibalism.

You guessed it. No decent film on the television tonight! Cheers pal, and give the pups an extra pat (not a cow pat! what a dreadful thought). (As kids, our first ammunition was cow pats, fresh crap crusted slightly under the sun, which you could scoop up and smash into the other gangkids' faces. We'd come home, happy, covered in shit, greeted by my pharmacist mother's smile- She thought roughing it up, exposing one's self to bacterial filth, was part of a good education, and wasn't far wrong, despite the pong). Nishidani (talk) 21:23, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

Calmécac had it survived the Spaniards or been taken over by the Jesuits, might have vied with Morocco’s Al Quaraouiyine as the oldest university of the world (forgot to copy and paste this last bit). Nishidani (talk) 21:47, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

I agree. Deeply understanding other cultures is sometimes hard, but not impossibly hard. One can understand cultures, that may appear at first as extremely foreign to one's own culture, if one is willing and able to spend considerable amount of time on carefully studying high-quality sources, learning the language(s) of the foreign culture, and, if possible, traveling extensively within the foreign countries and spending considerable time living and striking roots (at least for a year or more) in the foreign lands.

Arabic translators did far more than just preserve Greek philosophy (4 Nov 2016), by Peter Adamson in Aeon Magazine. -- Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:03, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

I like to think of it this way: every one of the 10,000 historical cultures was or is a form of human possibility and constraint. It follows that absorption in any other culture than one's own can open doors that are locked if one remains monocultural. Great civilizations run on a paradox; they are promiscuous by the eclecticism intrinsic to imperial overreach - since they must absorb a manifold of distinct regional cultural realities, yet tend to orthodoxy when the politics of power at the centre feels threatened by the centrifugal vectors of the accommodated diversities. It's not however that one finds something out there not available to one's own sociocultural backdrop: Lévi-Strauss in his Mythologiques essentially concluded that the devices of 'savage thought' were still with us, not overcome by progress, but simply reformulated. The imbrication of social and cultural categories with natural taxonomies is constant - we just think we have gotten beyond the apparent oneiric randomness of primitive thought because we have a technology that beguiles us into believing we are cognitive creatures that have made some quantum leap out of the historical past. Reading ethnography, one is constantly struck by the wild blindness of explorers: they die where natives thrive, they cannot read the landscape for the telltale signs of how to survive in it, signs that are meticulously archived in the ecology of native lore. Burke and Wills hauled 20 tons of equipment across central Australia, with food stocks calculated to last 2 years, and died of starvation, in an area where the Yandruwandha were living intelligently off the desert's recondite riches. The stupid bastards just didn't do the obvious things, like earning good will, learning the languages, changing their diet, etc. The !Kung-San of the Kalahari classify over a hundred insect species, and found close to 20 edible, while others have medicinal functions, and where early travelers saw a desert void of food, their native taxonomy closely classified several hundred plants, each with its ethnobotanical uses, all of course encoded in a different discursive form than what we are accustomed to think in terms of. I was going to write about the failed follow-through of Hellenism's philosophical impact on the Palestinian Talmud, as opposed to the Bavli, then Maimonides's failure, reflecting a broader Islamic missed opportunity, to take Aristotle's syllogistic system on board (monocultures etc) and got distracted, probably because I've had a long day's reading and need to rest up with some film. Thanks for the link and have a good weekend. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 20:47, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the insights.

When you get a chance, I'll be interested to read your thoughts about the failed follow-through of Hellenism's impact on the Palestinian Talmud.

Additionally, your thoughts on the following? Leonard Cohen Sang About Our Love Affair With Death and Destruction (14 November 2016). A short video tribute to Cohen's work over the last 5 decades. "The brooding singer-songwriter tried to humanize society's darkest wishes, and lamented its inability to ever be at peace." The Real News (4:29 minutes)

Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:24, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

50 years ago I read a comment by Moses Hadas raising the hypothesis of a decisive influence of certain Platonic texts like the (otherwise) draconian Laws. He had in mind the minute regimentation of every element in one's life according to an established tradition set down by philosophers/sages. Given that rabbinical literature took on board some 3,000 loanwords from classical languages, it still strikes me as odd that so little is done to try and reconstruct the lost historical hinterland, esp. in the ascendency of Hellenism over the world where at least the Palestinian Talmud developed. Some have argued that there are traces there of a syllogistic modus operandi, not evidenced in the Bavli,for this very reason, but that had failed to gain much traction. Abrahamic religions of course are systems of advanced irrationality whose function is to detribalize the Neolithic world by making its spiritual heritage more amenable to communities living within the powerful jurisdiction and statist universalism of empires. So it's particularly interesting to see how they cope with propositional logic, which, since Pythagoras, has raised the problem of the truth status of axioms. All three had creative skirmishes with the Greek tradition: Christianity tried to meld the two, and we have theology under pontifical and synodic authority; the Islamic world had a major moment of creative contact, evinced by the Muʿtazila only to suffer, devastatingly at least in terms of science, from a failure of nerve. Judaism, having, aside from the probable Khazar experiment,a role of minoritarian subordination to secular authority, just withdrew into an cognitive enclave where the chain of tradition trumped logical curiosity, though it retained an indirect contact with it through familiarity with Arabic translations of Greek works (e.g. Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, etc). The results more or less, from a classical angle, in the case of doctrinal Judaism, are more or less as Israel Shahak set forth. Despite the tragical nature of the necessity to dispossess and destroy another people in order to reenter history in the most imbecilic form of normalcy, it is fascinating to observe the utterly dysfunctional δυσκρασὶα (the inexorable discrepancy between ingredients forced to assume a form of amalgamation) between a modernist project pinioned on secular rationality, and an identitarian value base drawing on an ethics that is devoid of any purchase on logical principles. But, it's late here, and the ghosts of the antipodes are murmuring discontent over this whiteman's distraction. . .

As for Leonard Cohen, he's never been on my radar: I read several poems in the 60s that seemed pretty much in line with a lot of bad work of that period. Several songs remain in memory, but, again, so do a thousand others from that golden age. I guess I'll have to review my prejudices by getting some time to relisten to part of his corpus on youtube.Nishidani (talk) 20:44, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment. Very insightful, as always. I am still in the process of reading and re-reading your comment and trying to understand all the very interesting nuances, issues, complexities and insights. I will comment further in the future.

Your comment motivated me to read the WP article on Israel Shahak. (I was not previously aware of the work of this wonderful, amazing human being, thanks for bringing his work to my attention.) I don't know when is the last time you may have read the WP article, but I've read it for the first time, and to me, it reads mostly (although not entirely) as an WP:Attack page on Shahak and his work. I looked briefly at the history page, and it appears that several editors whom the community has recently determined to be highly disruptive or otherwise very problematic (e.g. the blocked sockpuppet Epson Salts and several other civil POV pushers) have basically turned the article into (largely, although not entirely) a piece of crap. I don't have the time to work on the article to bring it into compliance with WP policies, I am wondering if you, or anybody who reads this comment, may hopefully have the time, motivation and inclination to improve the article to make it adhere to NPOV (and other policies), because in its current form, this article is a disgrace to WP.

Thanks for sharing some of your perspectives on Leonard Cohen. Your ideas are thought-provoking.

On a somewhat different topic, I highly recommend these two recent, insightful interviews with economist/ historian Michael Hudson: Part 1 and part 2.

Last but not least, the puppies send their love to their grandpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 14:21, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Off to Germany again, and rushing to get a few notes into a backlog of stubs I have material for but haven' had much time to work on. I tried to edit the Shahak article into some semblance of neutrality some years ago but was hindered by an admin at that time distinguished for his brilliant wikilawyering on behalf of the cause. Shahak was an exceptionally insightful and erudite man. Our User:RolandR knew him personally and can attest to his humanity. You can download both his books from the net, even though unfortunately some copies are on anti-Semitic sites, but that will tell you nothing in itself. I recommend a close reading of them: to me they read like a version of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, a formative book for me as a youth, with Plato being replaced by rabbinical tradition. There was nothing new here: what Shahak did regarding the ghetto mentality of the arbitrators of the rabbinical chain of tradition has been done hundreds of times by scholars working on the irrationality of Christianity. One should be careful here: it is one thing to make a metacritique of a specific cultural code or intellectual tradition, another to dismiss its varied members as all implicated in a delusional system of collective scotoma. Marx, it is only slowing emerging, had a prescient intuition into the core end logic of capitalism, and found many eminent, deeply humane acolytes. Attempts to legislate his worldview into a political programme where, were, predictably (as he himself foresaw in 1854,) a disaster. That is true of all the Abrahamic (and other) religions: it's a paradox of humanistic, as opposed to scientific thought, that genuine wisdom and profound readings of human nature came bubble up from thinkers whose overall weltanschauung is irrational. One sees that studying the anthropology of 'primitive' tribes - it's a good exercise to absorb the ethnography of a 'backward' people sufficiently to assimilate their basic rules, and then walk round any city streets and gaze into the faces, minds ands manners of our fellow citizens, and suddenly twig how bizarre we are, how random and contingent our ostensible metropolitan 'rationality' is. One can learn from that rabbi or this imam, or Pope Francesco, or the present Dalai Lama, things that a hyper-rationalist or scientist knows nothing of, though from a higher perspectival angle, science, and the rules of logical method, must rule our better wits, with religion, and much philosophy deriving from it, merely a camouflaged echo of an ancient ghost-dance (there's a great book on this by Weston La Barre).

Nuzzle the pups. Best Nishidani (talk) 15:31, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

ps. that ostensible disproof by Immanuel Jakobovits is of course a spectacular lie: the situation generally was as Shahak said it was, regardless of the incident. One can ascertain this very simply, by googling the relevant topic. Unfortunately, at least at that time I edited, there seemed to be no RS connecting the ban with the Shahak incident, and a lot of malicious recycling of the pseudo-rebuttal.Nishidani (talk) 15:42, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

I've lived in Jerusalem for a number of years, and yes, you are right, the situation was, generally, as Shahak described it. Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:15, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Does Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt?, Foreign Policy (magazine). "A new study has energized a century-long debate at the heart of China's national identity." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:15, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

The only interesting datum there is Sun Weidong's note that the chemical composition of ancient Chinese bronzes resembles that of Egyptian bronzes. The rest is pretty weird. In ancient cultures metal-working was a closely guarded secret, and figures with mastery of it were regarded as shamanic, men of power and dangerous, so diffusion wasn't rapid unless the craftsmen migrated, or were captured, and sent elsewhere. There was an Indo-European element in western China, and one theory,very minoritarian, holds that the Shang were not speakers of a Sinic language, as were the later Zhou. But the idea of a Hyksos link looks wild. Strange things do happen, though. The 'isolated' aaboriginal peoples of northern Australia were bartering trepan they fished for goods with sailors for the north and it ended up in the fish markets of imperial China. In any case, controversies that wash every idea about the past in the lyes of nationalism are not worth following. I'll try a thought experiment tonight, and mentally transmit two juicy vitaminized biscuits to your pups. If they don't end up in there, put it down to the waning powers of their senescent grandpa. Have a great festive season. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:05, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh, and, following up on Leonard Cohen, I found his line:'Everyone knows the war is over/Everyone knows the good guys lost' instantly memorable (particularly in the aftermath of the victory (if predictable, as I argued with some US friends much to their disbelief, or rather conviction I was just being geriatrically contrarian, not only in terms of Murphy's law) of that wanker with the dopey haircut.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Greetings Nish. I liked the brief (4:30 min) analysis of Leonard Cohen's work. Cohen was right, the losers on both sides of practically every war in the last 12,000 years of human history are well known in advance even before the war begins: it's mostly the bottom 90% of the population on all sides, while the top 1% smile all the way to the bank. I am not an expert in poetry and you may be right and Cohen may have been a mediocre poet, but he was right about the fact that the vast majority of the global human population is (and has almost always been) basically completely, thoroughly fucked and will likely remain fucked for many more years and decades. Human so-called 'society' is completely insane and has been so for the last 12,000 years. On the other hand we are also completely sane and rational at the same time. (I am slowly discovering that almost all great, complex, multi-layered truths in life are a paradox. Often, both the very complex thing/ topic/ item/ issue and its exact opposite are true and correct at the same time, at least to some degree ...) We can't even bring ourselves to talk about - and more importantly, make big decisions and commitments about - the big problems that are slowly but steadily destroying our lives - e.g. gross human overpopulation, massive overconsumption, enormous inequality/ inequity, Intensive animal farming, global warming/ environmental destruction/ loss of biodiversity, and much more ... At the same time, life is still beautiful and offers many good and enjoyable things e.g. love, friendship, enjoyable work, pursuit of beauty, art, science, pursuit of novel physical, emotional and intellectual adventure/ exploration/ knowledge, pursuit of excellence, and many more pleasurable and enjoyable and deeply satisfying relationships and activities ... In short, life is a piece of excrement and a piece of paradise, and everything in-between, all at the same time ...

Wishing you and yours good health and continued happiness. And keep up the good work on Misplaced Pages.

The pups received the biscuits and quickly wolfed them down and licked their lips afterwards. They asked me to relay a big thank-you to grandpa Nish. (I dressed them in their Santa Claus outfits and took them to the giant park nearby on both Saturday and Sunday, to the delight of many small children ...)

Joyful tidings, Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:11, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

It's a pretty modern thing to think of the poor being the victims of war while the elite profit and survive. Ever since homo sapiens insipiens has ruled the roost, at least down to WW1 and even 2, war was thought excellent for character-forming and a practical way to master the more intricate details of how to muster and therefore master the masses, even if the cost was substantial. A significant part of the ruling elite's rising generation of young men were mowed down in WW1. George Bush Jr.,'s family got things 'right', you funnel Nazi funds to safe havens, and pull strings so that your sons don't serve, but that only signifies something new.

I guess I'm a poetry rigorist. Apart from Shakespeare and a few others, most of the best poets are lucky, as Auden said, to ratchet up a score of poems that will outlive the ages. If you look at wonderful songs for their verbal poetry, many are total duds, though Christopher Ricks has made a great case for Dylan as a poet. Music's metrical baton can tap dull words into memorably orchestrated lyric. I read Cohen's lyrics in print, before listening to them, and that put me off, ,but I realize this was unfair, a prejudice. Sung, they exude a different, moving resonance to what they look like on the printed page. I recite stuff in the shower every morning, just to wake up by refreshing my mind with lyrics, and today sang von Eichendorff's "Mondnacht"

Es war, als hätt' der Himmel

Die Erde still geküßt,

Daß sie im Blütenschimmer

Von ihm nun träumen müßt'.

Die Luft ging durch die Felder,

Die Ähren wogten sacht,

Es rauschten leis die Wälder,

So sternklar war die Nacht.

Und meine Seele spannte

Weit ihre Flügel aus,

Flog durch die stillen Lande,

Als flöge sie nach Haus.

I learnt it as a boy because a German classmate who was, on casual acquaintance, a pretty normal happy-go-lucky 'petty bourgeois', stopped me one day and asked me what I got out of reading. he was puzzled by my anomalous presence in a college for drop-outs (I'd been expelled from an expensive college for subverting their culture and ruining their Catholic value system . I'd spend most time in class reading books and ignoring the teachers). Over a coffee we had a chat, I mentioned poetry, and he finally twigged. 'yeah I know what you mean. My granddad taught me this poem (then recited) and I think the last four lines the most breathlessly beautiful thing I've ever known.' In fact it was the only poem he knew, he was intent on a career in business. Nothing wrong with that, but if one does, one should recall how Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot handled it: diligent paperwork by day, and then, strolling home, down to lights out, the inner world where things make real, i.e. perplexing sense.

This utterly took me by surprise and rid me of whatever supercilious sense of being different might have lurked in me, Whatever stupidity the daily tsunami of global and provincial nonsense throws one's way, such things remind us of the reclusive adamantine potential for refinement in mankind, resonant in lyric, music, acts of empathy, courage, philosophical intuitions, scientific intelligence. It's not an elite thing: that kid's remark showed it's there, deep down, waiting to thrum if the right person can get past our mental messiness and touch the deeper chords. One story of Osip Mandelstam's final days in the gulag has him cared for by thugs, who were enchanted as, dying, he recited fables and poems for them. Today stacking timber that had just been culled from a distant wood and offloaded at my place, I noted these ants, wandering about dazed along the logs. Obviously clueless as to what had happened to their environment, thrown out of kilter from their daily round on the forest floor. I thought, spontaneously:焚き物にだれずに迷う森の蟻 (takimono ni/darezu ni mayou/mori no ari), i.e. 'On the firewood/unflaggingly, their way lost, they stray (perplexed)/the forest ants') Not much chop as a haiku, but more or less, we are the ants, much as you say, in a stripped and bulldozed woodland.

I'm meandering, which is natural enough, given the afternoon of hard 'yakka'. Delighted by the vignette of the santa pups. My family prevailed on me the other night to dress up as Santa Claus because a 3 year old niece, hugely bright, was convinced someone really would knock on the door and bring in presents. I did so, cushions on the stomach, a flowing beard, and, sneaking out back, banged on the door, and chuffed and huffed in with a tired limp, gasping from fatigue, handed over a bag of goodies, and then collapsed, sprawling, on a couch. She really was taken in, 'Oh poor Santa. He's so tired'. So I snored for 10 seconds, and then jumped up:' Must be off, all those kiddies in Africa are waiting for me too. An easier leg to do: no bloody soot or chimneys', and off I trundled.

Best regards and auguries for a good new year, even after the deadshit hits the fan on 20 Jan. Nishidani (talk) 16:59, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the beautiful poem, and for your comments. Your words are inspiring and encouraging.

Wishing you a full and quick recovery.

The pups send their love to Grandpa Nishidani. One of them is sleeping in my lap right now, the other is sleeping at my feet. Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:08, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Hi Nish, how are you? I hope you are doing well. Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:11, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

I've been inactive. Diagnosed as suffering from herpes. The medico said it hurts like a dog's bite, but, having been bitten that way, I never felt much pain, and don't now. Once in Paris, coming out of a restaurant, I saw a beautiful Alsatian and bent down to have a chat with it. It jumped at me and snapped at my face, its spittle on my cheek. I stayed steady, didn't retreat, but just kept murmuring dogtalk to it. It quietened down immediately, wagged its tail, and allowed itself to be patted. Which reminds me, give the pups a St Valentine's caress (or chocolate) from gramps! Cheers, IT! And thanks for the note, as always.Nishidani (talk) 18:03, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Wishing you a quick and full recovery. Indeed, the pups and I are enjoying Valentine's day. The pups are sending their affections to their grandpa Nish. Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:27, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Ditto here. John Carter (talk) 14:59, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Yo Ho Ho

Doug Weller talk is wishing you Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's Solstice or Christmas, Diwali, Hogmanay, Hanukkah, Lenaia, Festivus or even the Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!

Spread the holiday cheer by adding {{subst:User:WereSpielChequers/Dec16a}} to your friends' talk pages.

newish article

Could use a hand like yours.--TMCk (talk) 22:07, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

Sorry. Hospitalized for kidney stones. Can't edit for some days, perhaps weeks. Nishidani (talk) 16:12, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Yuck. That's painful. Good luck and best wishes then.--TMCk (talk) 22:04, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Oh gosh, poor Nishidani. Happened to me about 20-something years ago, in Scotland. The most excruciating pain I have ever experienced, much, much worse than the worst toothache. Fortunately over with in a few days (it was only a small stone, but big enough to make its presence felt). May have been caused by letting myself get dehydrated on long (several weeks at a time) cycle tours in (very hot) Spain. I read somewhere that drinking plenty of milk can help avoid them. Seems to have worked, as the problem has not recurred. Best wishes, NSH001 (talk) 09:34, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Doctors have told me I have a high tolerance of pain. I allow dentists to do dental work on me without an anaesthetic, etc. but, damn it, you're right. This kind of pain's in a different league. The remedy is 2 litres of water a day - imbibing the most tedious liquid on earth for a week or so, and if that doesn't work, surgery. Thanks N.Nishidani (talk) 10:23, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Appalling news, my sympathy. However, there are many interesting stories, which I'm sure you know, involving people urinating while standing on their head (upside-down). That was in the days when surgery involved butchers with infectious knives. This might be good time to recycle the adage may all your problems be little ones. Johnuniq (talk) 11:02, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Hmm, 2litres/day doesn't sound like enough to me. And if you're drinking that much fluid, it should be isotonic, or you can add some electrolytes to the water. I'd recommend alcohol-free beer as a good isotonic drink (well, anything's better than water). Maybe see what the docs think. --NSH001 (talk) 11:08, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Hchlama Mehira--Bolter21 (talk to me) 01:34, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

The big day. A visit to the specialist, . .who has fallen sick himself and cancelled all appointments! Thanks for the kind sentiments and suggestions. Why urinate standing upside down? Johnuniq? That comparatively easy, compared to drinking a glass of wine upside down (which in the long run probably explains some of these later run-ins with kidney pains!)Nishidani (talk) 11:35, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Apparently the hope is that by standing upside down, gravity will move stones away from the entrance to the urethra before attempting to urinate. "Benjamin Franklin, as usual, outdid everyone. When stones blocked his urethral opening, he dislodged them by standing on his head and urinating upside down." Good luck! Johnuniq (talk) 04:42, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

That's an odd way to interpret the laws of gravity. I've drunk beer and claret upside down for half a century on request (by folks who've heard the usual rumours) and the grog goes north, as, my head on the floor, I use one hand to pour the stuff into my mouth, from where it travels in the proper direction irrespective of physics, i.e. towards my stomach a foot further up in the direction of the ceiling.Nishidani (talk) 13:24, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

If its anything like a blocked catheter .... whatever: you have my sympathies. Padres Hana (talk) 12:40, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Warning on Personal Attacks

Consider this a warning to cease your personal attacks. Calling someone "foggybrained" and telling someone that they are unable to comprehend things certainly approach a personal attack if not violate it. I have had it with your attitude that you are the arbiter of what is correct and everyone else is merely a stupid person you graciously allow to edit Misplaced Pages. You need to stop being condescending to everyone and strive to edit in a fair and collaborative way. In addition, I do want to point out that your user page violates WP:POLEMIC and should be removed. Sir Joseph 20:50, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

oyf tsu shraybn geshikhte darf men hobn a kop un nisht keyn tukhes.Nishidani (talk) 11:29, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Writing a personal attack in a foreign language is still a personal attack. Sir Joseph 14:34, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Your idiosyncratic views on what violates WP:POLEMIC have been tested before. Your attitude that you are the arbiter of what violates WP:POLEMIC and that everyone else is merely a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer you graciously allow to edit Misplaced Pages is thankfully not one that carries any weight here. nableezy - 16:09, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

I understand your viewpoint, but Misplaced Pages does not allow pages and pages as Nishidani has on his userspace. I don't understand how you can't see that it violates polemic. Sir Joseph 16:34, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Nope. nableezy - 17:55, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

If I noted for the record what I often observe, and complained before arbs, you wouldn't be here. You regularly turn up on obscure pages I edit and revert me, when I am merely maintaining order by reverting some IP, who removed stuff without a valid policy ground or talk page appearance. You do this regularly after 'losing' an argument on a talk page. you did it today. It is patently an attempt to 'get back' at an editor. It is infantile,beyond the obvious desire to be vexatious. Piss off, kindly. There is nothing offensive about my remark in yiddish. It's sound common sense, and if you can manage to understand try and take the advice proferred. If people ask me questions on this page, relevant to what Id do here, I answer them. Polemic has nothing to do with it. Nishidani (talk) 16:39, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Your userpage is polemic. Read up on what the policy is. I don't need to continue this. I warned you about attacking people and that is all. Sir Joseph 16:43, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Nope. nableezy - 17:55, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

To quote User:Kudpung, "....So without beating about the bush, what I do expect however is for them both to put {{Db-u1}} on their user pages at User:No More Mr Nice Guy/Quotes and Stuff and User:Nishidani very quickly - and I mean delete, not just selectively removing contetious material, otherwise I'll delete the pages myself per POLEMIC. They only exist in order to incite something and have no usefulness towards the building of this encyclopedia or the friendly collaboration of its editors." from: Misplaced Pages:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive887#Advice_requested Sir Joseph 19:16, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

And on 11:51, 31 May 2015 the page was deleted as per that conversation, and Nishidani promptly recreated the page with all the polemics still intact. Sir Joseph 19:21, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

As is often the case, you do not know what you are talking about. You have no idea what was on Nishidani's page at the time of that comment (quotes from other users saying things that could be taken badly for example, and not simply quotes from published authors). And you have yet to give a single example of polemical content on it now. You disliking something does not make it "polemical". You pulled this same stupid shit with me. Boo hoo, somebody thinks something that I dont like. Grow up. nableezy - 20:20, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Nishidani's userpage is polemical. It does nothing to help Misplaced Pages, and is there merely to be pointy, to use a Wiki term. I am sorry that I think a Hezbollah userbox has no place on Misplaced Pages, I guess that is why I think driving a truck into a crowd of people doesn't deserve praise or having sweets handed out. Sir Joseph 20:22, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Ohhh, argument by assertion I see. Another fine example Sir Joseph, well done, well done. nableezy - 20:24, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

(e-c) It is open to question whether much of the material on most any editor's user page or in user space really helps the encyclopedia. And I have seen repeated comments from admins regarding comments made by editors who are subject to various sorts of topic bans that limited discussion in violation of the ban in user space might be overlooked. Most of the time, I have seen those comments from admins after having raised questions about those comments to them myself. I regret to say that engaging in what some others might see as being perhaps a tendentious form of discussion, possibly verging on harassment, in user space may well not win any friends either. I think the matter of Nishidani's user talk page has already been raised in the MfD discussion on it, and it was allowed to stay. That being the case, I think the only places where this sort of discussion is really appropriate is either at ANI or before ArbCom, although, like I said, based on what I've seen before regarding other editor's userspace comments, I wouldn't expect much at either location. John Carter (talk) 20:30, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Just for the record, it is my understanding that the MFD was on his talk page, not his user page. Sir Joseph 20:34, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

It was, but I don't know of anywhere in policy or guidelines where user space pages are differentiated, so it seems to me to be a case of a difference which makes no difference being no difference. John Carter (talk) 20:38, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

This is nonsensical. On the page dismissed as a violation of WP:Polemic, we have a number of quotes like the following:

欲以存亡繼絕, (淮南子, 卷二十一 要略 7a.)

That, Sir Joe, is from the Huainanzi where of Duke Huan of Qi it is said:

He wanted to maintain alive the moribund, and conserve whatever teetered on the verge of extinction.

If you like, when I edit pages on Tibetans, Aboriginal peoples, Palestinians etc., I am mindful of Duke Huán's exemplary precedent.

Again, I can't expect you to know what:

ἄγνοια γὰρ ἡ μὲν τῶν ἰσχυρῶν ἐχθρά τε καὶ αἰσχρά— βλαβερὰ γὰρ καὶ τοῖς πέλας αὐτή τε καὶ ὅσαι εἰκόνες αὐτῆς εἰσιν—(Φίληβος,49ξ)

means, but I have a right to expect that readers who don't know what on earth this is saying refrain from spluttering words like 'polemic' while calling for it to be removed. For it simply states:

self-ignorance accompanied by strength is not just disgraceful, it’s dangerous too:anyone who comes into contact with it, or anything like it, is threatened (tr. Robin Waterfield)

That can hardly apply to the issue of Israeli settlements. Theodor Meron immediately informed the Israeli government in 1967 that settlement in the belligerently occupied territories was out of the question: the law was explicit, any such settlement would contravene the Fourth Geneva Convention. A year later Moshe Dayan went ahead, admitting that,'settling Israelis in administered territory, as is known, contravenes international conventions, but there is nothing essentially new about that.' In other words, the Philebus is speaking about self-ignorance whereas the Israeli settlement project is consciously furthered in full lucid awareness that it is a 'flagrant violation' of Israel's legal obligations under international law.

Editing this area is very hard because the facts, the legal reality and the history are established, known, by everyone who reads beyond the tabloids or listens to more than soundbites. A huge paperwork tsunami nonetheless arose to split hairs, cavil, equivocate, throw sand in the eyes, blindside the critics, and puzzle the public. You can only get away with something of this order if you sow confusion, and most of our articles are minutely attentive to the pharisaical hasbara churned out to justify up front what is known to be carpetbagging behind doors. All over wiki I/P articles the pretense is maintained that there is some margin for disagreement, that interpretations of the one reality differ, that there are two POVs- Israel's ueberexceptionalist theory, vs the consensual opinion of every juridical body that has competence in international law - rather than a juxtaposition of the ascertained, universally endorsed legal situation as opposed to a nationalist fringe theory pushed wittingly by an occupying power intent on destroying the nation it occupies. I wouldn't therefore complain, Sir Joe. I don't raise a fuss at the structural distortions in so many of these articles: the weight of numbers determines content. I simply strive to clarify what is consistently, from ignorance or ideology or national interests, glossed over. Nishidani (talk) 14:27, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

If anyone have anything against some user, go to the appropirate noticeboard and take action. If you are not confident enough to do that, there is no point in exchanging accusations here.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 15:58, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Coatrack article with gross WEIGHT and NPOV problems?

Nadia Abu El Haj

Hey. You're more familiar with the topic than I so I figured I should ask your advice. I frankly was tempted to blank the entire latter half of the article, which is completely bizarre and unlike anything I've seen in our articles on other academics. I understand that some people have controversial political views, but I actually came across the page through Misplaced Pages:Requests for checkuser/Case/Evidence-based, which was apparently a massive problem back in 07/08 with a sock-farm creating bogus coatrack articles on pro-Palestinian activists (along with at least one very poorly written article on a Hebrew Bible scholar who I've never heard of specifically being either pro- or anti-Palestinian, which is how I came across it).

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 14:56, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

It's WP:Undue probably, but shouldn't be removed, so much as pared down. A line or two for each critic or supporter. The only serious opinion there is Dever's. It's standard for anyone in this field to be targeted. I have a list at last check of about 42 academics of distinction who have been threatened with job loss etc for criticizing Israel's colonial policies. I've tried to balance that by opening a counter list for academic supporters of the Dershowitz brand who suffer similar career obstacles -it's still empty. If you are in the West Bank they shoot you, if you are in the West, they smear you. Any number of numbskulls are eager to pitch in. But, if you can't stand the fire in the kitchen, . . . In short, just trim it, making everyone's comments as succinct as that of Dever's. Secondly, this loudmouthed shouting in newspapers is unencyclopedic, but one can't erase it until it's replaceable with quality, focused criticism and you get that, iIf you have access to Jstor, by just looking at all the reviews of her works in the major academic journals. If you can get several reviews of each book, balanced for criticism pro and con, then under those circumstances you can chuck out the pseud's corner stuff.Nishidani (talk) 15:15, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

I see what you mean

If this is the level of IDHT one normally expects to encounter, I can see why you'd warn me away from IP. I just happened across a thread on WT:JEW immediately above one I had opened and gave the obvious response that was obvious, and as a result I have had to explain that ARBPIA3 applies to that Arab-Israeli conflict, not just "IP articles", three times and counting.

What a mess.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:26, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Again, you seem to be the one not hearing things. An article on Arabic Jews is not by itself part of the IP Conflict. Can some edits on that page be subject to sanctions, perhaps. But it is stupid to put entire pages under sanction. Sir Joseph 02:43, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Firstly, I must apologize to Nishidani for continuing this discussion on his talk page. I had no idea SJ was watching.

Second, it is not "an article by itself part of the IP Conflict" that is subject to the ARBPIA3 General Prohibition. It is all pages that could be reasonably taken as being related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. An IP who adds text about Jews being expelled from Arab states as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict is always violating this prohibition, regardless of whether you think the page itself should be placed under extended protection.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:50, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

IP Conflict is Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the page is not about the IP conflict, whether or not some edits can be construed as being part of the conflict. We should not be in the habit of locking off articles on the off chance there will be a dispute. Sir Joseph 02:52, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

For the umpteenth time, the ArbCom restriction is on articles related to the Arab-Israeli conlict, not just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am not a fan of "locking off articles" myself, but ArbCom already did lock off that article back in 2015, and the specific IP edit you wanted to allow was itself an explicit violation of the restriction as it was about the Arab-Israeli conflict. If you want the page to be unlocked, you need to appeal the general prohibition, or request that it be amended to more narrowly address only specifically IP conflict articles. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 04:24, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Warrongo

Hi, I noticed that Waruŋu, an article you've created, duplicates Warrongo language and Warrongo people. There's some content in it that is missing from the language article, so I was wondering if you'd be interested in merging it? I think Waruŋu should then get redirected to the dab page at Warrongo. Cheers! – Uanfala (talk) 23:06, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. Obviously a merge should occur since reduplication exists between Warrongo people and Waruŋu. Perhaps the simplest solution is the other way round. I've made Waruŋu fit the format I'm applying to all these article, with sections awaiting expansion. Warrongo people has only a definition, and nothing else. I'd prefer a redirect from Warrongo to Waruŋu. If you know how do do this technically, by all means go ahead.Cheers Nishidani (talk) 12:25, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

I'll try to get Waruŋu and Warrongo people merged. The title of the merged article had probably better be Warrongo people – Waruŋu is ambiguous between the people and the language, so it's best if this redirects to the dab page at Warrongo, and the spelling Warrongo seems to be better – it's the one used in the language's practical orthography, it's in the title of Tsunoda's 2011 grammar and, if I remember correctly, it's preferred by the Warrongo themselves. – Uanfala (talk) 16:43, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Good'oh. Go ahead and Robert's a close relative. Thanks Nishidani (talk) 18:28, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

By the way, there are two outstanding simple gaps in all these articles. Unsatisfactory maps for each group. I have numerous sources downloaded which give maps and precise tribal borders, but don't have the foggiest notion as to how to convert them into wikimaps. And the skin system, which all tribes had and of which the naming evidence for hundreds exists (basically a 4 to 8 system) needs a standard template. I tried to roust one up with a little help from friends, (Kariera people)but it falls short quite a lot and downunder specialists in maps and designs are needed there. Perhaps one should notify the relevant Australian project board? Nishidani (talk) 18:33, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

I don't think there's any specific "wikimap" format and I guess there are different degrees of wiki-friendliness. The simplest solution, probably perfectly acceptable in this context, would be to just reproduce the maps as they have appeared in print (provided this is OK copyright-wise). Generally, you can ask for help with maps at Misplaced Pages:Graphics Lab/Map workshop.

As for the skin templates, what do you imagine them to be like? – Uanfala (talk) 19:59, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

My Name

I've asked you three times to stop calling me Sir Joe. I do not like that name at all. If typing out the whole name is too difficult for you then you can call me SJ but not Sir Joe. I'd appreciate if you take note of this. Sir Joseph 23:53, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

I agree, and I have seen that SJ has indeed asked you to stop. Please cut it out. Bishonen | talk 23:55, 21 January 2017 (UTC).

Okay. I'll use SJ. It does mean 'Jesuit', but, since you say it's fine, then it's SJ from now on. In exchange, I would ask SJ to drop the habit of fatuous plunking of threat notifications on this page as if I were a newbie. It's obviously minatory besides being puerile. But I don't whinge about it. Nishidani (talk) 11:01, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

"SJ" means "Sir Joseph". Bus stop (talk) 11:13, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

The meaning of SJ is given here :-) Pluto2012 (talk) 11:38, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

But this is the meaning of SJ on Misplaced Pages. Or, if you want to be pernickety, it's this, I suppose. Bishonen | talk 12:00, 22 January 2017 (UTC).

As someone whose User name embodies anonymity, I am considering including a set of fingerprints and identifying tattoos. Bus stop (talk) 12:16, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

(EC) I'm guessing that you'd prefer other editors not to abbreviate your username to BS?

And while I'm here, I'd like to reassure Nishi that it's OK to continue referring to me as Scarpi and the editor who mispells my username as ZScrapia (intentionally or not rearranging the middle to spell 'crap') that he has my permission to continue.     ←   ZScarpia   18:56, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

I don't see the point in abbreviating any editor's name, generally speaking. Why not just cut and paste their name as it actually appears on their User page? Bus stop (talk) 18:53, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

I encourage all to abbrev my nick as they will. It embodies light pseudonymity, tho I do incl. an identifying fingerprint on my user:. While I'm here, hi Nish, hello Bish (who tbqh has the best wiki-alt of us all), and Bus stop: if you have to pause to c&p it really slows down the old wpm, which for some of us is the only staccato light in the grim endless fight against time's torture of all that is. – SJ + 13:37, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Ah, literacy at last: 'the grim endless fight against time's torture' (Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,. Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, etc I think of Prometheus's liver being slowly pecked for millennia, or the Negra espalda del tiempo..... ) RegardsNishidani (talk) 16:37, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes I realize that cutting and pasting takes time. And I don't think I am personally obsessed with "time's torture" although I may be deluding myself in that regard. I simply prefer the propriety of calling a person by the User name that they chose for themselves. Bus stop (talk) 16:00, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Small (actually big) question.

Do you really believe in the first sentence you put on your userpage? PKK and Chechnya cannot apply to this statement, made by a naturally biased person? I mean, I can't really sympathize with any of the other "reflections" (except for Uri Avnery simply explaining in the most basic way the reality? Oh and the non-English sentences), but the first one is very jarring (yea? you can say that? "jarring"?).--Bolter21 (talk to me) 00:42, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

I don't 'believe' in any sentence containing a generalization. Belief implies a fixed perception that is refractory to evidence. Rather than 'jarring' (which implies dissonance, from what?) Ashrawi's statement is 'jolting', a provocation. I too can think of exceptions. The statement from the Philebus in Greek can be read in context scrolling on from here. You can analyse that in terms of the psychology of envy, of the sociology of class, or as an illustration of the problems of division of classes in logic etc. As for the rest, I've always thought of the I/P issue in terms of comparative sociology: there is, despite the massive hot air rhetoric all round, nothing unique there - it is a typical colonial story: the John Wayne vs Indians plot in the 'taming' of the wild West, as good many writers noted at the outset of Zionism's implementation. Reading many of the downloaded classics of early Queensland history recently, the language and approach to these terroristic 'natives' (200,000 vs a few thousand whites, who then overwhelmed the 'uncivilized indigenes' with immigration and gunpowder) only confirms my perception of the analogy. Only its nature as a colonial narrative is, rather distinctively, hidden from view because of the exceptionalist discourse surrounding so much to do with the long mythistorical traditions of the occupier, and the guilt of the West concerning its own lethal enmity for Jews. Nishidani (talk) 11:08, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

I am always amazed by how much a negative action committed by someone of a white skin has a larger weight than a negative action committed somewhere far away by someone with darker skin. I too fall into this, with claims of "we have to be civilized" when I talk for over nine months about a soldier who executed the soon-to-be dead body of a terrorist, while there were, what? 250 attacks and attempted attacks by Palestinians since October 2015? The absolute majority with a clear racist and murderous character? The problem is that those who agree with me, that a negative action like colonialism or genocide committed by a white people is no worse than the ones committed by black, brown or pink people, are the undemocratic fascists or white-nationalists out there. So I have two options here, either go for euphemism and start saying "the Jews are not colonialists because colonialists searched for rich lands and the Jews settled on bad lands full of swamps and diseases, and they didn't try to speard their own culture on the people but rather inherit the modern and ancient culture of the land, and they came as indeginous and not as colonialists", or I can just say, "you pinning the word colonialism on the Jews doesn't make the Palestinians the absolute victims". Either way, I don't think colonialism justifies the Palestinians' reaction, just like I don't think Elor Azaria executing the man who stabbed his close friend for no real reason is justified. So not the Palestinians, nor Azaria, are angels hurt by the European colonialist Jews, or by the Ashkenazi leftist elite of Israel.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 14:52, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

250 attacks and attempted attacks by Palestinians since October 2015? The absolute majority with a clear racist and murderous character?

The absolute majority took place in a territory which Israel is colonizing, and which it does so in defiance of its obligations under international law, by land theft, shooting, raiding, gassing, and demolishing homes. In a Zionist perspective, all this is irrelevant. What is horrid for a Zionist is that a predictable minority of those who have been tormented for decades, stolen from, shot, arrested, gassed, or dispossessed of shelter, hit back violently. Scandalous? No. It's sociological physics of the most elementary kind. Nishidani (talk) 18:44, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Well, it's got nothing to do with 'white' vs 'black skin' or Jews vs Arabs. I am composing as I read through several thousand pages of old books on Queensland's history a time line of every attack, by aborigines on whites, and whites on aborigines, and I have so far more data on the former than the latter. It was estimated that 250 whites had been killed from 1840-1861. The 'savages' have far more incidents of killing in the archives than we have registers of whites killing blacks. But, we know that there were 200,000 aborigines in that territory by the time whites began to set up 'civilised' outposts, and within several decades these were decimated literally, down about 80-90%. Aborigines like Dundalli fought back and were branded as murderers or 'ìterrorists', and duly hung. So what were all of those 250 murders about? Over the last 3 decades, historians have managed to retrieve the obvious contexts: whites saw a rich territory full of development potential and just bulldozed in, driving or 'dispersing' the original inhabitants off their lands, where they had lived comfortably. The average height of the primitive natives' was 5 foot 10 to 6 feet, about 5 inches taller than the invaders: they were muscular, powerful specimens, but they only had spears against carbines.

It's typical of all colonial mentalities, of which Zionism is just the most recent, and anachronistic example, to think that any opposition, even killing, by the indigenous peoples opposing their dispossession or destruction is proof of murderous manners, intolerance (even anti-Semitism). You get that in the frontier chronicles of the West, in Canada, in Algeria, all over Africa (the Herero people). Whites/Europeans have a right to land that is not utilized to its full modern productive capacity: if the indigenous people refuse to upgrade to industrious collaborators in 'modernity's project', they have to be displaced, overridden, pushed out. If you can cite for me one thing that, in the Zionist history of colonization, contradicts the general pattern of colonial enterprises the world over since the 1500s, I'd be surprised. It's totally 'normal' to dispossess people and, if they resist or hit back, call that form of lex talionis 'terrorism', 'barbarous'. Israel's foundation is absolutely in line with the overall pattern of modernization's destruction or systematic reduction to marginal life of 'primitives'. I like historians like Niall Ferguson because they are quite open-eyed and honest about this: modernity is achieved by dispossession, plunder and it is, in the long term, for the good of all, especially the blighted and benighted 'primitive' whose right to land is cancelled by the fact that he cannot monetize it as, in the modern world system, is must be. So it's not a 'Jewish' thing. The only 'anomaly' is that it really took shape after WW2, when, by general consent, the age of colonization was to end (save for the diehard French holdouts in Vietnam and Algeria). Tony Judt made this point eloquently: the anomaly is that 'Jews' happen in Israel to be undertaking a discredited anachronistic experiment precisely at the moment when the West, having achieved its own 'civilized' state of post-colonial complacency and having enough from the plunder of centuries to be able to live off its accumulated capital, started to mumble about the 'conscience' of civilization. Nishidani (talk) 18:11, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

And I didn't 'pin' the word 'colonialism' on Jews. The earliest Zionist writings use that term officially for the project (Jewish Colonization Association, the Colonial Bank, etc.etc.etc.) Nishidani (talk) 18:33, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Making analogies between the Palestinian Arabs and the Aboriginals in North America is flawed in my opinion. The Jews were not an Empire expanding, they were a collective relocating, and knowing their place for the most part, they shown much more respect to their enemies than the Western Europeans showed to the Natives in North America. The ethos of the 1948 war being a "David against Goliath war" is part of it. They didn't say "we defeated the savage and uncivilized Arabs", they created a story of them being small, weak, unmanned, unequiped and they managed to defeat the hordes of trained Arab armies. Only the opening of the state's archives in the 80s allowed for histories to realise the truth, that the Jews had the upper hand and their stories of "winning against the odds" were a consequence of their panic. Their ethos was not an ethos of the "civilized" beating the "savage", it was exactly the opposite, it was the small yishuv of refugees beating "five armies" and the majority of the population. Today I can assume that the Jews were really the more civilized majority, but that was not part of the Zionist ethos. One of the only arguments I have in defense of the settlements, is that they are not colonialists, not becuase of their actions, which are policies of land grabbing based on supremacy, but because of their leading ideology, which is very religious. You can call them colonialist as much as you want, go to someone from Beit El and he will tell you "Abraham our father' passed here, and Jacob our father was named "Yirael" here and all of Israel sat here and fasted until night and sent made sacrefices to God, when they entered the land under Joshua, and the Ark of the Covenant was here and Phinehas Ben Eliezer lived here and there was a terrible civil war here between the Tribe of Benjamin and the other tribes and here King Josiah destroyed the golden calf built by Jerobaam Ben Nevat. I don't believe these stories are fact, especially not the mythological ones, but that doesn't change the fact, those "colonialists" have possesed what they see as the source of their right to live there, as their ancesters did. After all, the nearby Beitin doesn't just happen to sound like Beit El, and even if not, it is not the first Arab village with a corrupted Jewish or Biblical name. Can a colonialist who massacred a group of Aboriginal claim his ancestors lived on that tribe's land? While the activity does amount to resemble colonialism, the ideology is completely different. Calling a Jew who moves from Poland to Jerusalem a "colonialist" is already crossing the line, of how much you can draw simmilarities between European colonialism and the Zionist enterprise. My grandparents from my father's side came here as refugees, while my mother came here to marry my father.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 19:08, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Ok, I didn't really want to get into this discussion (I realised early that you can spend 100% of your time here discussing the issues..., alas, time doing that is time not writing an encyclopaedia...) However, I must modify you about the truth only getting know when the archives opened in 80s/90s. At least the leadership knew very well. Eg., there was a famous survey (by the Israelis) taken just after the 48 war, showing the reasons why the Palestinian refugees left. That survey showed roughly the same percentages that modern scholarship has showed; that the majority left to escape the war, or were expelled, and just a tiny minority left "on Arab orders". (And this survey was then made classified material..) In spite of this, it was "official" Israeli policy for years to claim that the majority of the Palestinians left "on Arab orders". And the leadership knew this wasn't true. Btw, lying by Israeli officials was the reason why I started questioning my 100 % pro-Israeli upbringing..

As for the settlers; nearly all nations have at some time been bigger than they are now, say, Norwegian Vikings first settled and built Dublin, what if the Norwegian army/navy landed in Ireland, claiming it as part of the ancestral Norwegian land..... kicked the Irish out of a third of their land and treated them like dirt. Then went around saying "It is the Irish terrorist mentality which makes them hate us!! And their leaders -and their school books all makes us look bad! It the Irish who has to change their murderous ways!!"

Btw, an old friend of mine (who is 100% North European background, and doesn't have one drop of Middle Eastern blood in her) has had a looooong interest in Judaism, and a few years ago she converted. She can become a citizen of Israel any time she like, (No, she has no plans to become that, but still...), and travel to Israel as much as she like. While, say a Salman Abu Sitta is refused entry to the place he was born. Avi Shlaim used to say the Israel has been on a colonialist project since 1967, however, he has changed his mind, these day he agrees that the colonialist project started much earlier. Huldra (talk) 21:49, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

The Norwegian army invading Ireland is a severe violation of Irish sovereignty. Norway is miles away from Ireland, separated by sea. Beit El was promised to the Jews by the UK and this is one of the claims of those who support it.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 22:08, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

"Separated by sea??" I see you know zero about Viking culture; the sea was what connected them; it was very much a sea-faring people. And Beit El was not included in the Jewish state in the 1947 plan (the only plan which had official backing). So legally, Israel has as much right to Beit El as Norway has to Ireland, (or Shetland, or Iceland, or Greenland, etc) Huldra (talk) 22:27, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

I don't think I ever supported the settlements, legally or ideologically, I just commented on the comparrison.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 22:43, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

I should have made a distinction. Herzl was an idiot, whose vision impelled a pseudo-solution to European racism by enticing dreamers to think that by dispossessing an Arab people in a colonial project the Jews could free themselves from prejudice. After WW2, this colonial fantasy bore with it such a weight of angst that the option seemed the only solution to many, but it let the West off the hook of their historical guilt by making Arabs pay the price of European dishumanity. The fault lies on the shoulders of the Western leaders who adopted this cynical strategy. Israel was created, and it assumed, whatever the tragedy, a rightful place among the nations, its legitimacy is inexpugnable. All that changed in 1967. There, the lucid minds and analysts foresaw the obvious evil, that Israel's hard won legitimacy would now be put in peril by Zionism's darker oneiric impulses, religiously atavistic, soaked in the dead weight of a huge mythic history begging for reclamation. It stepped beyond its achieved and legitimate confines, and began to aspire to a biblical state, wittingly treating the West Bank and Gaza as an opportunity for carpetbagging expansionism according to biblical fantasies. it did so in clear defiance of international law, of obligations it underwrote, cynically, contemptuously. It didn't take on the Palestinians: never a serious threat militarily. It took on concepts of restraint, democracy and the establishment of normalcy for Jews - the very real and persuasive reasons Herzl unrealistically dreamt of as the aim of Zionism - because an occupation of this order requires the permanent militarization of society, and the induction of its citizens in an experience of repression as a rite of passage, in a chronic unresolvable punitive destruction of another people to satisfy the megalomaniacal vanity seamlessly inscribed in what is, irreducibly, an archaic fiction woven by a sacerdotal class which wrote much of the novelistic content of the Bible as a solace for its own Babylonian exile. You don't need to be a psychologist to understand how destructive a model will be which takes as its blueprint for modernity a fiction concocted by ingenious religious fanatics 2,500 years ago, with its creation of a concept of pure descent, and the ethnoreligious sacrality of a patch of soil which bore no such burden of mythic value for most Jews from Iran to Spain in those distant times. The people in Beit El can rave on about the non-existent, utterly unhistorical Abrahams, Moses and Josephs walking through those very same terraced hills till the cows come home (to roost), but they are, mentally, like aborigines walking through their home terrain identifying each rock and crevasse as marks of the Rainbow Serpent in the dreamtime. The Aborigines know, now, that these were once functional legends: the colonialists of Beit El take it as the truth, or retain the functional value as an excuse for squatters to declare indigenous landowners intruders - and when you confuse fantasy with reality, no outside voice for a sane distinction between the infantile and analytical approach to the world can ever get a hearing. Nishidani (talk) 20:59, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

As for the personal side, there is no guilt or taint of 'colonialism' in emigrating to Israel or being an Israeli, anymore than one should feel guilty for being a Mexican of Spanish descent, or an American of Scottish origins etc. The colonial analogy refers to the West Bank and Gaza, and all those who persist in claiming it as part of Israel. Nishidani (talk) 21:09, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

The West Bank is part of Israel, the land of Israel. I remember being a kid, confusing the terms Eretz Yisrael and Medinat Yisrael (i.e. State). I see the rift between the understanding of secular, modernist people, like me, my family and my friends, who see "Israel" as the state, while the religious, fundementalist people, like my uncle's family, the right-wing bloc or the elder Mizrahi population see "Israel" as the land". That is the problem, that the Ben Gurionists like me prefer the state and the Menachem Beginists like my uncle prefer the land. While the left accepted the partition plan, giving a state for the Jews after 2000 years, the Revisionists saw it as "giving the Jews 60% of the 20% of land left from the land promised to us, "Auschwitz State"". Equating the idea of partition of Western Palestine to a Nazi death camp is the base of the world view that the right wing and the "neo-zionists" who settle the West Bank posses. The idea that a land with X people, belong to the Y people. This is seen in nationalist movements in Europe, and their copycats today, claiming "natural borders of Serbia", which are completely opposite to reality, when the Kosavars have no interest in being ruled by Orthodox Slavs. But I wouldn't call a settler movement to settle Kosovo with Serbs, a colonialist movement. Just like I tell people to take action against those they chose to call "Nazis", colonialism was outlawed by the UN, so what is the implication of you calling the Zionists colonialists? Should I feel white-guilt?--Bolter21 (talk to me) 21:47, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

The West Bank is part of Israel, the land of Israel.

This confuses a secular concept the State of Israel with a religious concept of the Land of Israel. Modern states have boundaries, which determine the judicial reach of their laws, and their legitimacy. States that refuse to have boundaries are like ego identities that refuse to distinguish themselves from the world, they are either tendentially narcissistic or invasive.

Steven Runciman, taking up a point outlined by Arnold Toynbee a decade earlier, perceptively anticipated all of this when he drew an analogy between Zionism and the Crusades (Joshua Prawer,The Crusaders' Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, 1972), whose history he was the leading world authority at that time. He remarked to Uri Avnery that:

"Israel was founded in the land that once belonged to the Philistines, while the Palestinians, who got their name from the Philistines, live in the land that belonged to the ancient Kingdom of Israel."

In other words, Israel as constituted has no burden of ancient myth, its messianic expectations and its aching juggernaut of collective pressures from one of the many pasts we have: 'Israel' as religiously defined means redefining oneself as a cypher in a collective, of memory and blood-kin: you don't count - the historic community's legends, myths, traditions determine who you are, and, in political terms, this translates into megalomania, fantasy-mongering, irrationality and the incapacity to understand anything or anyone beyond the pale of one's cultural ghetto (i.e. the cancellation of 2,600 years of diaspora experience where being a Jew meant having at least 2 and probably several equally respectable identities).

As to guilt, that is not a notion that has any sense collectively, being in the modern Kantian sense a state of consciousness where the individual's sense of right is troubled by negative feelings for what are personal acts he himself committed or fantasied to have committed. It is a repulsive biblical idea that punishment for the sins of the fathers be visited on the sons down through the generations (Numbers 14:18). It's useful to have dissent within one's family, I wouldn't worry about it. The poorest wings of my family were and often remain hardnosed right wingers, and some persist that way the poorer they get, as the governments they elect strip them of entitlements they used to have. They blame foreigners, the 'left', etc.etc.etc. Familiarity with this meant I wasn't surprised by Trump, or by Netanyahu. We're not wired biologically to be middle class rational democratic ethical egalitarian people. We're animals whose 'reason' is basically directed towards instrumental cunning, unless by some historical freak of conjunctural circumstance, we find ourselves in a relatively civil quarter of the world. That was the lesson of Yugoslavia: overnight people who had been amicable, civilized, intelligent turned to cutting their good neighbours' throats because some moron realized you get more votes if you play on people's innate hatreds and intolerance.

No one ought to feel guilt, as opposed to shame perhaps, for what others, one's kin, humanity etc., does or did. Of course the achievements of civilization are being rapidly burnt as the world, in response to globalization, turns its back on modernity and chooses tribalism. Israel's 'anomaly' will, on the cards, become 'normal' as the world trumpifies itself. It's one of the refreshing consolations of my age to realize that fortunately, I won't be around long enough to see the long-term effects of this crap. Nishidani (talk) 10:30, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

In case you're wondering

The red question marks appearing in the Australian Aboriginies articles indicate a short-form ref trying to link to a full citation that doesn't exist. This is the work, of course, of the fabled precocious infant, who vomits on meals that don't suit her digestive system . I will try and fix any obvious ones, but at Djabugay for example my guess (without having looked at the sources) is that the corresponding long cites are missing from the "References" section. Unfortunately it isn't generally possible to fix them automatically, as there is no way of telling whether a long cite is missing, or whether a name is misspelled or a year mistyped. Anyway, I hope it helps. --NSH001 (talk) 23:44, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

No, thanks indeed. Anything that spots slips, esp as hugely misleading as those, needs a nod of thanks or several. Evidently in copying for speed a template for a book I confuse editions or different works at times. Should take more care. The content citations were correct only the book years were not! 'vomits on meals that don't suit her digestive system,' meaning that the precocious baby fixing these errors has an avatar in the Aboriginal rainbow serpent, who often ate children and then vomited them up;)Nishidani (talk) 09:36, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, sounds delicious. On Djabugay, with the help of my young assistant, I corrected the distinction between Dixon 2011a and Dixon 2011b; as far as I am aware this is the standard academic convention. Using "(a)", "(b)", etc in the author name is not a good idea, as it corrupts the metadata emitted by the template, and causes the work to sort in the wrong order in bibliographic listings.

It also looks odd that there are separate full citations for Dixon 2011a and 2011b, but only 2011b is cited anywhere. Regards, NSH001 (talk) 11:05, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Well it's a beauty if it can catch out so neatly citational errors so consistently, and those minutiae I have often lazily failed to spot. I think I've fixed the Dixon thing. I often add sources that deal with a topic but which I haven't yet time to add. The idea is that, if I tried to do every tribe, one by one, in a thorough manner before moving along to the next, I'd never finish. Setting up stubs also means that, once I have a few hundred of the main ones done, anything that comes up in my daily reading for the next few years can be immediately registered in a pre-existing article. Cheers and thanks. Nishidani (talk) 15:15, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

By the way there is a silly title to Gubbi Gubbi. Far too long. One doesn't add the geographical location to a people does oner? Nishidani (talk) 15:16, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

What title would you like? I see there's also a redirect from Kabi people. Suspect it might need some discussion first before moving it. But you're right, the title is silly, and should definitely be changed.

Understood re your strategy. I've started working systematically through the pages, and have put the number of cite errors found in the edit summary, so you know which ones to look at. Let me know about any articles you are working on, so we don't tread on each other's toes. --NSH001 (talk) 17:17, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I dunno anything about procedures, but it should be Gubbi Gubbi, with any redirect Kabi people/KabiKabi going to that. What's a chap to do, open some discussion somewhere, on the talk page?

IO really appreciate the help, N. No hurry of course.Nishidani (talk) 17:25, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Well Gubbi Gubbi is a redirect with >1 entry in its history, so it'll need some form of formal process to get it moved there. On the other hand, Gubbi Gubbi people is a redlink, so it could be moved there immediately, if you wish. --NSH001 (talk) 22:15, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

The quick solution, Gubbi Gubbi people. In Italy it's taken me five months of paperwork to get my bank to pay telephone bills automatically. I like to think of the real world beyond its borders, including this virtual one, somewhat more efficient:)Nishidani (talk) 11:05, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Well, that was easy. Italy sounds intriguing, maybe there are unexpected useful side-benefits to hopeless inefficiency? Over here it's almost impossible to arrange to pay one's bills in any way other than automatically. --NSH001 (talk) 11:51, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

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Jstor

Good luck with the new account. FWIW, as can be seen at ANI, in the first thread as we speak, there is a lot of controversy regarding the country of Ethiopia and its peoples. Right now Llywrch seems to be most involved, but I imagine that it could benefit from input of other highly qualified individuals as well, and I have to think you might be among the most qualified in general around here. And the sometimes confusing history of the Ethiopian Jews and Ethiopian Christians and other ethnic groups and the claim for the Ark of the Covenant might be of interest to you. John Carter (talk) 21:44, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Looks like I'll soon have an account, but am steadying myself to go on a reading diet. That access is a gargantuan temptation, and I must be careful not to succumb to an omnivorous gluttony. Right now, I'm up to the gills in antipodean ethnography - so much of it is there that I can't allow myself too much distraction. But it's nice to hear from you, John, and to see you are still enriching Misplaced Pages with your widespread uploada of encyclopedic material. Best wishes. Nishidani (talk) 18:08, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Please comment

Please comment at Talk:Kadesh_(Israel)#Proposal_to_Change_Name_of_Article. I posted this here for you, since you took part in an earlier discussion about this issue on that same talkpage. Debresser (talk) 18:07, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

1RR violation

Hi, firstly, you violated 1RR at the list, secondly you cast aspersions when you claim HOUND. That page is on my watchlist. I am giving you the courtesy to self-revert. Sir Joseph 20:53, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Also, while I wasn't hounding you at all in this case since the page was on my watchlist, you did explicitly give me permission to follow your edits, see here: User_talk:Nishidani/Archive_21#Khazar_theory_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry Sir Joseph 21:11, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

I see exactly one revert by Nishidani today. You have to be able to count past 1 to get to a 1RR violation. nableezy - 21:16, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Fine, I meant the other DS, not reinserting something that was reverted. Sir Joseph 21:20, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

... without first establishing consensus on the talkpage. Especially something that is POV, sourced to a POV source, and ill formatted. Nishidani, why can't you put spaces in the right places? Debresser (talk) 21:29, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

I actually think Sir Joseph and Debresser are correct here...and you can blame me for that. See User_talk:Huldra#Arbitration_motion_regarding_Palestine-Israel_articles. Since December, 2016: "In addition, editors are required to obtain consensus through discussion before restoring a reverted edit." (The two diffs: ) But I see Bolter already reverted it, so it is a bit difficult for you to self revert.... Cheers, Huldra (talk) 23:58, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Just noticed this. I go on line late in the day recently. Why all this fuss? I note that Bolter21 broke the 1R rule on the very page SJ complains I did (but where I didn't) (Ist revert,2nd revert). This happened after SJ’s protest, before the intense scrutiny of you all, and I don't see any warning on his page. Of course, I personally ignore things like that. I don’t go to complain to Ed Johnston, or admins, or write up a draft of an AE indictment in my sandpit. But for those of you who reflexively indulge in Nishidani-reverts mostly on inane readings of policy (e.g. examine the completely farcical pretexts used to POV revert out long standing material I put back at Al-Dawayima massacre), i.e. via pretexts, as the RSN board agreed, I would suggest you be consistent.Nishidani (talk) 14:33, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Huldra. The way that interpretation plays out, anyone can revert anything and then demand an editor spend hours if not days trying to convince a team of automatic reverters that their objections are specious. The rule would mean policy precision is irrelevant, consensus trumps everything. Everyone who reads Israeli newspapers knows Palestinian stone throwers, even if they hurt no one can get from 18 months to 3 years prison. When Uri Avnery notes that an Israeli IDF soldier caught on film cold-bloodedly blowing the brains out of a wounded Palestinian, who had been neutralized 12 minutes earlier and lay bleeding slowly to death as folks walked around and chatted, received 18 months, and compared the sentences: 18 months for throwing an innocuous stone if you are Palestinian, 18 months for shooting a wounded man in the head if you are Israeli and he Palestinian, it is automatically erased. Uri Avnery is perhaps not RS!!!, Gush Shalom is perhaps not RS!! Let's revert and have Nishidani convince several of us for 10 days on this one as well (If the reverter was serious, he would have simply googled around and found a dozen sources which make the same comparison. This is revert-abuse, stalking to revert wherever possible one particular editor and sheer laziness, aside from POV pushing by suppressio veri.Nishidani (talk) 14:33, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Firstly, I did mention on the talk page that Bolter violated DS. And I didn't report you because I don't like reporting people for stupid stuff like that, and as you saw in my sandbox, the DS violation wasn't the main reason I was going to report you. It was for your behavior and comments towards me and anyone else you disagree with. And you shouldn't get too emotional about things, if you do, perhaps try to stay away from those areas that get you worked up. Focus away from Jews and switch to Australia. There's no need to get worked up over an online encyclopedia. And while I may sometimes feel your frustrations over the rules, after all, it's a numbers game and your side has the numbers which is why most IP articles are heavily biased, those are the rules. If you don't like it, go to ARBCOM and propose a change. In the future, I suggest you think twice about your edit summaries and how you interact with other editors. Your comments are not conducive to building a collaborative encyclopedia.Sir Joseph 14:38, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

You have an inordinate number of reverts of my edits. I'm a careful editor. I don't take this job lightly. You are gratuitously insinuating I 'get emotional' and 'worked up' in the 'area' and must 'focus away from Jews'. What in the fuck is that meant to imply? (it means, that you follow my edits and read them exclusively in the light of what you imagine they might entail for a 'Jewish' image in the world. Just to make you focus, if you can, I edit Palestinian pages. Jews have nothing to do with it. Nishidani (talk) 15

03, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Just to note, that Ashkenazi Jews has nothing to do with Israel/Palestine, but regardless, people get worked up over lots of areas. I stopped following many pages when I couldn't help getting worked up. We should all strive to try to edit in a nice manner, and edit summaries attacking people doesn't do that. Sir Joseph 15:15, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't get 'worked up' by topics. I get pissed off by having to waste time coping with bad faith, obtusity, and political obsessives. Tthe editors who edit the Ashkenazi page do so almost exclusively in thinking of Israel, suffice it to see the immense amount of genetic junk thrown in to prove a connection. The problem at the Ashkenazi article is that almost no editors there evince any basic knowledge of the topic, i.e, Ashkenazi history or culture. I supplied 25% of the sourcing, exclusively linked academic works for the history, while everyone else sat round chatting, kibitzing, reverting focusing obsessively on the pseudo-history of 'genetic' proofs, basically because they are ueber attuned to political implications. Nishidani (talk) 15:34, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

I didn't see the assailant's brains being blown out, it seems the bullet made a hole there, but not a JFK-style hole. And the shooting occured 11, not 12 minutes after the stabbed soldier's m16 had a failiure and al-Sharif was spared for 11 minutes. No one said Uri Avnery is not an RS (although I am sure at least 40% of the people in this thread might say he is not), but the statement it self, placed in that spesific place, is POV push, whether fact or fiction, but I already stated that in the talkpage.

Now again I'll urge users not to say things like "I will report you for your behavior", and just either do it or not. And I can cry all day about the fact the article on Deir Yassin includes the word "massacre" in the title, or that Ilan Peppe is given a strong voice in articles concerning the Palestinian exodus (and he is much less reliable than Avnery), or that every article on an state, kingdom or empire from the past which ruled the region has "State of Palestine" as part of the countries that today exist in that entity's region. There is no point in doing that here in Nishidani's page. Misplaced Pages is not perfect.

As Joseph said, all of us need to edit in a nice manner so it is obligatory to ignore sometimes. This is not the Gaza border, you don't have to retaliate on every single assault or whatever you deem as an assault. I had many disagreements with Nishidani, especially from my salty times, before two folks tried to ban me from Misplaced Pages, and yet I don't think I ever reported him, but one time someone decided to report him on my behalf for condecending. This shows how toxic this field is. Is it that all of you are old and you don't remember what it is to have a parent, a teacher or a boss, who says things that makes you feel your dignity is hurt? It isn't that hard, I am sure you all been through it.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 16:37, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't care for 'niceness'. I care about facts, and the precise citation of policy. I can get on perfectly well with people I might think are cunts, if they show competence, no ruses, just precise professional editing, in their work, here and in real life. Conversely I know a lot of nice people who are pains in the arse, and whose company I avoid. Being old means you don't have any dignity other than what you supply yourself, so, at least technically, one can't be 'hurt'. I don't give a fuck for what people think of me because I don't work here to shore up some wimpy, fragile self-esteem. As to Avnery he was challenged re Gush, and the point he made was a legitimate factual comparison. All facts can be thought of as POVs to the extent that they exist isolated from context. They are POV if the context is suppressed.Nishidani (talk) 16:48, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

The attitude you present in the first sentence is not one that can make people be fond if you and you yourself admits it, by saying "I don't give a fuck for what people think of me...". Do you expect people not to "HOUND" you as you claim? You can claim until tommorow that you are superior to others in your editing, but it is not going to change the fact saying things like "I can get on perfectly well with people I might think are cunts", which is obviously interpreted as a code name for some people with whom you interact here, is not going to prove you are professional and that's what important. I have yet to understand what drives people in this website. It took me a few moments to really understand what said about POV, but I don't accept it. Writing the comparison there is a clear push of the POV that Israelis are being treated lightly by the Israeli justice system, in contrast to how Palestinians are being treated. Do I disagree? Not with the fact, but I don't think you can draw a connection between the two, considering the two have completely different backgrounds and contexts, I am not going to get into right now. I don't see why the POV of Avnery and obviously, you, has a place in the list of incidents. Does it have a place in the article on the incident? Yes. Does it have a place in an article or a section concerning Israel's law system in regard to the Palestinians? Yes.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 17:16, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

The article on the incident is unreadable garbage, starting from the farcical title (Hebron shooting incident) I just read it now, and I'm buggered if it is worth anyone's time trying to make it readable in English or cogent.

Bolter we have rules, and editors that master them, and exercise care in making judgments, don't have to be nice, or whatever. One rule is that we are peons, whose subjectivity is under tight rein. In the Avnery instance, you just state this is a POV comparison. Well, no. We go by sources. Every experienced editor knows that if you have several highly reliable sources making the same observation then it can't be suppressed as a 'POV'. You say

the 18 month sentence being what is otherwise given to any Palestinian stone-thrower who does not injure somebody.Uri Avnery 'The Great Rift,'Gush Shalom 25 February 2017

• Bethan McKernan Five children who got longer sentences for throwing stones than Israeli soldier who shot incapacitated Palestinian dead The Independent 23 February 2017.
• Jack Khoury Hebron Shooting: 'Palestinian Kids Get Harsher Sentences for Throwing Stones' Haaretz 21 February
• Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights cited UN human rights office raps ‘excessively lenient’ Azaria sentence The Times of Israel 24 February 2017

etc.etc. Our incidents page can contain far more of the gist of an event that the useless spin offs we have, which are just a clutter of bloated responses, reactions, etc. By the way, cunts was used without thinking of present company. I've known a lot of people who are 'nice' and are cunts (most politicians for example). My point was rhetorical. A lot of 'nice decent people' have turned out to be murderers historically. Nishidani (talk) 18:02, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Every time you violate something, you end up saying that the article is a mess. Even if that were true, something I didn't check, the state of the article gives you no additional rights! Debresser (talk) 18:04, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Who said I was claiming additional rights, for fuck's sake? Nishidani (talk) 18:09, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

I was just making a point. Please refrain from swearing. Debresser (talk) 19:17, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Debresser, you weren't making a point. You were evincing an intrusive illiteracy in logic, which is disruptive. (a) Elor Azaria was mentioned (b) I examined the page on that incident (c) it a mess of garbled English and misreportage or stacking of irrelevancies. (d) stating this fact prompts you to make an out-of- left-field wild generalization about an ostensible behavioural tick of mine (every time I err, I blame the state of an article). (e) and, having invented this behavioral pattern you then insinuate I am claiming rights others don't have. All this is invented out of whole clothe, a fabrication of driveling fustian. If you cannot think syllogistically, don't comment, at least here. Nishidani (talk) 09:49, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

I won't react to that. I hope just you got the point of the discretionary restrictions. I have not much hope you will be more civil or less condescending the next time we cross paths. Debresser (talk) 10:38, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't cross paths. I edit pages, and find my quite normal additions frequently reverted by the usual crowd. Bolter is the only one who I can rely on to not be petty, (b) chose to revert where there may be arguably some grounds to do so but only then (c) argue his case cogently (d) and yield ground, as I do, if the burden of evidence goes the other way. He should be an example to you all.Nishidani (talk) 11:02, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

You dont exactly get to dictate the language others use, least of all place on their own user talk page. nableezy - 22:02, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

@Huldra: Wasnt even aware of that. Good to know. nableezy - 22:02, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

• You just violated DS. Please revert or I may report you. In addition, not every interaction between an Arab and a Jew is about the IP conflict. It is OR and SYNTH to apply every dispute to the IP Conflict. Sir Joseph 17:29, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

• Please see here ] for an AE action. Sir Joseph 17:40, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

You and a few others are violating the intent of all Misplaced Pages laws. Constituting a standing editing majority, you successively revert in tagteaming quite innocuous edits and say 'gain consensus', when there will be no rational discussion towards consensus because you have the numbers. This is utterly cynical. In the last edit, if you read the page it documents numerous examples of Palestinian stone throwing. This is by the tradition of the page an acceptable thing to be registered. I add an example of 4 Israelis throwing a stun grenade into an apartment to drive out the Palestinian occupants, and you revert it on spurious grounds: i.e. those who threw the grenade were 'criminals'. Well, all Palestinian stone throwers are defined in Israeli military law as criminals. So what's the fucking difference? None, except that you think the ethnicity of the thrower changes the nature of the act.Nishidani (talk) 19:48, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

One thing that can help create a better environment for editing in the I/P conflict area, is for Sir Joseph (SJ) to stop hounding Nishidani. Over the last several years, Nishidani has repeatedly asked SJ to stop hounding him, but to no avail. Typically, SJ denies hounding and claims that the article is on SJ's watchlist. Well, the reason the articles are on SJ's watchlist is because SJ hounds Nishidani, and then SJ adds the article to his watchlist. I am not (yet) seeking sanctions against SJ. But I think it would be a good idea for SJ to understand that experienced editors can see that he is hounding Nishidani, and it may also be a good idea for SJ to consider removing from his watchlist most, if not all, of the articles that Nishidani edits in the I-P conflict area. IIRC there are something like 5 million articles in the English WP, many of which need significant work. I see that SJ has been making some contributions to areas outside the I-P conflict. In my view SJ should seriously consider shifting away from wasting his time, and the community's patience, on his apparent obsession with Nishidani's work in the I-P conflict, and instead invest even more of his (SJ's) efforts to contribute to WP areas that do not involve the I-P conflict. Thanks. Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:19, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

"I don't want to be nice" was a line from an old song that I often repeat. I have lost some of my enthusiasm for being a Misplaced Pages editor because of the protective policing of all things Israel/Palestine/Jewish. To the extent that I wouldn't recommend Misplaced Pages as a reliable source for information about these subjects (with the exception of the bits of articles I have contributed). Is there a limit to the number of articles one editor can revert? Or a quota? Padres Hana (talk) 12:53, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

March 2017

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 ] or ]. 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. — Coffee // have a cup // beans // 00:54, 14 March 2017 (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."

Hi Nishidani: May I suggest, in the future, reverting yourself whenever someone says it's a 1RR violation (actually it's not a 1RR violation, but a violation of a clause which was added in the last ARBPIA case "restoring a disputed edit")? This is my own practice, irrespective of whether I think the person is right or wrong about the complaint. It's not worth getting blocked over trivial procedural matters. Feel free to argue about the edit etc. as much as you like. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 04:47, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree with Kingsindian, but I also think the editorial conflict may have been exacerbated when Nishidani may have felt exasperated and frustrated that Sir Joseph was relentlessly, obsessively continuing to hound him despite Nishidani asking him several times to stop. Moreover, Sir Joseph (SJ) appears to be in denial of his bad habit. Every time Nishidani, or I, asked SJ to stop, he declined to admit to his bad behavior. (For example, see the discussion in the immediately preceding section titled '1RR Violation,' and also see the comment that SJ recently posted and self-deleted.) As long as SJ remains in self-denial about his bad habit, behavioral problems are, regretfully, likely to appear and re-appear. In My view, SJ's bad behavior in the I-P Conflict area of WP detracts from SJ's apparent on-going good work in contributing to WP areas unrelated to the I-P Conflict.

Overall, over the last several years, Nishidani has shown remarkable restraint in dealing with relatively large numbers of disruptive, Civil POV pushing users who suddenly appear and re-appear to tag-team to revert Nishidani practically immediately every time he makes an edit they don't like. I think Nishidani should continue to show restraint, but it is also reasonable to expect that he will lose his (very long) patience every once in a while. Ijon Tichy (talk) 12:18, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

I reverted because I didn't want to deal with you.however, if you continue to cast aspersions I may be forced to take you to ani. Sir Joseph 13:10, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Ijon Tichy, Sir Joseph, may I suggest that the discussion between the two of you (and by you about each other) may have outlived its usefulness? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 13:24, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

SJ, your starting a complaint against me on ANI may turn out to be the best thing for you as a WP editor and for WP, because it will open your own record to close scrutiny and other people will see that you have been relentlessly, obsessively hounding Nishidani for years, and that you have completely ignored all pleas by Nishidani, as well as by others, for you to stop your disruptive behavior.

Like I said before: I am glad you have been doing some work on areas outside the I-P conflict. I suggest you continue to expand on that good work, and drastically reduce/ minimize your contact with Nishidani by removing the articles that Nishidani edits from your watchlist (articles that you likely added to your watchlist after following Nishidani there), and by never reading Nishidani's list of contributions ever again.

There are many thousands of existing WP articles outside the I-P conflict that need significant improvement, or thousands of new articles that need to be developed, including a good number of articles on various aspects of Israel or closely related to Israel, that are not directly or closely related to the I-P conflict, and that are, in my view, much more important, to people everywhere, including Israeli people, than the WP articles on the I-P conflict. It would be great for the encyclopedia if you could put your energies to good use in these areas. Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:07, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Ijon Tichy, if you have evidence, feel free to add it to support your argument, otherwise you are just casting aspersions. I also would like to second HJ Mitchell in saying that this is probably not the best venue for such a report and that the discussion here has probably outlived its usefulness. Thanks. El_C 19:58, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

El_C, since you asked:

here is a diff where Nishidani indicates to SJ that SJ is hounding him.

Nishidani does not make any accusations, including those of hounding, lightly or casually. Nishidani is an experienced editor who is very careful with the facts, and if he says that SJ is hounding him, then it is highly likely that there is ample evidence to support that.

For people who are intimately familiar with the very frequent and very numerous editorial disagreements in the I-P conflict area of WP, and who follow Nishidani's work very closely almost every day (such as myself), there is a lot of evidence that SJ is hounding Nishidani. Gathering that evidence and presenting it here is very time consuming and I simply do not have the time to do so, because I am busy in real life, and whenever I have spare time I try to spend it on reading the work of good editors (including Nishidani, as well as several others) and to contribute to developing WP articles.

El_C, if you have the time, motivation and inclination to look for the evidence, I suggest you simply follow Nishidani's list of contributions over the last few weeks, months and years (skip Nishidan's edits in the areas related to Australian native tribes/ aboriginal people/ etc, because SJ is only interested in Nishidani's contributions that are related to Israel, and especially the I-P conflict area). You will find the evidence, for example you will see many cases where SJ appears, shortly after Nishidani has made an edit, to revert Nishidani's contribution or to contest it on the article talk page etc. Happy investigating! Ijon Tichy (talk) 06:09, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Here is how user:Nableezy described Sir Joseph's behavior: diff

Here are three insightful comments by user:Sean.hoyland describing how some users work to disrupt and frustrate the efforts of policy-compliant editors who are trying to contribute in the I-P conflict area: 1 2 3

Ijon Tichy (talk) 10:07, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

did you just admit to hounding? Sir Joseph 12:21, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

It falls short—you can't simply direct me to investigate. The onus is on you, as the one who made the accusation, to prove it. Looks like they edit similar articles. El_C 12:37, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Just a note to save people the tedium. SJ is asked, to repeat what I told him some time back, not to disturb this page, which is reserved for serious editors ((Redacted)). The exception is AE or ANI notifications.Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Warning for personal attacks. Don't comment on your opinions of the intelligence of other editors. The Wordsmith 00:59, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Apropos your redaction Sir Joseph admitted a year ago he stalked me BTW, I hope you don't mind that I sometimes "stalk" you. I oftentimes use you as a free version of curiosity.com He complained however, to no purpose, that he was being stalked when he walked into a page and made a rollback violation against an old consensus, and was called for doing just that, which immediately provoked him to whinge to an admin ‘I don't need to have this over my head every time I edit’ is what worries him, but there's no problem in openly stalking me so that I am to have ‘SJ to deal with every time I edit’. In this perspective what is good for the Nishidanean goose, is not so for the one that ganders at him like Medusa. Since at that time he admitted he stalked me his presence was innocuous, I said I didn’t mind. In the meantime the mechanical reverts became vexatious.

Soon after this exchange, in May he was blocked for badgering editors, and the block admin wrote:that SH was ’ wearing out editors' patience and bludgeoning them into the ground with your relentless repetitions and exhausting WP:IDHT issues . . your refusal or inability (I honestly don't know which it is) to listen to what other people say.’

Badgering and WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT is what he was sanctioned for, and in stating last night I do not want on this page people intruding who show no intelligent grasp of editing on these sensitive issues, I unwittingly echoing an administrative judgemnent on something that in the past has been judged problematical with SJ’s editing.

One example of irrational editing. At Stanley Milgram he vigorously opposed those who wished to keep Milgram’s ostensible ‘religion’ from the infobox. He then in an incorrect edit summary suggested I violated WP:DS (15:31, 29 December 2016) when I including the fact that the Ukrainian prime minister denied entry into Israel was Jewish, something reported in all of the sources on that specific ban (here in The Times of Israel; here in) Haaretz; here in Ynet.

I.e. On one page he nags away at editors who consensually agree Milgram’s Jewishness in whatever sense is not to be included in his wiki info section, and when I add that the Ukrainian prime minister is reported to be Jewish, he takes me to task. Milgram’s Jewishness must be recorded, the Ukrainian PM’s Jewishness, reported unlike Milgram’s in all sources on the specific incident as an integral part of the story, must not be registered. This is totally erratic, and the only inference one can make is that, in SJ's I cannot state anything in sources about Jewishness, without getting admonished by SJ. The evidence?

SJ followed this up with something which was extremely offensive: unlike him, I don’t whinge to administrators, and dismiss these attacks as piffling. But the evidence is obvious:

• try to stay away from those areas that get you worked up. Focus away from Jews and switch to Australia. he complains I 'condescend, but that takes the cake for condescension. The insinuation was obvious, that I get emotional about 'Jewish' topics (=antisemite). As an editor specializing in the cultures of people who have suffered historic discrimination I edit with the same principles on Aborigines, Tibetans, Palestinians etc, regardless of the ‘sensitivities’ (to their national ideology) of nationalists in Australia, China, or Israel, etc. My work on the pathologies of ethnocentrism has an extremely high citation rate on Google Scholar. I know it inside out. Only RS count, not equivocations like saying that it is acceptable to note on Talk:List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, 2017 all incidents where Palestinian youths throw stones at Israeli cars driving in the West Bank (a criminal offense in Israeli military law), but one cannot include an incident of 4 Israelis throwing a stun grenade into a Palestinian’s apartment in Israeli to drive them out. That kind of double standard is characteristic of POV pushers with a nationalist profile. They are extremely attentive to the image of their own country or ethnic group, but are indifferent to any outgroup the former may have a conflict with, and that means WP:NPOV is beyond them. It is abusing wikipedia by using ethnic criteria to distinguish identical behaviour as different. My noted worldview excludes any idea that subsumes individuals into a national stereotype, unlike what you get with this kind of rubbish, making a general attack on Swedish people, for which he was reproved by User:Drmies, and User:Mastcell, among others. That is why SJ is not welcome on this page.Nishidani (talk) 14:30, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm familiar with much of the history here. However, I didn't come here to engage in a discussion of content disputes or NPOV issues. The edit of his that you cite is commentary about your content contributions, which is a valid thing to discuss on an encyclopedia. Your comment that I partially redacted, however, was a criticism of SJ's intelligence as a person. Do you see how that's a different issue, and one that doesn't belong on an encyclopedia? Especially on a place where you've asked him not to participate, like your talkpage.

I'm not blocking you for the personal attack and I'm not dragging it to AE, though either would be acceptable under the Discretionary Sanctions. All I did was remove the attack and ask you to refrain from commenting on the motives or competence of other specific editors. Can you at least agree to that? The Wordsmith 14:45, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

You took the appropriate wiki action, of course, and I have no objection to your redaction. What the system misses is that there is a huge amount of unreported poor editing, lack of mastery of the proper policy protocols, and bad faith generally in this area. Most serious editors ignore it: editors who spend a lot of time whinging at AE et al., are often the same as those who have a POV that overrides their judgement. I know it is customary to refer to examples one cites as 'content disputes' when, however, close familiarity with the history of a topic or subject would show, they are not content issues but matters of competent judgement. In an ideal wiki editing environment, people would collaborate by striving to possess themselves of a precisian's command of policy rather than waving a flag (WP:RS, WP:BLP etc.) at you when these policies have absolutely nothing to do with the content dispute, but are there as pretexts, in edit summaries etc., merely to satisfy the requirement one motivate a revert. If I reported every inanity, or abusively specious edit I note, or innuendo made my way, I wouldn't be editing. I would be dragged into endless forum shopping, which is I guess the internet version of mall shopping, killing time. Thoreau said killing time mutilates eternity. Well, not quite. Killing time deadens one's self aforetime.Nishidani (talk) 15:22, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

You are incorrect in one thing however in stating:'The edit of his that you cite is commentary about your content contributions, which is a valid thing to discuss on an encyclopedia.' Saying I get het up by Jewish issues, and should go away from them is a personal attack, as well as a serious insinuation. It has nothing to do with my content contributions.Nishidani (talk) 15:27, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Some light reading

I sent you some light reading. Check your email.... Zero 11:15, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

In these messy days...

I think you might like this as someone who seems to love Japan.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 13:23, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Cute, with a lot of errors, like suggesting Kūkai inventing the Japanese writing system. I guess the manga approach to history is what will furnish future generations, if they do exist, with their basic 'knowledge'. One will pass one's daze/days between infotainment and nymphotamement. I'm glad I'm old. I really was lucky to have lived in one of those intelligent, brief periods of Western history, that ended around 1982.:) Nishidani (talk) 17:13, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Unless you enlighten on past education, today, in Israel, the educational system is not searching for new creative ways to teach the material to students, like creating a funny animated skit. Instead, what you learn in a History course, is not "history", but "how to succeed in the bagrut test in history". In the past you could learn only from the teacher or a book/encyclopedia, today people have decided to outsmart the system and give you a sheet with no more and no less thsn exactly what you will be tested on. They teach you what kinds of question will be in the test, how to answer them, whaat exact words to use and how to get precisely 100%. So now everyone is teaching how to succeed in the test, rather than teaching history itself. This is partially why I had such a low grade in History (7/10), despite the fact at one given moment it seemed as though I knew history better than my teacher, who didn't even know that Jaffa was supposed to be part of the Arab State and that Plan D was implemented in April and not in May, as she asserted. Knowing this two facts didn't help me, when in the test I forgot one of the criteria for a Righteous Among the Nations status, which made me drop 15 points. I am not sure how knowing four criteria for this status is going to make me understand Jewish history more than understanding the course of the Independence War.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 14:08, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't think Israel is any exception to the general drift, in any case. There has been a general policy of dumbing down everyone for some decades, in favour of a factitious (economic) 'performativity'. When I studied languages, from Greek to Russian, Chinese and Japanese, no one in the classes has the foggiest notion of what their 4 years of intense study would lead to. They studied for love of the topic, gained in adolescence, regardless of its utility jobwise. That changed in the 1980s: everybody had to think of the economic implications of the subjects they planned to take on. Greek and Latin have no direct functional value, but when WW2 broke out, the Australian government scoured all high schools that taught those subjects, for the brightest students, who then mastered Japanese in a year and formed the nucleus of their intelligence and interrogation units. In Italy, if you did those ancient languages in the classical lyceum, Universities automatically accepted you for any discipline, engineering, medicine etc., and corporations snapped you up before you even got a university degree. To judge by your work here, I wouldn't worry about your grades at school. I was asked to repeat first year in primary school. I was expelled from high school, and, once forced to matriculate by studying on my own, started getting excellent results. Fuck em.Nishidani (talk) 14:44, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

BY the way, young man, I should compliment you on your growing command of English. 'skit' for example, was the precise word required by context, among many other things I noticed in your prose.Nishidani (talk) 15:06, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Didn't think Israel is an exception, but didn't know it isn't either. I am happy we learned the Bible. Even though it is not a "different language", it sure teaches a lot of language, and I think it is more interesting than literature, because it has the more historeographic feeling. But bible is probably one of the most undervalued subjects in schools, and if we didn't have a large religious bloc in Israel's political system, they would have canceled it already.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 15:32, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Well, if you wish to master English, reading the King James version is indispensable, as literature. It gives you a sure touch for things like prosody, the balancing of sentences, and historical idiom. It is no guide to history however, since its history is selectively harvested, rewoven, and often mangled for theological purposes, and much of the best parts of the bible are short stories -deceptively spliced in with vague historical echoes-invented for creating a religious outlook, like the Purim narrative or Exodus. The problem is, these stories are enchantingly written, but not 'historical', so that absorbing them as part of one's historical identity means taking emotionally on board as a truth what turns out to be a number of brilliant short stories. The stories can be read as 'true' to human (not 'Jewish') psychology, certainly, just as the myth of Oedipus might be read as 'true', but he never existed. A lot of Roman history never 'happened', it was invented. The problem is taking the Bible as an index of an ethnic mentality, or as forming the mould in which all 'Jews', and no one else, are shaped.Nishidani (talk) 15:56, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Exodus and Purim are not my history. The more prominant Jewish history is during the Classical Age, rather then the Iron and Bronze Age, but I am certainly willing to accept Josiah and Jeroboam's stories as historeography, with the exact standards you would accept from a script written up to the Classical Age. Whatever archeologist might find, I also accept. If Israel Finkelstein's theory, that Judah never ruled over Israel, and that it was a small insignificant kingdom, that later mixed the mythologies of both entities into one, I'll go with it. I am more connected to the theories of the origin of the mythology more than the mythology it self. I am most certainly not a decendent of some Mesopotamian dude who migrated to Hebron, but it is part of the tradition of my people, written where I live today. Going to the Bible and saying "it is not true, and it can't be used to justify anything" is not far from people who claim that before the Palestinians created themselves in response to Zionism, they have no right to be the sovereign of the West Bank: it doesn't matter. I once thought it does matter, as well as many other things, hence the word "Nihilist" in my userpage, but today I no longer think like that. Even if I recognize the fact an old tradition is just that, I am not willing to give it up for the price of being a sad leftist. I enjoy being a Jew who traces his roots to the Hashmoneans. Anyway, I have three books on my book list, I am a slow reader and I am going to have to read them during fighter training in the army, so I guess reading the King James bible will have to wait a lot of time.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 22:50, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

I think comparatively, on the basis that history excludes uniqueness, and therefore what I say of the Bible is equally valid for all other religious or cultural products of pre-modern 'historiographical writing'. Greek nationalists stake territorial claims on the basis of ancient documents, as do the Serbs, the Turks, the Chinese, the Hindutva nationalists, etc.etc.etc. Koreans and Japanese are forever disputing the interpretation of ancient chronicles for what they are thought to state about their contiguous and interacting worlds 2000 years ago as it were relevant to their respective identities, and it is no anomaly that Israeli nationalism uses the same technique. The ancient history that is (ab)used to provide some political or cultural warrant in contemporary times is not the history of historians. Several of my close family have Jewishj origins, among others - but this for them is purely an anecdote, it has no bearing on who they are, though, if they got into an identity pursuit, no doubt it would figure prominently, as oneside of the family's Cohen origins would be trumpeted as securing roots that are 3,000 years old, ignoring the Norman French, Irish, possibly Goan, Anglo-Saxon, Phoenician (on my wife's side) miscellany in our pasts. Sorry if I implied you should read the KJV immediately. It's only to be dipped into, occasionally, to read say, a chapter of Genesis, or Exodus, if only to remind one that when you say 'my brother's keeper' in English, to take the most familiar example, it resonates with the story of Cain and Abel, where it was coined from. I have no Greek 'blood' but from early childhood that is where my imagination, and therefore a core of my identity resides, though analytically I know that this is a tropical camouflage for aspects of myself which have no 'ethnicity'. As to reading, since you have been inducted, think of glancing at Sun Tzu's manual, and of course Carl von Clausewitz, much cited for one phrase but rarely read from cover to cover. Nishidani (talk) 10:58, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Interesting analysis by Uri Misgav in Haaretz of an Israeli high school national matriculation exam. I am guessing (I don't have data to make an informed opinion) that this crap is not unique to Israel, and that similar horseshit is happening in many other countries around the world. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:58, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

let's take solace from the example of Riccardo Bertani an 86 year old 'peasant' from northern Italy who left school to work on a farm out of sheer boredom, and set about learning languages, apparently now he's mastered 100. Reminds me of another Italian farmer who drove a tractor while memorizing the Aeneid, and spoke to himself in Latin. He could recite the Aeneid from cover to cover. I know of hillsmen in the backblocks here who whiled away their time herding by memorizing the whole of Tasso or Ariosto. This is not only farmers: John Jackson wrote one of the most penetrating books on emendations in Greek literature, Marginalia scaenica while working his mother's farm for decades in the wilds of Cumberland. Nishidani (talk) 18:43, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	In recognition of your extensive work in creating articles about the indigenous groups of Australia. – Uanfala (talk) 13:23, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Uanfella. I apologize for recently getting behind schedule, but will try to get at least 300 done by year's end, all going well. Your overseeing these things is much appreciated. Remember, I'm only doing structural stubs, so that editors now and in the future can find a readily formatted page and just fill in the masses of details that I haven't had the time to get down into the article. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 13:26, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Notice to whoever

I'll be offline for several days.Nishidani (talk) 21:01, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Shakespeare authorship question scheduled for second TFA

This is to let you know that the Shakespeare authorship question article has been scheduled as today's featured article for a second time, for 23 April 2017. If you're interested in editing the main page text, you're welcome to do so at Misplaced Pages:Today's featured article/April 23, 2017. Thanks! Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:11, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Being reverted

• User:Debresser Edit summary,'Not relevant in the way it is cited. Also, information about only 4 years is not representative.' atPalestinian rocket attacks on Israel

This is both meaningless in policy terms (what is meant by 'not relevant in the way it is cited'?, and contradicts the practice of the lead which has several statements that have a restricted time period. E.g.

’Another poll conducted in September 2014 found that 80% of Palestinians support firing rockets against Israel if it does not allow unfettered access to Gaza,’

’In 2012, Jerusalem and Israel's commercial center Tel Aviv were targeted with locally made "M-75" and Iranian Fajr-5 rockets, respectively, and in July 2014, the northern city of Haifa was targeted for the first time.

’prior to the 2008–2009 Gaza War, were consistently supported by most Palestinians (8 years)

So the revert fits the norm of what is done to my additions. Nishidani (talk) 11:08, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Matthias Hermanns

Hello, I see that you created the page Matthias Hermanns, which contains the statement "Towards the end of the 1930s, around the time the future 14th Dalai Lama was found, Hermanns had the opportunity to meet him, still a child, since he knew the family well. According to Hermanns, the child did not know Tibetan at that time. On being asked his name, he replied in a Chinese dialect that he was called « Chi », the local Chinese name of the village of Taktser." You gave as reference "P. Matthias Hermanns, Mythen und Mysterie. Mage und Religion der Tibeter, Cologne, 1956, p. 319"

I was not able to find it. Would you be kind enough to provide a citation from Hermanns book? Thxs, --Tiger Chair (talk) 23:14, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks indeed for picking me up on this. I've removed it and will look into it later. I did that rapidly, translating from another page, I think, and never got round to checking it independently. My bad.Nishidani (talk) 10:20, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

I/P

Hello, I just wanted to drop by and say your comments at this AfD really impacted me. I was always aware of the "I/P bias", as you called it, in the news media and try my best to gather multiple sources to achieve a universal perspective on an issue. To see this exist every time you come here to edit, while still being expected to keep your composure, must be frustrating. I apologize immensely for the ignorance of the editors here who contribute to this serious problem. Again, thank you for the words you said at that AfD; I will carry them with me whenever I read any news story.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 03:34, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

That's very decent of you. I note you have a strong editing record, after a mere 2 years. I commend your enthusiasm for the project. Editors here aren't ignorant. Rather, they are very serious-minded, and think a cause they identify with closely is under a concerted assault by POV pushers whose point of view, differing from their own, is thereby intrinsically 'suspect'. Notwithstanding this, the I/P area, which I would advise anyone not to get sucked into, is a good training ground: it requires patience, composure and equanimity and quite a few regulars have managed to help articles stand on their feet by insisting on neutrality, which is not something commonly encountered in sources of either persuasion. You know a good editor/admin in the I/P area when you see that (s)his comments or judgements are somewhat unpredictable, i.e. based on a close examination, case by case, of the merits of arguments, and attention to the strict meaning of our basic policies. Best Regards Nishidani (talk) 15:22, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

April 2017

Please do not attack other editors, as you did with this edit to Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/2017 Jerusalem Light Rail stabbing. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Same with this. Thank you. Cyrus the Penner (talk) 04:19, 17 April 2017 (UTC) Cyrus the Penner (talk) 04:19, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Cyrus the Penner why did you need to warn him several hours after the fact? And how is pointing out a bias in editing a personal attack? I do not think legitimate concerns should be swept aside with a warning template.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 04:41, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

I did not see the attacks until several hours after the fact, of course. And a consistent failure to assume good faith and claiming edits are being made out of bias (which is completely subjective, by the way) constitutes personal attacks in my book. Cyrus the Penner (talk) 04:45, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Well if an editor (I won't throw out names) refuses to understand policies on recent news and does not examine the merits (or lack thereof) of a topic that could be placed in a list, it becomes difficult to assume good faith.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 04:55, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Can't say I agree... I agree with his reasoning that these incidents always somehow find their way back into media coverage because of their motive and nature, thus solidifying notability. Cyrus the Penner (talk) 05:02, 17 April 2017 (UTC)