This post is by contributor Alexander von Sternberg.
A recent Pirate Wires exposé by Ashley Rindsberg about the goings-on at Wikipedia caught my eye the other day, and has held my attention ever since. I was familiar with Rindsberg’s work, notably his incredible historical critique of the New York Times, The Gray Lady Winked: How The New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions & Fabrications Radically Alter History (2021), so I knew this reporting was something to take seriously. However, I did not realize how much it actually related to the work I’ve been doing with my podcast History Impossible for the past six years, namely with regard to Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a historical figure who has, perhaps unfortunately, become something of the show’s mascot.
In his piece, Rindsberg detailed a coordinated effort behind the scenes to engage in deliberate actions that compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia, what the Wikipedia community refers to as “vandalism.” This case involved about 40 editors working on behalf of a group called Tech for Palestine, a Discord group of about 8,000 members. According to the article, they “worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years.” Once their actions started coming to light, the rogue editors immediately tried covering their tracks. This suggests to me that they recognized their actions were not only dishonest, but also completely violated the spirit of a site like Wikipedia.
Many of the examples reported by Rindsberg are troubling, including changes to omit any mention of Hamas’s 1988 charter — a document that was a little less than, shall we say, “diplomatic” in its wording of their own Jewish Question. Lest we forget, the original charter both explicitly referred to Jews as “Nazis” and glowingly cited the story of the Prophet Muhammad being told by Allah to kill any Jew hiding behind a tree or a rock in order to bring about the Day of Judgment. In 2017, Hamas leadership took a page from the Hitler handbook of never admitting anything on paper and changed their charter to reflect a hatred of Zionists rather than spelling out “Jews.”
Another Wiki change — or rather, series of changes — included sanitizing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s reputation by deleting any mention of the theocracy’s human rights abuses. As documented by Amnesty International, these include arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, torture, and punishments that include “flogging, blinding, amputation, crucifixion, and stoning.” In some ways, the most disturbing edit involved the from-scratch creation of a new Wiki article called “Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism”, (originally titled “Zionism, race and genetics”). As Rindsberg writes, two editors “attempt[ed] to tie Zionism’s roots to 19th century views on ‘race science’ embraced by the Nazis, thereby drawing an implicit — and, in at least one instance in the article, explicit — parallel between Zionism and Nazism.” The editors’ most concerted effort, however, occurred after the pogrom on October 7th, 2023, which Rindsberg summarizes as follows:
“A separate but complementary campaign, launched after October 7 and staged from an 8,000 member-strong Discord group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), employed common tech modalities — ticket creation, strategy planning sessions, group audio ‘office hour’ chats — to alter over 100 articles. Operating from February 6 to September 3 of this year, TFP became a well-oiled operation, going so far as to attempt to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British members of parliament into changing their positions on Israel and the Gaza War.
These efforts are remarkably successful. Type ‘Zionism’ into Wikipedia’s search box and, aside from the main article on Zionism (and a disambiguation page), the auto-fill returns: ‘Zionism as settler colonialism,’ ‘Zionism in the Age of the Dictators’ (a book by a pro-Palestinian Trotskyite), ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,’ and ‘Racism in Israel.’”
Disconcerting as many of these revelations are, I was most struck by the following:
“One of the articles targeted most intensively by the group is the one for Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from the 1920s to the 1950s, a pivotal figure in Palestinian history. While Iskandar323 [a prominent member of TFP] worked to remove negative content from the Al-Husseini article, it was two other members of the group — Zero0000 and Nishidani — who would have the greatest impact, together making over 1,000 edits to the article, often in an attempt to erase or downplay Al-Husseini’s well-documented collaboration with Hitler.
In one instance in April 2021, Zero0000 and Nishidani worked together to keep a photo of Al-Husseini touring a Nazi concentration camp out of the article. […] To date, Nishidani’s contributions to the article on Al-Husseini comprise 56.4 percent of its content.”
As long-time listeners of my History Impossible podcast know, this figure — the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini — has been at the center of the ongoing “Muslim Nazis” series I have been researching since 2018 and producing since 2021. To call him the show’s mascot, as I did earlier, is not too far off. While there are certainly nuances to Husseini’s biography — namely his family’s treatment at the hands of the British Empire — there is far more negative than there is positive, whatever one’s thoughts about Israel, Palestine, and Zionism. He was largely responsible for most of the pre-1948 rejections of peace settlements between Arab nationalists and Zionists. Prior to helping foment the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, Husseini was arguably partially responsible for the pogroms and riots unleashed upon the Jews of the Holy Land in 1920 and 1929. He also had a hand in the agitation in Iraq between 1939 and 1941 that led to the Farhud, the most destructive pogrom in Iraqi Jewish history.
This is to say nothing — about which I have said much — of his alliance with Nazi Germany after his flight from the Middle East in 1941. This relationship produced little in the way of tangible results but much in the way of tangible evidence of Husseini’s priorities, which included his attempts to have Jewish emigres shipped to Poland, knowing full well what was happening there. The man was, without question, a rampant hater of Jews. Distinctions between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism need not apply here either. In fact, as I recently covered in History Impossible, it was thanks to Hajj Amin’s influence that the Nazis’ propaganda campaigns in the Middle East began to blur the identities of Zionism and Jewishness. Portraying them as two sides of the same coin was part of their effort to broaden the distrust and hatred of Jews in the region as much as possible.
However, one would not know any of this if they looked at the Wikipedia entry covering Hajj Amin al-Husseini. As Rindsberg explained, Husseini’s villainous behavior was subjected to extreme whitewashing to the tune of over 1,000 edits, particularly involving his complicity with the Third Reich. The concerted effort to prevent the photographic evidence of Hajj Amin touring a Nazi concentration camp — specifically Sachsenhausen — from being displayed after its unveiling in 2021 is particularly emblematic of how insidious Wiki vandalism can be. Thankfully, those photos are easily found on the Internet, but given that people’s first impression of any subject is usually Wikipedia, their removal from the site essentially amounts to historical censorship.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the pro-Palestinian activism occurring within Wikipedia’s code is that these people likely see themselves as rebels fighting against the system and the Zionist status quo. The fact is, however, while it’s obviously true to say more Americans support Israel than not, the conversation surrounding Hajj Amin al-Husseini was, until very recently, dominated by pro-Palestinian scholarship. Philip Mattar’s 1988 biography downplays the Mufti’s alliance with the Third Reich almost to the point of omission. The historian and self-described activist Biyan al-Hut’s own writings about Husseini — whom she actually met many years after the war — referred to the evidence of his role in the Holocaust as “Zionist accusations.” With the exception of Zvi Elpeleg’s 1991 biography, it was not until historians started plumbing the Israeli, German, and American archives — beginning largely in 2009 with Jeffrey Herf’s outstanding Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World — that a more critical biographical eye fixed on Hajj Amin. Only then did scholarly evidence of his complicity begin to accumulate.
Prior to the past 15 years, Hajj Amin had been reduced to a historical footnote. The Israelis never forgot him, for obvious reasons, but after the French allowed his escape back to the Middle East in 1946, and after the Arab cause’s failures of 1948, Husseini became something of an embarrassment for the Palestinian nationalist movement. Many of his contemporaries already carried a grudge against him for his intransigence during the Arab Revolt, and many more were humiliated by his kowtowing to National Socialism and, by extension, his complicity in genocide. The failed 1948 war against Israel, referred to as the Nakba among Arabs, cemented the association of Husseini’s name with complete and utter failure. His legacy was soon downplayed in favor of more familiar figures like Yasser Arafat. According to historian Oren Kessler, the only real memory of Hajj Amin within the Palestinian context is a single street in Gaza bearing his name. As recorded by Corey Gil-Shuster in the 2023 Ask an Israeli/Ask a Palestinian project, very few Palestinians he spoke to were familiar with Husseini or his legacy.
This lack of familiarity is even more striking in the West, though for more understandable reasons. Why, after all, would a Western reader even care about the political and religious leader of Jerusalem who essentially founded the centralized version of the Palestinian nationalist movement? Why indeed, until we remember that so many people, after October 7th, 2023, decided that their political raison d’être was to stand up for Palestinians, demonize Israel (and oftentimes Jews in general), and tell those who disagreed to educate themselves about the conflict. To an extent, they are correct: everyone invested in this conflict — regardless of their stance — should be educated about it. And while it would be nice if people actually read a book or three on the subject, that’s an unreasonable expectation for those of us who are not historians or historians in training. Wikipedia is, at its best, a starting point. At its worst, it’s the only thing many people will read on a given topic.
Wikipedia has had plenty of problems in the past, but this particular case’s overt sloppiness is almost baffling. And it’s larger than just Wikipedia. Thanks to Google’s high ranking of Wikipedia in their search algorithm (not to mention search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo), Rindsberg notes via a source that this is “a Google problem.” To get more insight, I reached out to American Dreaming’s Timothy Wood, who is a senior editor with Wikipedia. Providing some overall context, Wood explained:
“The short answer [to the problem of malicious editing] is that there is no short answer. Folks of all stripes are always trying to influence [Wikipedia], from individuals editing their own biographies, to companies and marketing firms, ideologues, even state actors like Turkey and China who have banned the project entirely when we didn’t do what they wanted.”
This is unsurprising, and demonstrates the scale of the problem that Wikipedia (and its good-faith volunteer editors) face when it comes to the concerted efforts to vandalize their pages, particularly those related to contentious topics. It is not an enviable place to be in, especially if one believes in Wikipedia’s core mission and even devotes their time to it. As Wood clarified regarding this particular controversy, “It’s a complex case and hasn’t reached a conclusion,” and “it’s not as if people are unaware.” The problem is that, even with Wikipedia’s growth over the years, the methodology for editing articles has never really changed. As Wood explained, “By default, anyone can edit any article,” and, more importantly, “articles are open to everyone until there is significant disruption.” This is not the case with every article, and protections can be put into place, but as an organizational ethos, “openness is a core community value.”
This credo is, to many eyes, part of the fundamental respect for free speech and open-access information that Wikipedia stands for and should not be abandoned. However, when looking at the evidence provided by Rindsberg in his article, some kind of protection is likely necessary when it comes to the articles in question. Because Zionism and Arab nationalism are such politically charged topics that suffer from a documented pattern of Wiki vandalism, it’s clear that Wikipedia needs to step in here, and in similar instances.
Wood was careful to note that, “Articles can only be protected by the most experienced and trusted users who are given sysop [system operator] access by community consensus,” and that these are “the only users that can delete pages.” While the page histories are accessible in many of the cases reported by Rindsberg, it’s still unreasonable to expect the average user to go back through the earlier versions of an article, or even to know how to do so.
The fact remains that maliciously editing Wikipedia pages is not particularly difficult, provided the vandals have the ability to phrase and cite things carefully (and, of course, have the correct politics). Perhaps the pros of this system outweigh the cons. Perhaps the value of a completely free and mind-bogglingly sprawling repository of self-correcting information is worth the price of the occasional violation of this honor system. We have yet to see how this particular conflict will resolve itself, and if Wikipedia’s internal arbitration system works, these vandals will be ousted and there will be greater care taken when it comes entries on contentious topics. But the fact that this happens at all, and that it happens so flagrantly and without very much attention apart from one article (whose author has his own biases), should be troubling for anyone who cares about being able to sift truth from fiction online.
Wikipedia’s Islamist vandals got on my radar thanks to my own interest and growing expertise on the subject of Zionist and Arab nationalist history, but there are plenty of other examples of malicious editing, especially in recent years. These range from the repeated vandalism of both Donald Trump’s and Hilary Clinton’s pages, to defamatory changes being made to figures like John Seigentheller, Jr., as well as United States Senators like Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch. These have actually been documented and given their own page on Wikipedia — which has a refreshing air of transparency — but at a certain point, transparency may not be enough. Public figures like Trump or Clinton arguably should be subjected to various kinds of negative speech. However, should history? Should the human record of events be subjected to the whims of historically illiterate activists who simply want to make a point about the present? I would hope, perhaps sooner rather than later, Wikipedia’s internal authorities recognize that the answer is a resounding “no.”
See also: “Stealth Editing a Culture”
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