In the News
B’nai B’rith International CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin told JNS that Wikipedia’s use of an anti-Israel group as a source highlights its absence of fairness and standards, leading to bias, misinformation, disinformation and even blood libels.
The “absence of fairness and standards” on sites like Wikipedia leads to “perpetuation of misinformation, disinformation and blood libels,” said Dan Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith.
The widely used online encyclopedia Wikipedia deems the Anti-Defamation League and NGO Monitor to be “generally unreliable” sources to cite when discussing Israel and the Palestinians, but it maintains that an organization with a documented history of antisemitism, including lauding the Oct. 7 terror attacks, “can be cited as an opinion source” on Israel and the Palestinians.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is “an advocacy organization on a controversial topic, and should be used with attribution for factual claims,” Wikipedia states on its list of “reliable” and “perennial” sources. The group appears “to gather and responsibly report claims and information gathered directly from primary sources, and is widely used with attribution by reliable news sources,” Wikipedia states.
The group, whose founder and chairman praised the Oct. 7 attacks and which has accused Israeli soldiers of harvesting Palestinian organs, has been cited 95 times on Wikipedia.
“This is exactly the problem with the absence of fairness and standards in websites like this,” Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, told JNS. (B’nai B’rith created the ADL in 1913, but the latter is now independent.)
“It leads to bias, and in these cases, worse—the perpetuation of misinformation, disinformation and blood libels,” Mariaschin said. “If you are the one writing and editing these entries, and you are a fellow traveler in the anti-Israel realm, you can be an ultimate arbiter of ‘truth.’”
“This egregious, malevolent distortion and double standard proves the point,” he added. “Trumpeting the big lie, where there is zero accountability, is more than just an editorial issue. It is downright dangerous.”
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