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:::::::That's not a reasoned reply, it is persisting in an opinion in the face of an obvious fact that exposed the premise of the generalization you used, and its lack of historical pertinence. The tetragrammaton is a furphy in the argument I proposed. Judaism, like all religions, changed its opinion after several centuries, and decided not to pronounce God's name in Hebrew (or rather you could no longer hear the High Priest shout it 10 times from the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur). It was a word that could be only said on one day at one place in the world, and with the destruction of the Temple, its justifying context was lost. |
:::::::That's not a reasoned reply, it is persisting in an opinion in the face of an obvious fact that exposed the premise of the generalization you used, and its lack of historical pertinence. The tetragrammaton is a furphy in the argument I proposed. Judaism, like all religions, changed its opinion after several centuries, and decided not to pronounce God's name in Hebrew (or rather you could no longer hear the High Priest shout it 10 times from the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur). It was a word that could be only said on one day at one place in the world, and with the destruction of the Temple, its justifying context was lost. |
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:::::::You appear to have forgotten the starting point: This is an English encyclopedia, which must be global and neutral. The concept of God shared by the 3 monotheisms, all genetically related, is denoted by a different term in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic etc., but in English we say 'God'. No one writes, the YHWH of the Jews, or the theos of the Christians, but there is a tendency to differentiate the Arab word as denoting a different concept. Westerners allow that the standard English term, 'god' (or dieu, dio, Бог (as in ''bok(er tov''), Gott, etc.) according to cultural context, can be used for the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic deity, despite the fact that each of these religions describe key aspects of that entity in decidedly different ways. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that a residue of the millennial old hostility to Islam subsists in '''our''' (lazy wikipedian) persistence in allowing 'God' to cover both the Jewish texts, and the Christian texts, but reserve for Arabic texts the indigenous term, implying it is qualitatively different. It is not: a large part of the Qu'ran comes straight out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Christian and Jewish concepts of God are as alien to each other as the Islamic notion might be to either, yet we treat the Jewish and Christian texts re God as referring essentially to the same metaphysical reality. It's pure prejudice, racist at the core.[[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 16:23, 9 October 2017 (UTC) |
:::::::You appear to have forgotten the starting point: This is an English encyclopedia, which must be global and neutral. The concept of God shared by the 3 monotheisms, all genetically related, is denoted by a different term in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic etc., but in English we say 'God'. No one writes, the YHWH of the Jews, or the theos of the Christians, but there is a tendency to differentiate the Arab word as denoting a different concept. Westerners allow that the standard English term, 'god' (or dieu, dio, Бог (as in ''bok(er tov''), Gott, etc.) according to cultural context, can be used for the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic deity, despite the fact that each of these religions describe key aspects of that entity in decidedly different ways. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that a residue of the millennial old hostility to Islam subsists in '''our''' (lazy wikipedian) persistence in allowing 'God' to cover both the Jewish texts, and the Christian texts, but reserve for Arabic texts the indigenous term, implying it is qualitatively different. It is not: a large part of the Qu'ran comes straight out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Christian and Jewish concepts of God are as alien to each other as the Islamic notion might be to either, yet we treat the Jewish and Christian texts re God as referring essentially to the same metaphysical reality. It's pure prejudice, racist at the core.[[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 16:23, 9 October 2017 (UTC) |
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== A barnstar for you! == |
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|style="font-size: x-large; padding: 3px 3px 0 3px; height: 1.5em;" | '''The Tireless Contributor Barnstar''' |
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|style="vertical-align: middle; padding: 3px;" | nice article, [[Khalil Beidas]]. ORES says it is GA, so you could push it through the process if you wanted a green badge. cheers. [[User:Leetotherear|Leetotherear]] ([[User talk:Leetotherear|talk]]) 19:34, 16 October 2017 (UTC) |
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Revision as of 19:34, 16 October 2017
editor emeritus
Index |
This page has archives. Sections older than 100 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 20 sections are present. |
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.'[1]
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.. .' [2]
Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,
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.’ [4]
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’[5]. 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.[6]. 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.'[7]
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 [8]). 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.” [9]
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’[10], 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’[11]
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.’ [12]
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 [13], 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.[14]
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.[15]
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. [16]
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.[17]. 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'.[18]. 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.'[19]
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 Wikipedia 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 [20] 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.' [21] 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.[22][23]
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.” [24]<
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.[25]
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’ [26]
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[27] 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 ’[28]
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)[29]. 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.’ [30]
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. [31]
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[32] 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.[33] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power[34]. 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[35][36]. 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.[37]
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.' [38]
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.'[39]
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.’ [40]
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’. [41]
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 unprovoked[42]invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state[43] 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[44]. 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. [45] 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. [46]
Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, 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[47] 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'[48] 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.[49].
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), [50], 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".'[51]
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).[52][53] 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.[54]
(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’ [55]
'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.'[56]
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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
- ^ 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
- ^ Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
- ^ George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
- ^ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,, vol.1, tr.Ralph Manheim, Yale UP 1955 pp.119ff.,p.122
- ^ 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
- ^ Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
- ^ John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
- ^ Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
- ^ 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
- ^ M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
- ^ Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
- ^ ‘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
- ^ 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
- ^ Susan Gay Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1997 p.32 .
- ^ Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
- ^ Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
- ^ 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.’
- ^ Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid, p.19
- ^ 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.
- ^ Amar Dahamshe Off the linguistic map. Are Arab place names derived from Hebrew? in Haaretz 30.06.10
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid. p.17, p.18
- ^ ‘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
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words, ibid p.140
- ^ Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
- ^ Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
- ^ '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
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
- ^ '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
- ^ '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
- ^ '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.
- ^ 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
- ^ Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
- ^ William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
- ^ 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
- ^ Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
- ^ Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
- ^ 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'
- ^ Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
- ^ See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
- ^ Numbers, 32:18
- ^ David C. Jacobson, Does David still play before you? Israeli poetry and the Bible, Wayne State University Press, 1997 p.50
- ^ Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1998 p.14
- ^ Nigel Craig Parsons,The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa, Routledge, 2005 p.299
- ^ Michael Sfard, Occupation double-speak,' at Haaretz, 12 June 2012.
- ^ Jonathan Cook, Israeli Road Signs, Counterpunch 17-19, July 2009
- ^ Nir Hasson, Give Arab train stations Hebrew names, says Israeli linguist, Haaretz 28/12/2009
- ^ Yossi Sarid 'Israel is not killing the Palestinian people - it's killing their culture,' Haaretz 3 Octobr 2014
- ^ 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
- ^ 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)
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 Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.84.1.2 (talk)
Yo Ho Ho
Reconsideration
The aforementioned decision looks like a 'hissy fit', as young people used to say. Giving aboriginal societies their due should take precedence over some egotistic standing on one's dignity in the face of judgments I find deplorable. My premise was that I was being denied my natural right to edit I/P articles, and that, if that right was denied me, I would not supply the 400 remaining articles I am preparing on Aboriginal societies. Some arbitrators think the former is just my personal take and that I deserved a month's suspension for expostulative language. Well, I'll drop the expostulative language, and return to the I/P area alone, and see if I run up against the tagteaming revert pattern that exasperated me earlier. If this fails to eventuate, and I can work there with equanimity, then I'll take it I was mistaken, and resume my project on the comprehensive coverage of Australian tribal societies (but only on that condition). I will list the I/P pages I work on here, as editorial interventions dictate.Nishidani (talk) 12:25, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
This was immediately commented on, with an alerting link to another user here and a follow up denial of WP:AGF here and elicited a personal attack against me by the other editor.
- Nish, ignore both of them. Completely and utterly useless to spend a brain cycle on them. So, please, dont, your remaining brain cycles can be put to so much better use. nableezy - 15:53, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- And if there is some egregious edit that one of them happens to make, try not to be baited into giving what may be called a dressing down with colorful language on the talk page. Just let me know about it. nableezy - 15:58, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- Of course. But it helps to keep one's records in order, like noting that your remarks aboveare already giving rise to a theory we are organizing a conspiracy. Yawn. Nishidani (talk) 16:39, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- Wtf cares. Im serious, let me know when theres something as bad as say calling unnamed editors "anti-Jewish". Those are things that somebody who has repeatedly taken others to AE for personal attacks should know better than to do, and it should result in a ban. Now this is likely not your preferred genre of music, and it is actually one of his shittier songs, but I find it cathartic to sing along to the chorus. nableezy - 16:46, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- Well, I've always had problems with the ambiguities of the expletive 'Fuck you' and its passive variant, 'Get fucked'. In one sense, telling the world to 'get fucked' is tantamount to asking everyone to 'get laid'. I think this a friendly augury - meaning, if everyone got a 'piece', there'd be more peace. I'm sure someone has done a learned grammatical analysis for some linguistics journal on the semantic complexities of the words, but if they haven't, once I'm through with wikiwork, it is one of hundreds of topics I'd like to write about. Subtextually, the preceding signals:'Don't worry about me.' I never have, because that particular burden is something a lot of other people who (don't) know me do, quite pointlessly.Nishidani (talk) 16:58, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- I very much look forward to seeing you investigate this further. For now though, for the rest of us, just ignore what isnt directly related to the content. nableezy - 19:17, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- No. I asked the editor to retract his statement. He struck it out. Today he reintroduced it, insinuating I was not only anti-Jewish but also anti-Israeli, adding insult to injury My water-off-a-duck's back taciturnity in the face of a motherlode of this kind of sniping for a decade, i.e. rarely troubling AN/I and AE with reports, but just telling provocators to get stuffed, led to my being in turn suspended for a day and then a month when my remonstrative language was cited as a bad attitude. To not report this kind of atmospheric niggling, if it persists, while I watch my p's and q's, is to encourage it. That said, I'm focused on content. I'm here for the pleasure of editing, nothing else.Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- Yeah, I see that, and I agree. Im just saying you are much better off doing what you did now, that is ask the person to retract it and not respond to the personal attack otherwise, and if it continues to report it. Dont allow him to bait you into making disparaging remarks against him. Thats all he is doing, trying to wind you up with personal attacks so that he can report you if you make one. nableezy - 19:59, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- No. I asked the editor to retract his statement. He struck it out. Today he reintroduced it, insinuating I was not only anti-Jewish but also anti-Israeli, adding insult to injury My water-off-a-duck's back taciturnity in the face of a motherlode of this kind of sniping for a decade, i.e. rarely troubling AN/I and AE with reports, but just telling provocators to get stuffed, led to my being in turn suspended for a day and then a month when my remonstrative language was cited as a bad attitude. To not report this kind of atmospheric niggling, if it persists, while I watch my p's and q's, is to encourage it. That said, I'm focused on content. I'm here for the pleasure of editing, nothing else.Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- I very much look forward to seeing you investigate this further. For now though, for the rest of us, just ignore what isnt directly related to the content. nableezy - 19:17, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
- Of course. But it helps to keep one's records in order, like noting that your remarks aboveare already giving rise to a theory we are organizing a conspiracy. Yawn. Nishidani (talk) 16:39, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
Hi Nishidani. Welcome back. I really like the talk you emailed me: I always enjoy a good story with personal anecdotes and it was rather humourous in places.
If you have any issues with opening RfCs or arguing about fine points of Wikipedia bureaucracy which no sane person would want to get involved in, but are sometimes necessary, feel free to ping me. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 02:24, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
Very glad to read you again :) --TMCk (talk) 23:51, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
12 July
- Yinon Plan
- Shuafat reverted on a key point immediately, together with a personal attack ('one of your first new projects, you choose to clash with me. Again.', and then told to shut up. A subsequent insinuation of anti-semitism, i.e. I and another editor belonged to an 'anti-Jewish camp' was duly retracted at my request.A day later this retraction was retracted here and finissed here with a variation adding anti-Israeli as a further innuendo. For the record the article on Antisemitism uses the word ‘anti-Jewish’ as synonymous with anti-semitic. I asked the editor to strike out the offensive smear again. On his own page he appears in the meantime he appears to be encouraged to think there’s something conspiratorial about my behavior today.
- Archaeology of Israel on the talk page
- Khan Shaykhun chemical attack
16 July.
- Timeline of anti-Zionism. I was instantly reverted when I removed some recent trivia totally out of keeping with the contents of the page (I wrote about 95% of the entries, basically an annotated list of all Jewish thinkers, writers etc who have taken an anti-Zionist position. The page is deemed 'ridiculous').Nishidani (talk) 20:59, 16 July 2017 (UTC) Nishidani (talk) 20:59, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
23/28 July
- 2017 Temple Mount shooting This is a serious problem. One cannot describe Israeli/Jewish vs Palestinian-Arab incidents on the Temple Mount (the preferred English term for the former) without glossing at least on first mention, that it is also known to Arabs as the Haram al-Sharif. Indeed to satisfy both constituencies, we have two articles on the same site. So I introduced the parallel Arab term for the Temple Mount Haram al Sharif on the 23 July Per NPOV. Temple Mount alone espouses one narrative of the meaning of that location to only one party in the dispute.
- Duly reverted the day after
- I reintroduced it after some days. and again, after a day's wait the same editor removed it mentioning WP:COMMONNAME, a policy which refers to the 'title of an article, not to its content. If so then the revert is a case of a policy-wise false edit summary.I.e.
- No need to include both, this is the WP:COMMONNAME for English. Saying 1 billion people call it that is meaningless as its a different language. The whole article is a POV attack piece.Nishidani (talk) 14:22, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
- 2017 Halamish stabbing attack Editors have restored the content of all material I removed on policy grounds and because the material introduced was using 'is expected' in the contextual sense of 'Israel sources have speculated', making a conjecture into a neutral generalization. NPOV abuse.
- Hilltop Youth. Material, which the reverting editor did not contest as RS-sourced was steady trimmed over several edits. I noticed this today, and restored the deleted material. Undid revision 792912511 by Nishidani (talk) BLPCRIME vio vs Ettinger, and also wrong on some details, you can only state what he was covicted for. This is a false edit summary, since it was a blanket revert changing (a) 'in the view of hilltop youth' into 'the ideology of' and erasing the fact that Hilltop Youth have been compared to ISIS, which has nothing to do with a WP:BLP/Crime issue. The editor involved has been the highest reverter of my few edits, before the sanction, and afterwards.Nishidani (talk) 19:05, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
13/14 August
- 2000 Ramallah lynching Reverted for adding attribution to a phrase. The phrase 'accidentally' had no consensus, and was introduced as a revert. My 'was reported' however is reverted for 'obviously no consensus'. In other words, you can introduce a phrasing that lacks consensus, but you cannot add a phrase which lacks consensus]:) Fortunately this double standard was then perceived by the reverter who then elided also the unconsensual edit which my tweak of attribution modified. Nishidani (talk) 06:39, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
Hi Nish,
Hope you are fine and happy to see you back :-)
If and when you have time, could you please introduce in English in this article the material that can be found in French here ?
You will understand in reading the article and the content that should be added...
Pluto2012 (talk) 17:05, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
- I'll try to get round to it tomorrow. I've looked at the section (a lot of those adjectives can go of course. Responses should have a conceptual value, I think) By the way, the English title is flawed. You can't say 'Hatred on Jews' in English (as opposed to Hass auf in German, which is normal but where auf = gegen. You must write 'hatred of Jews.' (cf. FrenchHaine des Juifs ) Nishidani (talk) 18:22, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
- I've checked it all out. I had a nice afternoon in the virtual company of a deeply intelligent man, Shahak. To have one's ears tuned to that kind of toxic agitprop is depressing. I don't even know if it's worth the bother to improve a page that was brain-dead on birth: the French page is far better.Nishidani (talk) 19:27, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
- Don't worry too much.
- The idea was just to neutralize the English version with these 3 scholars.
- DE, EN and FR articles are just depressing and b***sh**. Pluto2012 (talk) 20:22, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
- I'm a bit late, but must get a certain backlog of work, private and otherwise done, before I pass the translation on. Sorry for the delay.Nishidani (talk) 16:41, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
- I've checked it all out. I had a nice afternoon in the virtual company of a deeply intelligent man, Shahak. To have one's ears tuned to that kind of toxic agitprop is depressing. I don't even know if it's worth the bother to improve a page that was brain-dead on birth: the French page is far better.Nishidani (talk) 19:27, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
Archiving
Welcome back, old chap. You've been missed!
Anyhow, now that you're back, I've restored the previous settings for the archive bot.
It is possible, if you really wish, to stop a specific section from being archived (I'm doing this for the long LHT clutter thread on my own talk page, at least for now), but in your case I strongly recommend against it, because your talk page is already pushing the limits on size and number of threads. Instead, I think you should just let the bot do its work in the normal manner. You can always put a link to an archived thread on your main user page, possibly with an excerpt or explanation. Regards, NSH001 (talk) 05:35, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
AE comments
Hi. May I suggest some "Best Practices" for AE statements?
- Nobody reads 90% of what people write at AE. Therefore, statements must be short.
- Nobody reads the disputes between people who are not a party to the request.
- The more one writes, the more it can (and will) be used against oneself.
So, I suggest that you simply ignore what NMMNG is saying at the AE request. Nobody is going to read it. And if anyone does, it's likely to hurt you as much as him: admins will think that "these people can't get along with each other. Let's ban both of them".
If you want to complain about NMMNG, just open a separate request. Or you could just ignore them. I have told NMMNG the same thing, but they don't listen. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 02:56, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
- You're quite right. I should stop thinking and behaving as if Wikipedia were an exemplary arena for the deployment of what Habermas called kommunikative Rationalität, esp. within the I/P death zone's basso ostinato of unkommunikative Nationalität. That kind of persistent fishing expedition, baited with just enough sneering to get under the WP:AGF radar while sufficiently rude ('your claim is self-serving falsehood,') to elicit a countering response (which in turn will be parsed to find evidence of a WP:AGF violation thitherto lacking) should be passed over in silence. It's just that while sympathetic to admins - it's tough wading through such motherlodes of unfocused discursive drift- I've seen enough judgements that are 'humoural' rather than policy-based or internally coherent, to think at times a further word of clarification is needed. by the way, having to reread through the history of my engagements with this case, I realized that it was correct to suspend. Wordsmith didn't think much of the plaintiff's evidence but went back and noticed I had unduly 'personalized' things once or twice by saying things like "from your nationalist perspective" and "the usual Israeli POV pushers." Apparently, however, this is more offensive that language that implies to most readers that someone is an anti-Semite. What is crushing evidence for a sanction in one case, is piddling in the other. Still, I'll take your and the other chap's advice to 'shut up'.Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
- Ah, I note in the meantime the case is closed. Back to serious editing.Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
Aboriginal source page per Huldra's shining example
I think I need to muster up the fundamental early sources on the Aborigines, very much along the lines of my inspirer for this series. I'll begin to drop some bibliographical notes here, so they can be transferred to a new page, as she does.
There are two assumptions on future work once the several hundred outline articles are completed
- (1)All articles deal with the country where each aboriginal tribe lived, listing contemporary townships and cities etc. Eventually each town and city article in Wikipedia should have a link indicating the tribe(s) that inhabited the zone before white colonization. At the moment, most articles begin with white settlement, ignoring the pre-existing groups.
- (2)These articles are being written according to the relatively modern scholarly notices. However, once the list is complete, then each article should be reviewed according to the 19th century historical sources listed below, which are extensive and detailed yet difficult to use because they mention landscape, and customs, without identifying the tribes by name. Once we know from the articles who lived where, reading the classics accounts becomes simpler, in that we can immediately twig which tribe or tribal group is being spoken of.
- (3) It follows that each article should have in a History section RS citations of the first settlers, where they set up stations and cattle runs, even if the tribe is not specified. Thios is perfectly legitimate background, and not a WP:RS infraction. Often the early pioneer chronicles will mention the 'natives' or 'tribes' without identifying them, but the lack of a specific tribal name does not translate into passing over in silence their presence on those terrains. This is particularly exigent for articles on tribes for whom little information survives, since they died of introduced disease or massacres. Their articles can easily be thickened by using regional histories of the occupiers who took over their territory. Examples are the Bungandidj and Meintangk: the earliest forays indicate widespread smallpox marks, but few people. The archaeological evidence is turning up, to the contrary, evidence of dense populations until settlement.
I expect doing these two things is beyong my scope and span, but by setting up a comprehensive reading list and leaving it here, stray editors and odd bods may just be able to click read, and harvest information from these sources without making tiresome net searches on their own.
- Overviews
- Tindale, Norman Barnett (1974). Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names (PDF). Australian National University Press. ISBN 978-0-708-10741-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Barwick, Diane E. (1984). McBryde, Isabel (ed.). "Mapping the past: an atlas of Victorian clans 1835-1904". Aboriginal History. 8 (2): 100–131.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help)
- Bibliography in chronological order
- King, Philip Parker (1827). Narrative of a survey of the intertropical and western coasts of Australia performed between the years 1818 and 1822 (PDF). Vol. 1. London: John Murray (publisher).
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Napier, Charles James (1835). Colonization, Particularly in Southern Australia: With Some Remarks on Small Farms and Over Population (PDF). T. & W. Boone.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Ogle, Nathniel (1839). Western Australia: A manual to that Settlement or its Dependencies (PDF). London: James Fraser.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Grey, George (1841). Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North West and Western Australia. Vol. Volume 1. T. and W. Boone.
{{cite book}}
:|volume=
has extra text (help); Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Eyre, Edward John (1845). Journals of expeditions of discovery into central Australia, and overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound, in the years 1840-1 (PDF). Vol. Volume 1. London: T. and W. Boone.
{{cite book}}
:|volume=
has extra text (help); Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Eyre, Edward John (1845). Journals of expeditions of discovery into central Australia, and overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound, in the years 1840-1 (PDF). Vol. Volume 2. London: T. and W. Boone.
{{cite book}}
:|volume=
has extra text (help); Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Angas, George French (1847). Savage life and scenes in Australia and New Zealand: being an artist's impressions of countries and people at the Antipodes (PDF). Vol. 1, 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Morgan, John (1852). The Life and Adventures of William Buckley: Thirty-two Years a Wanderer among the Aborigines of the then unexplored country round Port Phillip, now the Province of Victoria (PDF). Hobart: Archibald Macdougall.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - McGillivray, John (1852). Narrative of the voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, commanded by the late Captain Owen Stanley during the years 1846-50, including discoveries and surveys in New Guinea, the Louisiade Archipelago, etc : to which is added Mr. E.B. Kennedy's expedition for the exploration of the Cape York Peninsula (PDF). London: T. & W. Boone.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Lang, Gideon S. (1865). The Aborigines of Australia (PDF). Melbourne: Wilson & Mackinnon.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Bunce, Daniel (1859). Language of the aborigines of the Colony of Victoria and other Australian districts: with parallel translations and familiar specimens in dialogue, as a guide to aboriginal protectors and others engaged in ameliorating their condition (PDF). Geelong: T. Brown.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Lang, J. D. (1861). Queensland, Australia; a highly eligible field for emigration, and the future cotton-field of Great Britain: with a disquisition on the origin, manners, and customs of the aborigines (PDF). London: E. Stanford.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Howitt, William (1865). The History of Discovery in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand: From the earliest times TO the present day (PDF). London: Longman Green & Co.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Beveridge, Peter (1865) [1861]. "A few notes on the dialects, habits, customs and mythology of the Lower Murray aborigines". Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria. 6. Melbourne: 19–74.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Oldfield, Augustus (1865) [1861]. "On the aborigines of Australia". Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London. 3: 215–298.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Smyth, Robert Brough (1878). The Aborigines of Victoria: with notes relating to the habits of the natives of other parts of Australia and Tasmania (PDF). Vol. Volume 1. Melbourne: J. Ferres, gov't printer.
{{cite book}}
:|volume=
has extra text (help); Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Taplin, George (1879). Folklore, manners, customs and languages of the South Australian aborigines (PDF). Adelaide: E Spiller, Acting Government Printer.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Fison, Lorimer; Howitt, Alfred William (1880). Kamilaroi and Kurnai (PDF). Melbourne: G Robinson.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Dawson, James (1881). Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia (PDF). Melbourne: George Robertson.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Beveridge, Peter (1883). "Of the aborigines inhabiting the great lacustrine and Riverine depression of the Lower Murray". Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. 17. Melbourne: 19–74.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Palmer, Edward; Howitt, A. W. (1884). "Notes on Some Australian Tribes". Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 13: 276–347.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (1886). Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (ed.). The Australian race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia and the routes by which it spread itself over the continent (PDF). Vol. 1. Melbourne: J. Ferres.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (1886). Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (ed.). The Australian race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia and the routes by which it spread itself over the continent (PDF). Vol. 2. Melbourne: J. Ferres.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (1887). Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (ed.). The Australian race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia and the routes by which it spread itself over the continent (PDF). Vol. 3. Melbourne: J. Ferres.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Favenc, Ernest (1888). The history of Australian exploration from 1788 to 1888 (PDF). Sydney: Turner & Henderson.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Howitt, Alfred William (1889). "On the organisation of Australian tribes". Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria. 1 (2): 96–137.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Beveridge, Peter (1889). The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina (PDF). Melbourne.
{{cite book}}
:|journal=
ignored (help); Invalid|ref=harv
(help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
- This is a reprint of 1883, but more legible online
- Threlkeld, Lancelot Edward (1892). Fraser, John (ed.). An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal, the people of Awaba, or lake Macquarie (near Newcastle, New South Wales) being an account of their language, traditions, and customs (PDF). Sydney: C. Potter, Govt. Printer.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Meston, Archibald (1895). Geographic History of Queensland. Dedicated to the Queensland People (PDF). Queensland Government Printer.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Worsnop, Thomas (1897). The prehistoric arts, manufacturers, works, weapons, etc., of the aborigines of Australia (PDF). Adelaide: C.E. Bristow, Government Printer.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Bride, Thomas Francis, ed. (1898). Letters from Victorian Pioneers (PDF). Melbourne: Robert S Brain Government Printer.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Mathews, R. H. (January 1898). "Initiation ceremonies of Australian tribes.Appendix Nguttan initiation ceremony". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 37 (157). Melbourne: 54–73.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Mathew, John (1899). Eaglehawk and Crow; a study of the Australian aborigines including an inquiry into their origin and a survey of Australian languages (PDF). London: Nutt.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Mathews, R. H. (1904). "Ethnological notes on the Aboriginal tribes of New South Wales and Victoria". Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. 38 (Part I): 203–381.
{{cite journal}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Howitt, Alfred William (1904). The native tribes of south-east Australia (PDF). Macmillan.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Gribble, J. B. (1987) [1905]. Dark deeds in a sunny land: or Blacks and whites in North-West Australia. ECU Publications.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Mathew, John (1910). Two representative tribes of Queensland with an inquiry concerning the origin of the Australian race (PDF). London: T. Fisher Unwin.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Spencer, Baldwin (1914). Native tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia (PDF). London: Macmillan Publishers.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help)
Lyndall Ryan, (ed.) Colonial Frontier: Massacres in Eastern Australia 1788-1872 University of Newcastle, with timeline here and statistical analysis of the 172 massacres in 84 years here, 3139 aborigines as opposed to 72 colonists. Nishidani (talk) 21:04, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar | |
Good job, brave knight! AssadistDEFECTOR (talk) 17:22, 21 July 2017 (UTC) |
Perhaps 'Good night, brave jobber' would be closer! Thanks.Nishidani (talk) 19:59, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
See your diff here. Are you sure it's Lake Bumbunga (near Lochiel, Mid North)? I would love it to be but very little is known about the indigenous history of the lake and it's a long was away from Ngarkat lands. Are you sure the Pink Lake story is not about some other lake nearer to the riverlands where the Ngarkat and various Narrindjeri tribes might realistically have clashed? Donama (talk) 00:47, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks indeed for this note, of critical acumen. It's refreshing to realize not only that these obscure articles are read, but that they are combed through with care. I'm still shaking off cobwebs on an empty stomach growling for breakfast abroad, but a quick answer is this. The source is an academic specialist,Jessica Weir who in turn relied upon what the published a Ngarrindjeri elder Matt Rigney told her. I myself sat on that bit of info for a few days- it did look a bit far out of Ngarkat territory, but here we just have to follow what RS tell us. Unfortunately Rigney can't be contacted for further details, he passed away in August 2011, two years after Weir's book. It's true also that traditional lore can muddle names and places, and we need endless crosschecking. I'll handle this by adding attribution when I've had some tucker. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 07:18, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
- Okay, that is the Wikipedia approach and fair enough. I expect it will continue to bug me though, because it just doesn't make sense. The fact that there's being so much more information added to Wikipedia about SA's indigenous peoples, or generated in academia in the first place to support that, is what's really important so I'll try to just let it go for now! Thanks for your good work! Donama (talk) 00:21, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
- Just a final note. Distances don't mean much in mythic or legendary story. You can find the story of David and Goliath in the Iliad, which locates it in southern Greece, and in the Bible which locates it in the Middle East. Both refer to a battle at the river Jordan. The battle of Troy as described didn't necessarily 'take place' at Schliemann's Troy. For all we know it may relocate legends associated with the Lycian/Carian coast. All I think Rigney's remark tells us is that he heard s legend in which his tribe fought the distant (and much feared) Ngarkat. The Ngarkat functioned in several contiguous tribes as a bogey to spook their children. Obviously that is not the cause of the pinkness. And perhaps the Ngarkat were chosen because the Ngarrindjeri became tribally inclusive, and story-tellers might not have wished to offend recently incorporated groups, etc.etc. Myths are not based on facts. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 07:08, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
- Okay, that is the Wikipedia approach and fair enough. I expect it will continue to bug me though, because it just doesn't make sense. The fact that there's being so much more information added to Wikipedia about SA's indigenous peoples, or generated in academia in the first place to support that, is what's really important so I'll try to just let it go for now! Thanks for your good work! Donama (talk) 00:21, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
I can't remember what article takes this kind of opinion on for its topic.-
Philip Weiss, YT, Reuters, Economist journalists self-censor reports from Israel so as not to be ‘savagely targeted’-John Lyons,' Mondoweiss July 26, 2017, reporting on John Lyons's new book, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir. HarperCollins 2017. Those self-censoring mainstream sites are what wiki qualifies as RS, those that fail to self-censor, like +972 magazine etc., are automatically removed if introduced, consolidating WP:Systemic bias. A similar logic operates here. If you try to edit the Palestinian realities of a double POV narrative, likely as not, the logic of targeting is inevitable.Nishidani (talk) 20:30, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
Nomination of Meir Ettinger for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Meir Ettinger is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
AE
Reported here. No More Mr Nice Guy (talk) 01:25, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
- As is usual, another example of Much Doodoo about Nu-ffink.Nishidani (talk) 07:44, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
Et tu, Brute?
Do you feel like offering an opinion about this addition to Et tu, Brute? There is a fuss at ANI but that is not relevant. This is just a thought–I'm not asking you to have a look, I just thought you might like a change. Johnuniq (talk) 05:00, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
- You suggest that for a change?!! The assassination of Caesar was almost identical to the assassination of the two soldiers at 2000 Ramallah lynching, a mob stabs one or two people to death. I'll chuck a shufti at the page.Nishidani (talk) 07:15, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
Your edit on Bardi people
Hi,
I reverted your edit on Bardi people, as you removed a chunk of text without any explanation. If it does need to be removed, by all means do so, but please can you include your reasons in the edit summary? Cheers! Stephen! Coming... 13:11, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
ANI stuff
Hi. I suggest not replying to everyone who shows up at ANI. In particular, you should ignore Shrike and Nihlus Kryik. They have a right to express their uninformed opinions, just like anyone else; that is the nature of ANI. The tangent spawned by this remark of Shrike and your subsequent reply is needlessly distracting and will come to nothing, at least nothing good.
The main thing to understand is that nobody reads 90% of what is written there, at least not with any degree of care. You have one or two chances to make your point. Subsequent discussion just blends into the background noise, and is more likely to hurt you than help you.
What is likely to happen in these cases is that some passing admin will not read the whole thing carefully and say: "where there is smoke there is fire" and hand out sanctions like candy. Alternatively, the whole thing will be closed with some meaningless and boilerplate closing statement which will be appealed to by various actors in some future case.
If this sounds too cynical, I can assure you that it is not. ANI is virtually useless to handle long-term contributors. There is one case where this general pattern is violated: if one or more of the parties have past sanctions; in which case, they are pummeled regardless of the facts. (I once did an small informal study of ANI which reached this conclusion.)
For the general problem of NMMNG, I suggest simply ignoring them. Just don't reply to their points. At all. There are usually more good-faith interlocutors on the page who you can discuss with. (It's a pity that Wikipedia does not have a "mute" button like Twitter.) Either NMMNG will get bored and reduce their sniping; or if they continue their low level sniping, you would have a solid future case. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 14:05, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
- I have to agree with Kingsindian here. I tried to read both the AN/I discussion and the article talk page as much possible, but it is difficult to reach a coherent solution when the presentation is all over the place. My impression is that there isn't a convincing case at this moment to warn the editor in question, and a warning may not be helpful to resolve your situation. Alex ShihTalk 15:53, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
- It's not my situation, actually. I'm not upset by that nonsense. I just dislike being taken to AE every time I make a minor slip or have used 'biting' language, while fishing expeditions, baited with the usual personal insinuations, and intended to elicit more material from me on the expectation I'll act in kind, are ignored. Nonetheless 謝謝你花很多你寶貴的時間. Nishidani (talk) 16:07, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
- Oh thanks, 閣下會說中文? Anyway, hope everything goes well. Alex ShihTalk 16:27, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
- I have to agree with Kingsindian here. I tried to read both the AN/I discussion and the article talk page as much possible, but it is difficult to reach a coherent solution when the presentation is all over the place. My impression is that there isn't a convincing case at this moment to warn the editor in question, and a warning may not be helpful to resolve your situation. Alex ShihTalk 15:53, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
Copyright problem on Ngarinjin
Material you included in your initial revision of the above article appears to have been copied from Tindale's Aboriginal Tribes of Australia (1974). This was picked up by a bot and reported as a potential copyright violation, as the same content is reproduced online here. It was copyvio at the time you created the page, but you've since edited it and now it is copyright compliant. But in the future, please don't add copyright content to this wiki, not even temporarily for editing. Please do your amendments before you save the page, or use an external editor. This is the second time I have had to ask you to do this. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 22:58, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
- Well, do you ever imagine that things can happen beyond one's control, i.e. that someone can have 9 pages open, with a draft on one,-which has been placed there because from the file to completing the wiki reformulation of a text is a matter of minutes - and several women just happen to wander joyously in my study and ask if I might replay for the little boy the inimitable Jay Siegel and the Tokens' version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, the voice-over used in the cartoon version which, some days earlier, I had thought of playing when he was having a teething tantrum no one could soothe for a half an hour. It had worked like a miracle so I did so, and, yielding my seat, went off to make a cuppa while the child suddenly glued his eyes to the screen and began to sway and clap his hands together with his aunts. When I got back, he was happy, as were the aunts, and 4 hours work was wiped out because one of the aunts had in the meantime, trying to replay the tune, touched the wrong key, sending the draft into cyber space, and wiped out 3 other files? Jeezus, shit happens. And bots are morons that require oversight. This has nothing to do with intentions.Damn it. Now I guess I'll have to to soothe my own nerves at being hauled over the coals again by listening to the Gilgamesh Epic.Nishidani (talk) 07:49, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
- Hi Nishidani, some of the older revisions of the article needed to be revdeled to fix the copyright problems. WP is rather touchy about copyright, and WP:CCI is perpetually backlogged. So just be a bit more careful in the future. One doesn't want to get in trouble over a trifle. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 07:58, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
- My life here increasingly consists of getting into troubles over trifles, in which the running assumption is I'm a careless editor. One editor has even made it a life task to niggle at 'stuff' to prove this. If you do 2-3 articles on obscure topic a day for a year, slip-ups will occur by the logic of probability. All it needs is a courteous note. Manners and familiarity with an editor's work can save a lot of time. I'm tempted to note down hereonin each time I've had to rewrite patent copyright plastering all over these articles that the bot has not picked up. It's a daily occurrence, spotting copyright violations, and fixing them by careful paraphrase. Go figure. Nishidani (talk) 08:09, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
- 不要在意。Alex ShihTalk 08:11, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
- Just a note, by way of coincidence. I race to set up articles, their linked reading list, and then return every now and then, depending on reading to begin 'thickening' them. I had a letter from a relative working near the Worimi recently, and thought I'd better check it. Just stubbed, and still poor. I checked through and the first thing I noticed was the kind of endemic plagiarism, with pseudo-sourcing, that bots never pick up. I.e.
- The wiki article had:
- SOLDIERS Point is a special place for cultural, spiritual and historic reasons pre-dating white settlement (for) .. The Worimi people. (dead link)
- The ostensible source was Port Stephens Examiner 2016, p. 15. this.
- It was a false link, the date was wrong as well. On nabbing the real source the wiki sentence turned out to be lifted straight out of Sam Norris, State government recognises Aborginal significance of Soldiers Point land,' Port Stephen Examiner.4 July 2016
- Soldiers Point was a special place for cultural, spiritual and historic reasons to the Worimi people.
- Another fudge bots never pick up is unlinked sourcing, hundreds of articles in the areas I start to revise cite books or articles, without a link, and you are supposed to take it all on trust. You get off scot-free if you do that. If, as I do, you strive to link every statement to a directly verifiable page source, the bot will buttonhole you once in a fucking blue moon, yeah. But no bot picks up the massive crapsheets and motherlodes of pseudo- or 'trust-me' sourcing one finds on Wikipedia.
- It's good that people look over one's shoulder, excellent. But nudges and comic prompts are more than sufficient to get me to address any problem. I don't need to be templated with a remonstration.Nishidani (talk) 13:36, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
- Here is the documentation for the bot that is currently in use. What it is doing is taking all new additions over a certain size and comparing to documents already available online. (It is not checking extant content; while this is possible to do, it would be prohibitively expensive and not very practical, as there's so many Wikipedia mirrors. So there's plenty of copyvio that remains undetected, that's for certain.) Copyright violations are found regardless of whether or not you cite your source, as it's not using the cited sources to do its search; it's checking against the Web as a whole, including archived content and old, hard-to-find versions of web pages. Items that have a match over the given threshold are reported at https://tools.wmflabs.org/copypatrol/en for assessment. There's typically 60 to 100 or even more cases to be checked each day. Please in the future do not add copyright material to this wiki, not at all, not even temporarily. If I discover it I am obliged to act on it by performing revision deletion and issuing you a warning. Neither of my warnings were templates, they were purpose-written notes, so sorry. Copyright violations are not a trifle, they're not a joke, so please don't do it any more. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 00:49, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
- My life here increasingly consists of getting into troubles over trifles, in which the running assumption is I'm a careless editor. One editor has even made it a life task to niggle at 'stuff' to prove this. If you do 2-3 articles on obscure topic a day for a year, slip-ups will occur by the logic of probability. All it needs is a courteous note. Manners and familiarity with an editor's work can save a lot of time. I'm tempted to note down hereonin each time I've had to rewrite patent copyright plastering all over these articles that the bot has not picked up. It's a daily occurrence, spotting copyright violations, and fixing them by careful paraphrase. Go figure. Nishidani (talk) 08:09, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
- Hi Nishidani, some of the older revisions of the article needed to be revdeled to fix the copyright problems. WP is rather touchy about copyright, and WP:CCI is perpetually backlogged. So just be a bit more careful in the future. One doesn't want to get in trouble over a trifle. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 07:58, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
(2) Another one the bot apparently didn't pick up.
- Barkindji. [[User:| Pennyw]] added the following:
- 'In geographical terms, the homelands of the Barkindji extended from what is now Wentworth in the Riverina Bioregion, northward through the Murray Darling Depression Bioregion and into the Darling Riverine Plains Bioregion beyond Wilcannia. Barkindji homelands were known to extend into Queensland via the Paroo due to the friendly relations they had with the Parundji people of the Darling Riverine Plains Bioregion.'
- The source introduced states
- 'The homelands of the Barkindji extended from what is now Wentworth in the Riverina Bioregion, northward through the Murray Darling Depression Bioregion and into the Darling Riverine Plains Bioregion beyond Wilcannia (HO and DUAP 1996). Barkindji homelands were known to extend into Queensland via the Paroo due to the friendly relations they had with the Parundji people of the Darling Riverine Plains Bioregion (HO and DUAP 1996).'
- removed Nishidani (talk) 15:26, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
Merge?
Hi, Nishidani, thank you for taking off the above plagiarism - I'm pretty inexperienced and got distracted from paraphrasing it by worrying about whether the two pages 1. Paakantyi 2. Barkindji should be merged. What do you think? I was waiting on a Wikipedia helper for technical help, and, as I said to him, the one starting with 'p' seems to be more modern and have official approval: http://glottolog.org/resource/reference/id/500712
but the people themselves would mostly use Barkindji - for example, the people's Facebook page is called "BARKINDJI (PAAKANTYI) PEOPLE" I only went to the Barkindji page to fix a small error under the 'History' section, and now I'm getting quite confused :) ! Many thanks Pennyw (talk) 23:40, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
- No probs, Pennyw. When quickly reviewing those two pages, I realized there was a conflict, so I began to fix the Paakantyi article, leaving the Barkindji alone, except for rapid reformatting, assisted by the meticulously sedulous benevolence of NSH001. There's a substantial problem created by name overlap for anyone taking on these articles: as you can see in any article, there are many alternative names for every group, and often one has Buckley's chance of sighting a pre-existing article under another name, as one starts a new article. Thinking 'P' I didn't see 'B', in short. My fault. In any case, you're right, the Barkindji stuff has to be moved over, but very carefully, because each source has to be controlled, since both newspaper articles and government handout info sheets on the web rely on interviews with detribalized informants who often express an aggregate identity that is not quite aware, at times, of the historical differences. Here for example you have 4 realities potentially bundled into one, the Parrintyi, the (southern) Paakantyi, the Wanyiwalku-Pantyikali, (moving northwest from the Jitajita boundaries) and also the Paaruntyi. Sorting that out was required before I, for one, tackled the reduplicative rebus. Don't worry about being 'confused', even experts are. All help is welcome. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 09:45, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
Dear Sir. Thank you for the grammar lesson. I am capable of distinguishing between "whom" and "which." But this does not clarify the object of the verb "disliked." It merely makes it appear that the wrong word has been used to refer to the antecedent "Jews." Even if the word "which" were enough to tell the reader to jump back one more antecedent noun, the reader then gets to the noun "destruction," not to the noun "term," which is the actual object of the verb "disliked." The sentence must be improved. If you have a better improvement, please propose it. But please do not leave future readers to puzzle over this sentence several times trying to decipher its meaning. 68.100.9.169 (talk) 21:38, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
- Readers are expected to have a basic knowledge of English. How on earth one can construe that sentence the way you did is beyond me, and probably beyond the several thousand people who read that, and didn't pull up in surprise, since it was first composed some years ago. Nishidani (talk) 21:43, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
please
be a bit more careful with your marvelous aboriginal article creations - this talk page suggests you should know to add categories to pages, and take care with correct regions, and even the talk page tags - but there is something very creepy about this talk page, cannot put my finger on it - but simply, in my case asking for your help as you create, to tend to the details as well would be very helpful, thanks JarrahTree 10:40, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- It's a reasonable expectation, which I appreciate. I'm old and racing against time, however. I have an acute bot and its master to take care of most errors. This induces complacency. But since I'm doing 600 articles basically alone, error-creep is natural. I trust it to wikipedians to spend just a few minutes on any of these pages picking up and correcting any errors the bot and co., miss. It's not erxhausting reading a hundred pages a day to sythesize, or spending hours to find just some datum that is relevant. But it's a touch tiring to feel any slip tells against my carefulness. It's the text I care about: all the other wiki machinery is, well, for wikipedians to adjust. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 11:09, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- JarrahTree, Nishidani is already doing more than enough. One point to be corrected, Nishi, is that my assistant is very definitely a script, and not a bot (she would never get bot approval, as everything she does needs manual review). She's very clever, though. Now I could add things like using Aus English to her tasks, but prefer not to, since I would have to remember to turn it off for non-Aus pages. Jarrah, you could always use AWB to add the "Use Australian English" template to these articles. I'd probably do that anyway, but only when Nishidani has finished all his creations. Similarly for the talk page banners. --NSH001 (talk) 11:43, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- NSH it is obviuos you are indeed a good helper and an astute one... to your credit!
- Being a mac user, AWB is irrelevent... the following message is what almost was an edit conflict, addressed to nishidani:
- oh well even creepier - a truly disassociated editor - with disinterest in wiki machinery - and sharing space with others - as wikipedians - wow you should get some sort of honorific statue with eastern european overtones - but the project of 600 articles alone suggests either a disinterest in, or no faith in gaining co-operation - interestingly the dominant overtone of the specificity of required reading - if it is the fact... then the capacity of the relevant project to show any appreciation or even comprehension of the astonishing gap that you are in reality filling in suggests that where you are topic banned is indeed a crowded house of voices of contestation, while that which your are now improving is an almost literally an empty one - the disinterest is strong as the sound of the wind that encountered at points in the mid west (western australia) and on the extreme south east - nothing comes from nothing in truly shakespearian terms - the wind is from nothing going nowhere - it was worth being a bit part to hear that being said from lear to cordelia 8 nights in a row JarrahTree 12:02, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- Actually, I've noticed a rise in people visiting pages just done, and editing for errors, style etc., like yourself, so that's quite comforting. The hard thing about these articles is ferreting out reliable information, because the ones that exist are pretty crummy generally. The information is, almost invariably, out there, it's just time-consuming to find. Sometimes it takes upwards of 30 minutes/ an hour just to get to a journal, browse through to some page number, work out (cf. biodiversity) how to download the article excerpted,- after which, reading up is a breeze that sweeps away the mechanical attrition of scouring or flicking though 800 page volumes to find the sought-for article. Anyway, for the moment, I'm uploading links to all the relevant sources you find in Norman Tindale's footnotes to each tribe, so that anyone, well, anyone who can access jstor, can open up the sources and read for themselves, and build the pages. If that doesn't happen in the meantime, fingers-crossed, I'll go back as time allows, and make précis of each article's content, as I did at Birpai yesterday. It's shit prose, of course, because, instead of writing off memory, one has to paraphrase, which means renunciation of any virtue in the stylistic recreation of absorbed material. That would be a third stage: finish the survey, click through and reread each source, and then rewrite each article for harmonic prose, without feeling the pressure of strict textual accuracy hanging over one's head.Nishidani (talk) 12:21, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- I think this discussion could expand considerably - (thanks for your explanation) - probably best to leave most of what I wanted to say out for the moment - please dont feel obligated to fix things up in the minutiae - I have more paper versions than will ever get into jstor or google - either here or within a days visit to up to a range of repositories anything difficult - for what that is worth (not as good as being on the ground at Aitsis, but then its either in the state or in the NSW...JarrahTree 12:36, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- Good'oh. Bob's your uncle.Nishidani (talk) 12:39, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- In my case always a cousin - that can get the remaining braincells remember the Berndt lecturing on kinship, and so on JarrahTree 12:51, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- Good'oh. Bob's your uncle.Nishidani (talk) 12:39, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- I think this discussion could expand considerably - (thanks for your explanation) - probably best to leave most of what I wanted to say out for the moment - please dont feel obligated to fix things up in the minutiae - I have more paper versions than will ever get into jstor or google - either here or within a days visit to up to a range of repositories anything difficult - for what that is worth (not as good as being on the ground at Aitsis, but then its either in the state or in the NSW...JarrahTree 12:36, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- Actually, I've noticed a rise in people visiting pages just done, and editing for errors, style etc., like yourself, so that's quite comforting. The hard thing about these articles is ferreting out reliable information, because the ones that exist are pretty crummy generally. The information is, almost invariably, out there, it's just time-consuming to find. Sometimes it takes upwards of 30 minutes/ an hour just to get to a journal, browse through to some page number, work out (cf. biodiversity) how to download the article excerpted,- after which, reading up is a breeze that sweeps away the mechanical attrition of scouring or flicking though 800 page volumes to find the sought-for article. Anyway, for the moment, I'm uploading links to all the relevant sources you find in Norman Tindale's footnotes to each tribe, so that anyone, well, anyone who can access jstor, can open up the sources and read for themselves, and build the pages. If that doesn't happen in the meantime, fingers-crossed, I'll go back as time allows, and make précis of each article's content, as I did at Birpai yesterday. It's shit prose, of course, because, instead of writing off memory, one has to paraphrase, which means renunciation of any virtue in the stylistic recreation of absorbed material. That would be a third stage: finish the survey, click through and reread each source, and then rewrite each article for harmonic prose, without feeling the pressure of strict textual accuracy hanging over one's head.Nishidani (talk) 12:21, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- oh well even creepier - a truly disassociated editor - with disinterest in wiki machinery - and sharing space with others - as wikipedians - wow you should get some sort of honorific statue with eastern european overtones - but the project of 600 articles alone suggests either a disinterest in, or no faith in gaining co-operation - interestingly the dominant overtone of the specificity of required reading - if it is the fact... then the capacity of the relevant project to show any appreciation or even comprehension of the astonishing gap that you are in reality filling in suggests that where you are topic banned is indeed a crowded house of voices of contestation, while that which your are now improving is an almost literally an empty one - the disinterest is strong as the sound of the wind that encountered at points in the mid west (western australia) and on the extreme south east - nothing comes from nothing in truly shakespearian terms - the wind is from nothing going nowhere - it was worth being a bit part to hear that being said from lear to cordelia 8 nights in a row JarrahTree 12:02, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- Sitting on the swan river plain at night in rainy weather suffering from extremely bad unpleasant jet lag and other issues it is relief to think there is even recognition of the old huff huff (Berndts students nick name for him) may he rest... etc, multiple stubs are always appreciated... you'd be amused, my fathers collection had tindales/spencer and baldwin/bates a whole range of obscure... all gone - along with real captain cook, and so on - JarrahTree 9:12 pm, Yesterday (UTC+8)
- One of the things I miss these days is Berndt's great book on the Yaralde. I've just done the Djaui stub, which could easily be expanded to 10,000 kb in a few hours. I should explain why I stub quite often. Most of these articles are built on snippety comments in sources that deal with several tribes, so until one can get down stubs that include the range of groups in a territory, it is pointless focusing on one. If, on the other hand, one has a set of thematically/tribally similar stubs on hand, one can use the one source on several pages, as one reads it. Thus one has to set up Umiida Yawijibaya and Unggaranggu at a minimum before seriously rolling up one's sleeves. I'll try and do those three today, if I get time from putting up the Gija stub. regards Nishidani (talk) 13:02, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
- It gets weirder, but things I would not like to share in open space - (in Montreal, then one day in New York and back in f-ing Perth, it is not a pleasant transition) not helped by the mysterious bad vibes of Doha airport, or of the creepy movies in the 24 hours in the air - roger watters from pink floyd latest misery guts blithering antipathy that I can so easily relate to as the acoustic... sigh JarrahTree 09:58, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
- Bad vibes at Doha? You should have taken the Dubai airport route. One place in the area where, upstairs, you can get a fucken beer to break the boredom without being beheaded as an infidel.Nishidani (talk) 11:06, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
- Usual is Dubai, also I dont do alcohol when flying - all to do with the late douglas adams and the infernal Gargle_Blaster#Pan-Galactic_Gargle_Blaster - as adams is quoted - the laws of physics and international treaties...prevent... JarrahTree 11:13, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
- Bad vibes at Doha? You should have taken the Dubai airport route. One place in the area where, upstairs, you can get a fucken beer to break the boredom without being beheaded as an infidel.Nishidani (talk) 11:06, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
- It gets weirder, but things I would not like to share in open space - (in Montreal, then one day in New York and back in f-ing Perth, it is not a pleasant transition) not helped by the mysterious bad vibes of Doha airport, or of the creepy movies in the 24 hours in the air - roger watters from pink floyd latest misery guts blithering antipathy that I can so easily relate to as the acoustic... sigh JarrahTree 09:58, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
Bolter's point of view toes his government's line
The fact I perfer to use the term "Palestinian Territories" with no regret in my mind contradicts this claim. I do not say the SoP doesn't exist de-facto becuase I support Jewish sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, but becuase I know for fact, it doesn't exist de-facto, as a left-leaning anti-settlement person.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 17:52, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
- Yes, it was an inappropriate choice of idiom, but I don't have much time, given the work load and the heat to pause over the niceties of prose. What I meant was that objectively, despite the obvious fact that you think for yourself, spend a lot of time examining and thinking about sources to arrive at your conclusions, the result obtained is not substantially different from the conservative Israeli line, which I identified as a calculated desire not to clarify where Israel's eastern boundaries are. I think I wrote (perhaps replying to Kingsindian) some years ago, that it was rational for Israel to do this, and there was no visible gain for Israel in making up its mind (i.e. in no longer investing huge amounts of time, money and diplomacy to avoid a peace deal). Any minimal deal would mean losing something substantial while gaining nothing Israel already does not have. That's why Nathan Thrall's new book, stating what has been obvious for decades, was so welcome. When your researches tell you there is no such thing as the state of Palestine, that, objectively, is heir to a long line of Zionist claims about there being no such thing as 'Palestinians'. It took several decades to extract an admission that Palestinians do exist, so now we have the 'there is no State of Palestine' argument. This is too abstract, and plays with words, since you have an elected Palestinian government in Gaza, like it or not,and all retired Shin Bet heads seem to think you can negotiate with it) and the PNA ruling over 6,000 sq. kms. Sure, these are enclaves, but the definition of statehood is not arrived at by imposing the criteria used of Western polities- it has numerous definitions because state formation (see the historical anthropology of African states pre-contact etc.) is extremely variegated and a clear categorical definition thereby very complex. All the Israeli argument you agree with means is, 'Palestine' is not a state of the kind we, and the Western countries that count, have. Big deal. It is not such a polity because it is objectively in Israel's geopolitical interests, according to the conservative worldview, to keep the baby born in 1988 on minimum life-support, while denying it the conditions to mature into adulthood. All official power thrives on the margins opened up by ambiguities. Close the ambiguities by clear law, and you have less leeway to do as you want, at least in formal democracies. I must get back to Two Mules for Sister Sara since the ad break is over. Best regards, and, if you find the desert trying, take up an interest in skinks and lizards. Gaza alone has about 13 species. I used to collect them in my leisure time after a 15 hour workday.Nishidani (talk) 20:08, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
- The problem here is mainly what the name "State of Palestine" mean in both of our minds. It seems that to you, "State of Palestine" is a concept. You said ...you have an elected Palestinian government in Gaza, like it or not,and all retired Shin Bet heads seem to think you can negotiate with it) and the PNA ruling over 6,000 sq. kms.... which means that for you, it is not that the "State of Palestine" exists, but that there is a "State of Palestine" which is the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip. First of all, I don't fully disagree, in my eyes, the PA and Gaza are functioning as states. Secondly, saying "there is a State of Palestine already" and poiting out the Gaza Strip and PA, is a very Zionist thing to say, a few levels below saying Jordan is a Palestinian State. "The Palestinians already have a state" they say, "it is Gaza and the PA". This can be linked to Naftalie Bennet's vision, of a State of Israel, annexing Area C, keeping Areas A and B under Palestinian "autonomy" and the Gaza Strip as a separate state.
From my point of view, the "State of Palestine" is a state de jure. It is not the Gaza Strip or PA, but only what it claims to be: The State of Palestine. It was declared in 1988, not established via agreements with Israel in 1994 or after a civil war in July 2007. It is the Palestinian Liberation Organization, acting as a wanna-be state. Whether you say there is already a "Palestinian State", doesn't change what I see, that the state under the name "State of Palestine", declared in 1988 by the PLO, accepted as a UN observer in 2012, doesn't exist yet. The State of Palestine is not the Palestinian Authority. One thing some users in Wikipedia do, that is even worse in my eyes, is to refer to the Palestinian Authority as the "State of Palestine", while seeing the Gaza Strip as a separate entity, as if the situation was simmilar to the Peoples' Republic of China and the Republic of China, only that the Gaza Strip consists of a third or half of the Palestinian population and Hamas is still active in the West Bank, fighting Fatah politically, and enjoying the wide support of the West Bankers.
The State of Palestine, Palestinian Territories, Palestinian Authority and Gaza Strip, are all four different things, and blending the difference between them will contribute to further confusion among readers.
Just a small anecdote, yesterday my father's cousin and her Welsh husband visited us. She told me that when they were on the way back from a trip in Jerusalem, they took the 443 highway and passed through Modiin. On the way they entered Wikipedia as they wanted to read about the city, and they saw this paragraph in the lead: A small part of the city is not recognized by the European Union as being in Israel, as it lies in what the 1949 Armistice Agreement with Jordan left as a no man's land, and occupied in 1967 by Israel together with the West Bank proper. They read it, but since they are not educated on the subject, they didn't really understand much, and came into conclusion that Modiin is an Israeli settlement beyond the Green Line. This is the things I try to avoid, and this is why I am so stubborn about the definition of the State of Palestine and its usage in links, because I care first and foremost about what my readers understand, and this is why I send articles and paragraph I create to my father and to other people for review, to see if they actually understand anything. Know that this is my motive, more than a mere POV push.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 07:20, 27 August 2017 (UTC)- Well, when I've watered my tomatoes to ensure the blistering heat wave doesn't have me starving next week, I'll get back to this, but in the meantime, I've made an expansion to the article precisely on this. The problem with that patch in the lead was that it had no follow-up, as is required per policy, in the body of the article, which would have clarified the issue. There was nothing, however, inaccurate in the lead sentence, which states 'a small part of the city' meaning that the EU decision does not change the status of Modi'in as an Israeli city.
- The general issue you raise is, by the way, reflected exactly on this point because, while the EU was simply legislating in accordance with a court decision, its decision caused the usual boring outcry, described by Coren thus:-
“In our opinion, the European Union’s interpretation of the term the State of Israel as it appears in the trade agreement constitutes a deviation and breach of contract. Ora Coren, 'European Union: Parts of Modi'in Do Not Belong to Israel,' Haaretz 14 August 2012
- In other words, some Israelis were upset that an 'interpretation' was problematical as undermining 'The State of Israel', just as you think the 135+plus international states' recognition of a 'State of Palestine' is a denial of reality. The Israeli side upset about this chanted that the European Union was not facing 'reality'. Arguably, your approach is doing the same: not facing the 'reality' on the ground, i.e., that there are areas, recognized by Israel, as definitely constituting land under exclusive Palestinian jurisdiction where Israel has no right to enter, except on occasions when it determines that it must enter enemy territory. That is both a de jure and de facto admission that the so-called Palestinian territories contains something that constitutes a state. I'll get back to this, but first the garden.Nishidani (talk) 08:33, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- FYI : [1]
- The fact is that the 'de jure' situation prevails on any 'de facto' situation because the law and legacy of things and situations prevails on anything.
- If you are taken your smartphone by a thief, it is still yours, even if it is 'de facto' in his hands.
- Pluto2012 (talk) 07:39, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- Only that the State of Palestine was never taken by a thief, it never came into existence in the first place, unlike my phone. The State of Palestine exists only on papers. Writing that a university is located on a paper, is misleading. Someone might actually think that the Palestine Polyechnic University is located in a state called Palestine, and pays taxes to the State of Palestine, and get fundings from the State of Palestine, which also has a government and citizens. But the State of Palestine doesn't have sovereignty, or a government, or citizens. It only has recognition and the recognition is considered even by most of the supporters as no more than symbolic. Recognized or not, the State of Palestine still doesn't exist.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 08:01, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- The problem here is mainly what the name "State of Palestine" mean in both of our minds. It seems that to you, "State of Palestine" is a concept. You said ...you have an elected Palestinian government in Gaza, like it or not,and all retired Shin Bet heads seem to think you can negotiate with it) and the PNA ruling over 6,000 sq. kms.... which means that for you, it is not that the "State of Palestine" exists, but that there is a "State of Palestine" which is the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip. First of all, I don't fully disagree, in my eyes, the PA and Gaza are functioning as states. Secondly, saying "there is a State of Palestine already" and poiting out the Gaza Strip and PA, is a very Zionist thing to say, a few levels below saying Jordan is a Palestinian State. "The Palestinians already have a state" they say, "it is Gaza and the PA". This can be linked to Naftalie Bennet's vision, of a State of Israel, annexing Area C, keeping Areas A and B under Palestinian "autonomy" and the Gaza Strip as a separate state.
- Yes, it was an inappropriate choice of idiom, but I don't have much time, given the work load and the heat to pause over the niceties of prose. What I meant was that objectively, despite the obvious fact that you think for yourself, spend a lot of time examining and thinking about sources to arrive at your conclusions, the result obtained is not substantially different from the conservative Israeli line, which I identified as a calculated desire not to clarify where Israel's eastern boundaries are. I think I wrote (perhaps replying to Kingsindian) some years ago, that it was rational for Israel to do this, and there was no visible gain for Israel in making up its mind (i.e. in no longer investing huge amounts of time, money and diplomacy to avoid a peace deal). Any minimal deal would mean losing something substantial while gaining nothing Israel already does not have. That's why Nathan Thrall's new book, stating what has been obvious for decades, was so welcome. When your researches tell you there is no such thing as the state of Palestine, that, objectively, is heir to a long line of Zionist claims about there being no such thing as 'Palestinians'. It took several decades to extract an admission that Palestinians do exist, so now we have the 'there is no State of Palestine' argument. This is too abstract, and plays with words, since you have an elected Palestinian government in Gaza, like it or not,and all retired Shin Bet heads seem to think you can negotiate with it) and the PNA ruling over 6,000 sq. kms. Sure, these are enclaves, but the definition of statehood is not arrived at by imposing the criteria used of Western polities- it has numerous definitions because state formation (see the historical anthropology of African states pre-contact etc.) is extremely variegated and a clear categorical definition thereby very complex. All the Israeli argument you agree with means is, 'Palestine' is not a state of the kind we, and the Western countries that count, have. Big deal. It is not such a polity because it is objectively in Israel's geopolitical interests, according to the conservative worldview, to keep the baby born in 1988 on minimum life-support, while denying it the conditions to mature into adulthood. All official power thrives on the margins opened up by ambiguities. Close the ambiguities by clear law, and you have less leeway to do as you want, at least in formal democracies. I must get back to Two Mules for Sister Sara since the ad break is over. Best regards, and, if you find the desert trying, take up an interest in skinks and lizards. Gaza alone has about 13 species. I used to collect them in my leisure time after a 15 hour workday.Nishidani (talk) 20:08, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
I think that on a detailed level most of my understanding of the reality on the ground would match Bolter's. However, at the meta-level we differ. The main problem is that on Wikipedia we are not supposed to edit according to our personal assessment, but rather in accordance with reliable sources. The fact that both legal experts and political commentators differ widely on what "State of Palestine" means that our articles should reflect that disagreement, and we aren't allowed to write what we believe is self-evident and demand others follow. One key point: it is not hard to find expert legal opinion that there is no such thing as a distinction between a "de-jure state" and a "de-facto state". Usually the distinction is only made in reference to governments rather than states. For example, the "de-jure recognition of Israel" by the US some time after the "de-facto" recognition of May 1948 was in no way a statement that the status of Israel as a state had changed, but only (as the text itself says) that the US recognised the government of Israel after the first election as the legitimate government as opposed to the provisional government that existed before. So one can't take the de-jure/de-facto distinction as an objective fact but only as one of the extant opinions. As another example, the territory of states can be under occupation by other states. Many reliable sources, not least most or all UN agencies, use "State of Palestine" to refer to a territory and not just to a paper-state, and are perfectly happy to write about places "in the State of Palestine". We can argue that they are wrong, but our opinion on that doesn't belong in article space except as a report of reliable sources who have that opinion. As an aside, I would personally prefer to write just "Palestine" rather than "State of Palestine" unless the statehood is the topic of discussion, just as we write "Israel" most of the time and only rarely "State of Israel". Zerotalk 11:56, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- Incidentally, Palestine Polyechnic University does receive funding from the government of Palestine and answers to the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education (which is an entity that actually exists with staff and salaries, despite Bolter's sweeping assertions.) The government of Palestine also collects taxes in area A at least. Zerotalk 11:56, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- Well, that allows me to do some more tribal articles, since it is precisely my view, only expressed more succinctly and, arguably, more cogently. The final point is that the wild generalizations Bolter uses above (no citizens, no sovereignty, no government) crumble when practices in the real world are examined. You can, as a Palestinian, take out a Palestinian passport from the PA government authority in Ramallah, which first determines that you are, for them, worthy of Palestinian citizenship, and then travel abroad. If you go to the U.S. they, of course, will state that this acceptance of the passport's validity in no way, horror of horrors, implies recognition of the citizenship of its holder. If the same person then catches a flight to Tokyo, he will be treated as a Palestinian national, i.e. citizen. All you need is a visa, like most other folks. Daniel Barenboim in accepting his Palestinian passport, interpreted it as giving him Palestinian citizenship. But then, Barenboim's genius in this regard consists on insisting on being normal in a world of hallucinating confusion.Nishidani (talk) 12:25, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- The State of Palestine has no citizens, no soveriegnty and no government. The Palestinian Authority has all three for quite a long time. The Palestinian Authority is not the State of Palestine, and merging the two is extremely misleading. The State of Palestine is run by the undemocratic closed-club of the PLO, while the Palestinian Authority is run by the once-democratic Palestinian Legislative Council and Fatah/Hamas' cabinets.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 14:46, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- Please don't repeat yourself on this page. Either reason on the terms given in an argument or drop it.Nishidani (talk) 15:09, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- Since you are persisting in treading on dangerous wiki ground, I'll add this, for your own good. I.e. you are confusing your perception of the 'truth', with the way reality must be described, i.e. neutrally, by wikipedians. If you don't take that on board, you're asking for trouble, and that would be a shame. I'll synthesize the gist.
- What you are confusing is recognition of a country as a state, and the existence of that state, in whatever form it happens to be, embryonic in this case. Israel, as we all know, has no interest in recognizing the state of Palestine, as that is recognized by 135+ countries. It will not do so because doing so would be (a) political suicide for its proposer (b) a form of amputation of territory it aspires to control or annex (c) the definitive cancellation of a key symbolic component of Zionist ideology, the religious fiction of 'The Land of Israel’.(I'll add my private fourth view: a permanent state of conflict involving external threats is, pragmatically, ideal, and to be sustained for cynical political reasons by a leadership that must manage a country with deep identity conflicts about its nature and future direction). It can persist in obdurately blocking this because American administrations, Israel's junior partner, have repeated that they will continue to exercise a veto on any recognition of Palestine as a State, except if or when, some day towards the end of time, the Palestinians negotiate a deal with the occupying power, Israel. This, in performative terms, means that the State of Palestine cannot exist as an entity endorsed by the UN until Israel gives the go-ahead, which it is not in Israel's interests to do (except if it managed with their cronies in Ramallah an agreement that would necessarily kill any pretensions to a viable independent state. This is the hard realism Nathan Thrall finally made public, but has long been known to people who don't read newspapers, twitter or faecesbook.
- The rest of the world is realistic: it accepts that this ‘roadmap’ is a Catch 22/Batesonian double bind farce guaranteed never to resolve the outstanding issues, and thus, accumulatively 135+ nations have negotiated agreements with the Palestinians recognizing their statehood. All this however is irrelevant. The fact is, Palestinian diplomats explicitly present themselves as representatives of the State of Palestine. When Saeb Erekat writes that:
- ’The State of Palestine remains committed to negotiating a peaceful resolution to the conflict between it and the State of Israel’ (p.14 below) he is articulating the Palestinian POV, that a state exists already, and argues why this is true appealing to the Montevideo Convention, which expressly stipulates that recognition is not a sine qua non of statehood .(Saeb Erekat, Liberation Organisation: Legal Brief in Support of Recognition of the State of Palestine,’ in Mutaz Qafisheh (ed.), Citizens of the State of Palestine and Future Refugees, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014 pp.14-29 pp.23ff.)
- The State of Palestine has no citizens, no soveriegnty and no government. The Palestinian Authority has all three for quite a long time. The Palestinian Authority is not the State of Palestine, and merging the two is extremely misleading. The State of Palestine is run by the undemocratic closed-club of the PLO, while the Palestinian Authority is run by the once-democratic Palestinian Legislative Council and Fatah/Hamas' cabinets.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 14:46, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- Well, that allows me to do some more tribal articles, since it is precisely my view, only expressed more succinctly and, arguably, more cogently. The final point is that the wild generalizations Bolter uses above (no citizens, no sovereignty, no government) crumble when practices in the real world are examined. You can, as a Palestinian, take out a Palestinian passport from the PA government authority in Ramallah, which first determines that you are, for them, worthy of Palestinian citizenship, and then travel abroad. If you go to the U.S. they, of course, will state that this acceptance of the passport's validity in no way, horror of horrors, implies recognition of the citizenship of its holder. If the same person then catches a flight to Tokyo, he will be treated as a Palestinian national, i.e. citizen. All you need is a visa, like most other folks. Daniel Barenboim in accepting his Palestinian passport, interpreted it as giving him Palestinian citizenship. But then, Barenboim's genius in this regard consists on insisting on being normal in a world of hallucinating confusion.Nishidani (talk) 12:25, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
- What you have been doing recently is rejecting for personal reasons all of Erekat’s positions, which you are allowed to do off-line but you can’t as an editor. I’m surprised at your persistence because we have a known and documented Palestinian POV and all I/P article are obliged to balance the equations of the parties. You, articulating a commonplace Israeli POV, insist that Erekat's formal position is factually wrong, and want to meddle on those grounds with numerous articles. You’ve enough experience to know that WP:NPOV means that on wikipedia no position identifiable with a party in a dispute can be passed off as the default reality, i.e. as if it were a fact, and the other POV false.
- You've all the rights in the world to believe, that the Palestinians are deluded and you, an Israeli, see things objectively and that your 'objectivism' should be imprinted on this encyclopedia. In real life, you may well believe that your government is telling the truth: on wikipedia, you are obliged to see the other side, the alternative ‘truth’. You may, I allow, even be right, but that is irrelevant to editing here. Some day, you'd do well to get some philosophical student or lecturer to take you through Hegel's concept of Anerkenntnis. The whole of Israel's 'master'-conflict with the knechtisch Palestinians is contained in that short excursus, unbeknown to most of the actors, kibitzers, commentators of the global dronocracy.Nishidani (talk) 16:45, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
I may be wrong but I think that you both speak French. Anyway, here are the points of view of scholars on the topic : [2]. And that's quite clear. They even go further than what wikipedia admits. Jean Salmon :
- "l'Etat palestinien existe bel et bien. Mais il n'existe que pour ceux qui l'ont reconnu." / "The State of Palestine well and truly exists. But it only exists for those who have recognized it." All tihs is quite easy and obvious.
- "Est-ce que l'effectivité de l'occupation (manque de souveraineté) empêche l'existence de la Palestine ? Non" - "Est-ce que les frontières empêche la reconnaisance ? Non. Idrael n'aurait d'ailleurs pas de frontière non plus." :-) - "Est-ce qu'une reconnaissance ne risque pas" etc.
Pluto2012 (talk) 17:33, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
- Exactement. Merci, mon cher ami. J'espère encore trouver le temps nécessaire à compléter le travail pour lequel tu m'as sollicité l'autre semaine . . malheurerusement, la vieillesse me rend oisif. Nishidani (talk) 19:11, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
Mineng and Maia
This addition to Mineng doesn't make sense. Should it be in a "See also" section? Mitch Ames (talk) 09:26, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
- Quite right, thanks. When I set up a new page I type in the Aboriginal name link it and see what it produces, i.e., whether there is a disambiguation page or an already existing page on them. Normally there isn't, and a blank page opens up to write down the details, in which case there is no need to return to the other page and eliminate the trial link. Maia had many possibilities on the disambiguation page, it was late, and I forgot to check back on the Mineng page to erase it. Fixed. Nishidani (talk) 10:37, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
Philosophical inquiry
Since the meme 'alternative facts' is constantly in the air in the current political climate in the USA, I was wondering what would/could the contemporary Popperian philosophical outlook be on the possible concept of an 'alternative truth,' alluded to in one of the very recent posts above. The sudden, unexpected mention of such a concept has aroused, nay enhanced, my pure philosophical curiosity. warshy (¥¥) 22:29, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
- It's the bedtime reading witching hour over here. If you give me a link to the precise passage above alluded to, I'll examine it tomorrow. But off-hand, you might like to examine Many-valued logic.Nishidani (talk) 22:40, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
- Sure. I was referring to your statement above at 16:45 (UTC) today that
" on wikipedia, you are obliged to see the other side, the alternative ‘truth’. "
Incantation
To request speedy deletion of Wadjari, replace the whole of its contents by {{Db-author}}
As the sole author of the page, you have to do this yourself, otherwise I'd do it for you. Regards, NSH001 (talk) 07:53, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
- Done. Sorry for that bother and other oversights causing you needless labour.Anyway, we're just about half way through, over 270 tribes, and 24 anthropologist/linguist articles - by today I hope we'll tip the magic 300 mark, all within a working period of 10 months. It might even be less since the latest data, despite Tindale's classification, is that the Aborigines spoke 502 communilects, and languages(228)/dialects define the ethnic field. If so I hope, to use my father's idiom, to 'break the back' of this marathon by Christmas, if all goes well. This of course only means setting up the stubs, so that anyone, consulting the linked literature on any page, can build on them slowly and carefully. Back to woik! Nishidani (talk) 09:45, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
some reading
I dont know if you are familiar with these?
- Ogle, Nathniel (1839). Western Australia: A manual to that Settlement or its Dependencies. London: James Fraser.
Cheers, Huldra (talk) 23:58, 20 September 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks indeed. Setting that main course on my oogling menu today means you have helped me rid my thoughts of the image plaguing them since I woke up this morning: I was at a restaurant last night where the conversation dwelt in meticulous detail on an almost lost recipe for Pappardelle alla lepre, pappardelle stewed in hare sauce, which a male nurse (also a hunter) picked up by patiently eliciting the arcana from a dying cook, aged 92, from the Marches, who was otherwise on the edge of taking the recipe to the grave 20 years ago. It takes 3 days to prepare, and cooked once a year by the nurse, who has promised to pass on a succulent portion of the result this coming Sunday. We have salvage linguistics in Australian anthropology, and salvage cooking in the infinitely deep world of Italian culinary arts, and I really needed something like the above two works to get my mind focused back on my present priority! Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 07:28, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
A wee present for you
... to lift your spirits after the nightmare of the AfD getting into the Bundestag, and in thanks for your tireless work on anything that really matters on Wikipedia.
--NSH001 (talk) 11:05, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks,N. Exquisite. As these racist scumbags shoot up and shoot off like toxic mushrooms, one can only tune out of their yawping noise by tuning in to the likes of Daiqing Tana, or as song like Wiyathul by the late deeply lamented Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, to realize, if proof were needed, how little those xenophobic bastards know of the aesthetic dimensions of the non-hegemonic world. I haven't done much these last few days- busy navvying for a friend's farmhouse.Nishidani (talk) 13:15, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
The annoying topic of "State of Palestine"
Hello Nish. Came back from 25 days in Jericho. I've checked a few dozen Palestinian IDs, all say "citizen of the Palestinian Authority" in Hebrew and Arabic, with the Palestinian Authority emblem on the back (with "al-Sulta al-Falastiniyya", not "Dawlat Falastin"). Some of the Palestinians gave me their driving license, which said in Hebrew and Arabic "Ministry of Transportation - Palestinian Authority". I've checked a handfull of Palestinian Passports in the checkpost before the Allenby Bridge, all said "Palestinian Authority". I've seured workers in Aqbat Jaber and we met with Palestinian policemen, whose tags said "al-Sulta al-Falastiniyya". I've seen a big sign on the southern entrance to Jericho, whit information about a construction project, sponsered by the "Palestinian Authority". My platoon commandor was part of the convoy of Abu Mazen on his way to Jordan, which was described by a Palestinian representitive as the "President of the Palestinian Authority". In other words, I've spent 25 days in the State of Palestine, and I saw no sign of it existing in any way. Any opinion? (other than probably showing sorrow about me doing the job you spend a effort opposing).--Bolter21 (talk to me) 11:12, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- Thanks, Stav. very interesting. In other words, the state doesn't exist, but has citizens: the non-existent state does what all states do, issuing licenses, passports, and running standard state institutions like a police force, health and educational services and infrastructure and these multiple exercises of state rights are recognized as legitimate by Israel (I don't think you lads are told to impound that material, as an earlier generation was told to rip down on sight any Palestinian flag), and foreign states, 136 of which formally recognize statehood. No. I don't have feelings of sorrow. When I went to Israel to work on a kibbutz, I was asked in the tel Aviv office where I'd like to spend my time. I said: 'Anywhere, near borders, that is regarded as dangerous will be fine' and, after a laugh, they posted me to one such area. I wanted to put my antiwar principles under strain, potentially of hostilities, to see whether they were real, or just a cover for cowardice. One man did try to kill me, but he was a psychotic foreigner, neither Israeli nor Palestinian and I handled the threat well, without panicking.
- You are under a national obligation to do military service (I preferred a jail sentence, but Socrates would have served even if he disagreed), so the point is to do the job well, without enmity, by the book, which it appears, unsurprisingly, you do. I have no expectations that the experience will substantially alter your views. I only worry that you are in an unpredictable warzone, where even the best of intentions can misfire and endanger you, and others. It is a very difficult situation, so keep on your toes, observe everything closely, and keep safe. My only advice is to try and wrench 10 or 20 minutes each night writing down the bare bones of your daily experiences, without cluttering it with emotions, and, perhaps, to read Thucydides. The world is increasingly hysterical and one opportunity your service can offer, unintentionally, is to cultivate close detached observation, not only of the 'enemy' but of your fellows, and yourself, when everything you might face demands the opposite. Above all, take care, lad.Nishidani (talk) 11:56, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- This is a different argument, you say that the "Palestinian Authority" is, in fact, the Palestinian State. I won't fully disagree, as the PA does act more as a state rather than an autonomy as some in the right like to define it. But the "State of Palestine", as an entity, and not a general term, is not the "Palestinian State" that the PA is.
- I am struggeling to spend 10-20 minutes for exercising, reading (books or newspaper) and sometimes, even sleeping and eating. So far I didn't really had any serious confrontations with the "enemy". The Palestinians of the Jordan Valley are quite calm and when we meet them in checkpoints (Allemby or at the exit from the West Bank on the south) it is usually accompanied with a smile and sometimes a laugh. The occasional Taxi drivers from East Jerusalem already know us and shake our hands in the morning, while the Palestinian workers from Ramallah, Hebron and Jericho sit with us for a cup of coffee and greet us as they renovate a millitary camp, from which raids on Jericho will be sent. The only time we saw a major confrontation was when we arrested someone for a crinimal offense (wouldn't elaborate as I don't know if I am allowed to) and his family refused to let go (not knowing that he will probably go back home tommorow, as most of the Palestinians we arrest). One extremely odd expiriance I've had, was seeing three Palestinians being arrested and brought to our base, blindfolded with their hands tied, after they accidently flew a drone above our base. An hour after they were arrested, I saw my half Bedouin, half Galilee-an Muslim company commandor sits with those three, with their hands and eyes free, as they show him their BMW car and let him take it for a ride around the base and even take a picture of him with it. Even though I knew that my expiriances will be much different than what is expressed by the media (the Israeli, Palestinian and international ones), I have to say I didn't expect so many cynical and absurd expriances and in such a short period of time.
- Hopefully I'll have time to expand some articles about the Jordan Valley in the future.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 14:11, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- Nothing absurd there: it's the normal side of any longterm occupation on a quiet front. Australians collectively in the colonial period shot an estimated 20,000 indigenous people but generally most people 'got on' and most settlers didn't engage in it. They just kept mum, or murmured it wasn't nice, but then the logic of history meant that they would die out anyway. A man like Paul Foelsche could command 'nigger hunts' and wipe out a dozen here and there and, next week, camp with some and ask them if they could supply him with words for his lists of their vocabulary. Some of the worst massacres were by the Australian native police, under of course white commanders, just as some of the most vicious behavior in the IDF search and arrest missions is undertaken by Druze. It's a standard colonial policy. Men could have Sunday shooting parties to knock off a tribe, while keeping some blacks to work for them.
- Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I didn't identify the PNA with the State of Palestine. The PNA is a quisling government. Palestinians suffer a double occupation in my view: by the PNA (and perhaps Hamas) and by Israel. As I said much earlier somewhere, the State of Palestine is a quarkish entity, there and not there depending on terms of definition but recognized by too many foreign states. The concept of God is nonsensical of course, but a disturbing proportion of mankind accept it, as a metaphysical reality, and act, behave, perform service and think as though it were existent. Nishidani (talk) 15:02, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- I just noted that Interpol has accepted the State of Palestine.Nishidani (talk) 15:26, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- Just an afterthought,B. The evidence you cite re PNA documents doesn't reflect the 'state' of the 'State of Palestine' question. It reflects a negotiated outcome between the occupying power and the occupied authority as to what form of notation is acceptable to the former, Israel, and what the latter is willing to go along with faute de mieux. On internal or diplomatic documents, and discourses before an international institution, the PNA appears to refer to itself as the representative of the State of Palestine, for there, Israel cannot pose a veto, as it can on documents circulating (which require its approval) in the West Bank. I would expect that were the PNA to issue documents for those travelling through Israeli checkpoints that contained 'State of Palestine' it would translate into holdups, rejection of passage etc. So the 'evidence' is neither here nor there, for Israel, in every forum in the world, and today at the Interpol conference in Beijing, vigorously protested the use of State of Palestine. To no effect, fortunately. The farce you see in documentation reflects not reality (whatever that may be) but force majeure, for it would imperil Israel's geopolitical interests to have Palestine universally recognized as a state, starting with immense legal complications. And that is the way it will almost inevitably stay, regardless of diplomatic realities.Nishidani (talk) 16:55, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- If the Palestinians will elect Marwan Bargouti as a president, he would still not be a president, until he will be released from the Israeli jail and the State of Palestine will not be a state until it will be released from Israeli occupation, even if the world will vote in favour of its existence. I accept the PA as an entity which is a state within a millitary occupation on a territory under occupation. But the concept of a "State of Palestine", the member of the UN, is not acceptable as a location in which there are cities and academies.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 18:50, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
the State of Palestine will not be a state until it will be released from Israeli occupation, even if the world will vote in favour of its existence.
- That sums it up nicely. In your understanding, Israel, uniquely among the community of nations, has the right of veto as to what constitutes a state, in this case Palestine. No nation on earth, in international law, has a right of veto to invalidate what 99.9% of the states of the world recognize. It can state its view, and wipe its arse on all formal deliberations by the world community that contradict its intransigence, but no one would give a flying fuck, other than laugh. You admit that Israel is an occupying power, and assert, above, that it is occupying something that doesn't exist. Reflect again. I'm familiar with all these paradoxes: Zionism was a secular movement by atheists which laid a claim to entitlement over another country on the basis of a divine writ concerning a promised land which, however, the foundational atheists knew to be a pious fiction, etc. Nishidani (talk) 19:30, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- We occupay a land and a people, as in, they are not our citizens, yet we rule over them, and the territory is under the direct rule of our millitary and not the government. And we believe (and know for fact) that regardless of mythology, we were here and this is our homeland. If there was no sign of Jewish presence in the region or any other mention to Jews in Israel outside of the biblie, today you won't have any atheist nationalists like me.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 20:24, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- As I've said a million times, the state of Israel is uncontestably legitimate. But the nucleus of your statement 'We were here' is analytically and historically meaningless. In laymen's language, crap. You were born in Israel. Israel is a state 80% composed of historically recent immigrants and their offspring, period (like Australia, America, Canada etc). The only thing that connects that variegated multitude with the land is a religious doctrine formulated in Babylon by a small clerisy, around 6 centuries BCE, descending from exiles from Judea, which formed the nucleus of Judaism, defining incidentally 'pure Jews' like themselves (see Ezra/Nehemiah) from a 'rabble' ( Am ha'aretz) who nonetheless were ethnically identical to them, and had stayed on the land while the aristocracy languished in Babylon. Use 'we' as some transhistorical entity which has maintained its essence, you step outside of religion, and enter into a form of ideology based on the notion of 'race', now euphemistically reframed as genetic continuity. 'We' means, here, that Yitzhak Shamir and Israel Shahak, or Norman Finkelstein and Menachem Begin, or Albert Einstein and Dov Lior, all share some secret essence that is deeper than anything that might bind the first 3 to their peer communities. If you believe that you'll believe anything
- There is no genetic continuity proven between Jews in general and the Jews located, aside from everywhere from the Maghreb to Iran in antiquity, in ancient Israel, anymore than Italians are ancient Romans or Greeks Hellenes, or the English Britanni. Mind you, in real estate terms, it's a buyable idea. It's nice to be able to hail from Brooklyn, from Ashkenazi families that go back hundreds of year in the USA, discover you are a Jew above all else, and therefore entitled via aliyah to kick Abdul out of Shuhada street in Hebron because a Sephardi who did aliyah in the 1800s from Iraq was force out of his home after the slaughter in 1929, and you want his house at zero cost.
- I looked on my ancestors' farmland in Carrick-on-Suir some years ago, and a local farmer hailed me at a distance, mistaking me for a local identity, saying I was his spitting image. It turned out, funnily enough, that the local identity had the same name as my ancestors who fled after being dispossessed by the English. He wanted me to meet up with the fellow. I wasn't interested. Perhaps I should check the net and see if anyone else will join me in an armed invasion to take back what was, um, 'ours', meaning all of the 70 million people who can trace some link to the Ireland from which one of their forefathers was evicted at gunpoint or by the duress of state-organized famine. Nishidani (talk) 21:02, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- As Im sure you know, Dublin was founded my MYYYYYYY ancestors.....them damn sqatting Dubliners can just wait, I will be back with our navy and kick them out one day.....(Seriously, Ive never been to Ireland, but I hear that many of countrymen invade Ireland every summer.....mostly its pubs..... I even know a couple who have bought a 2nd home there...and apparently they are quite welcome, too! That might have something to do with only taking what is for sale, and paying for it. Huldra (talk) 21:23, 27 September 2017 (UTC))
- Good grief. True, you have prior right. My father always said that we weren't authentic O'Cuinns but rather descended from a medieval Norman family, Duquesne. He also said however that nothing the Irish say about themselves is reliable, since their, sorry, 'our' penchant for letting fantasy get the better of the facts was unrivalled. If Ireland, then the West Coast, in September. Magnificent food is not the least of it. Nishidani (talk) 21:53, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- As Im sure you know, Dublin was founded my MYYYYYYY ancestors.....them damn sqatting Dubliners can just wait, I will be back with our navy and kick them out one day.....(Seriously, Ive never been to Ireland, but I hear that many of countrymen invade Ireland every summer.....mostly its pubs..... I even know a couple who have bought a 2nd home there...and apparently they are quite welcome, too! That might have something to do with only taking what is for sale, and paying for it. Huldra (talk) 21:23, 27 September 2017 (UTC))
- We occupay a land and a people, as in, they are not our citizens, yet we rule over them, and the territory is under the direct rule of our millitary and not the government. And we believe (and know for fact) that regardless of mythology, we were here and this is our homeland. If there was no sign of Jewish presence in the region or any other mention to Jews in Israel outside of the biblie, today you won't have any atheist nationalists like me.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 20:24, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- If the Palestinians will elect Marwan Bargouti as a president, he would still not be a president, until he will be released from the Israeli jail and the State of Palestine will not be a state until it will be released from Israeli occupation, even if the world will vote in favour of its existence. I accept the PA as an entity which is a state within a millitary occupation on a territory under occupation. But the concept of a "State of Palestine", the member of the UN, is not acceptable as a location in which there are cities and academies.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 18:50, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- Just an afterthought,B. The evidence you cite re PNA documents doesn't reflect the 'state' of the 'State of Palestine' question. It reflects a negotiated outcome between the occupying power and the occupied authority as to what form of notation is acceptable to the former, Israel, and what the latter is willing to go along with faute de mieux. On internal or diplomatic documents, and discourses before an international institution, the PNA appears to refer to itself as the representative of the State of Palestine, for there, Israel cannot pose a veto, as it can on documents circulating (which require its approval) in the West Bank. I would expect that were the PNA to issue documents for those travelling through Israeli checkpoints that contained 'State of Palestine' it would translate into holdups, rejection of passage etc. So the 'evidence' is neither here nor there, for Israel, in every forum in the world, and today at the Interpol conference in Beijing, vigorously protested the use of State of Palestine. To no effect, fortunately. The farce you see in documentation reflects not reality (whatever that may be) but force majeure, for it would imperil Israel's geopolitical interests to have Palestine universally recognized as a state, starting with immense legal complications. And that is the way it will almost inevitably stay, regardless of diplomatic realities.Nishidani (talk) 16:55, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
Allah vs God per WP:NPOV
apropos this, which of course was immediately reverted.
I think it obvious that there is something wrong in consistently referring to 'Allah', when, with regard to the other non-Christian monotheism, Judaism, one does not refer to 'YHWH' or Jehovah/Yahweh. This is a systemic bias.
- 'god-fearing Jew' (234,000 results)
- 'god-fearing Arab' (9,210 results)
Textually one has good authority for 'those that feared Yahweh' but Western tradition has abandoned it. God is God (whatever the deep differences are between the two conceptions) in Christian-Jewish dialogue. We still insist, however, on a distinction between 'Allah' and 'God', whereas Allah is the standard Arabic for God, used by all Arabic-speaking Christians. This should be brought up, as a policy-point that is, as far as I know, unclarified.Nishidani (talk) 12:31, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
- I doubt whether others would find this interesting.
- Yossi Gurvitz An Atheist in the Yeshiva: The education of Yossi Zvi Gurvitz Mondoweiss
September 29, 2017
- I enjoyed it because he found in classical Greece an exit ramp, to mix metaphors, from the ideological straitjacket of Judeo-Christian thought.Nishidani (talk) 07:49, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
- Nishidani - it's not the same. Muslims use Allah when speaking in English (partly due to Muslims using Arabic, and only Arabic, for prayer and for the Quran) - e.g. - [3] (see 0:45, 2:00), or [4] (0:45 for instance), or [5] (1:10 for instance). Jews, in contrast, do not use the proper Hebrew name for god in Hebrew, let along English - it avoided both when speaking (if reading a section with the proper name, it is replaced - typically with Adonai (mylord) and when writing (for instance, with a single ה, or alternatively with a euphemism). One uses euphemisms. In English - most Jews will say God (and if not (rarely these days) - a different euphemism). In fact, avoiding the proper name has reached the point when some English speaking Jews write G-d ([6], as well as other shortcuts) and not god as a carryover from the Hebrew practice. The google bias is there due to completely different speech and writing patterns. I suspect that if Jews didn't have the custom to avoid the proper name - we probably would seem more proper name uses in reference to Jews - as it is something no practicing Jew (and many non-practicing Jews) would say or use. When referring to other religions (e.g. Buddhism) - we do use the proper names of figures in their religions, as they do use them.Icewhiz (talk) 12:53, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- It's best not to seek information on the popular sites, like the ones you link to. You only get disinformation, in the sense that anyone who tries to improve their knowledge of Judaism (or any other religion) via such sources only gets trapped in modern ethnonationalist collectivist clichés that iron out all of the variations and dissonance in the respective traditions. I expect Arabic-speaking Jews would have had no problem in reciting the Shema Yisrael in Arabic, using 'Allah' as a replacement for 'Adonai Eloheinu'. Jews translated the Tanakh into Arabic precisely for this reason, because it was the primary language of their eastern communities. Perhaps you might like to check Saadia Gaon's tafsir to see how he handled such issues.
- Where did you get the idea Arabs only use Allah when speaking other languages? My local Moroccan and Egyptian tradesmen say 'Dio',and I have often heard or read Arabs saying 'God' in English, as I have heard Jewish people say 'God', without thinking they are somehow thinking as Christians. Navid Kermani 's Gott ist schön: Das ästhetische Erleben des Koran, came out 6 years ago and no jihadi has, to my knowledge, taken offense. Same with Zahid Aziz, Introduction à l'Islam, (2012)
'Dieu est Rahim ce qui signifie qu'Il est Miséricordieux,.' p.17
- Rabbis likewise have no trouble saying God/Dieu/Dio/ when referring to the tetragrammaton: Neil Gillman,The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians,2003 etc.Nishidani (talk) 14:09, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- Some Muslim may use God in English - but many use Allah. Arabic-speaking Jews may have used Allah (though this was complicated by use of Judeo-Arabic languages, Judaeo-Spanish, as well as Aramaic language by some communities) - I don't not know off hand (though wouldn't have used this for Shema Yisrael - which would've been said in Hebrew even by lay people (as the least common denominator Hebrew prayer - just as the Shahada and Takbir would be something just about any Muslim would say in Arabic), but in day to day or in more esoteric instances - perhaps). Note it was permissible according to some for Jews to pray in a mosque, whereas praying in a Church is considered to be a "big problem" (due to the trinity and icons). however no practicing Jew uses the tetragrammaton (any most non-practicing as well) - this is avoided - thus a Jew (Rabbanim included) in English will always use god or some other replacement - in fact the most common use of the tetragrammaton in English seems to be by Jehovah's Witnesses which is Christian (or derived as per POV).Icewhiz (talk) 14:34, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- The Mishna allows prayers like the Shema Yisrael to be said in any language, and it was so prayed in Arabic, since most Jews in Arabic-speaking lands did not know Hebrew, as most Jews in the Mediterranean 2000 years ago spoke and read only Greek, and prayed in that language as often as not.Nishidani (talk) 14:45, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- ps. it's best not to bold some sentence that contains a cliché, the implication being your interlocutor doesn't know the ABC of such things. Entering a church is, in the general orthodox tradition, forbidden, not because of the Trinity. Halakhic rulings are fuzzy, but the general rule goes back to the old interdiction against Jews entering a city where any structure containing idols had been raised. Of course, most Jews couldn't give a fuck for such nonsense, since curiosity about art, architecture, history and human culture etc trump the stupidity of bigots in the clerisy of any faith. Nishidani (talk) 14:58, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- And no one could of course pronounce the tetragrammaton anywasy since no one knows how it was to be properly pronounced. You can't speak a word you can't pronounce.Nishidani (talk) 15:04, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- Allowed, yes (contrast this with Islam's exclusive use of Arabic, of course most Christian branches are much more language permissive) - however most communities prayed in Hebrew - and the Shema in particular would be something most community members would've been able to say in Hebrew - even if they knew little else. So yes - possibly said also in Arabic - making the use of Allah in the Shema more prevalent (rarely used) than the use of the tetragrammaton (in the past 2000 or so years - since the advent of Rabbinic Judaism - never used). The point I'm trying to make - is that Jews (in the past 2000+ years) never use the proper name - and typically use the language equivalent god (as long as it isn't an idol...) in whatever language they are speaking. And yes - pronunciation of the tetragrammaton is to a large extent lost (though possible to reconstruct) - since it has been suppressed by Jews for 2000+ years - this is an effect of Jewish use, not the cause.
- Regarding churches - yes... it is complex.... Alot of blood bad between Jews and Christians (heck - the Christian bread & wine "thing" caused various Jewish prohbitions)... And needless to say much of the finest art and architecture in Europe is in masterpiece churches.Icewhiz (talk) 15:06, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- Generalizations are either high-order syntheses of a complex cluster of facts cautiously made in order not to violate any detail in the secondary order under summary, or they are just impressions, opinions, etc. It's not proven that most Jewish communities prayed in Hebrew, and the reason is simple. You are taking the word 'Jew' as having an inclusive valency which defies the huge variations of Jewish traditions. Your premise, for example above, is gender-biased: while Ashkenazi Jewish men who prayed in a synagogue would use Hebrew, their wives and daughters in Europe would pray in Yiddish, from such sources as the Seyder Tkhines. That means one half of the community did not pray in Hebrew.Nishidani (talk) 15:35, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- We might argue on the length of time the respective genders spent praying vs. possibly more productive pursuits, however neither gender uttered (in the vast majority of cases - halachik dissenters might've) the tetragrammaton in whatever language they were praying.Icewhiz (talk) 15:50, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- That's not a reasoned reply, it is persisting in an opinion in the face of an obvious fact that exposed the premise of the generalization you used, and its lack of historical pertinence. The tetragrammaton is a furphy in the argument I proposed. Judaism, like all religions, changed its opinion after several centuries, and decided not to pronounce God's name in Hebrew (or rather you could no longer hear the High Priest shout it 10 times from the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur). It was a word that could be only said on one day at one place in the world, and with the destruction of the Temple, its justifying context was lost.
- You appear to have forgotten the starting point: This is an English encyclopedia, which must be global and neutral. The concept of God shared by the 3 monotheisms, all genetically related, is denoted by a different term in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic etc., but in English we say 'God'. No one writes, the YHWH of the Jews, or the theos of the Christians, but there is a tendency to differentiate the Arab word as denoting a different concept. Westerners allow that the standard English term, 'god' (or dieu, dio, Бог (as in bok(er tov), Gott, etc.) according to cultural context, can be used for the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic deity, despite the fact that each of these religions describe key aspects of that entity in decidedly different ways. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that a residue of the millennial old hostility to Islam subsists in our (lazy wikipedian) persistence in allowing 'God' to cover both the Jewish texts, and the Christian texts, but reserve for Arabic texts the indigenous term, implying it is qualitatively different. It is not: a large part of the Qu'ran comes straight out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Christian and Jewish concepts of God are as alien to each other as the Islamic notion might be to either, yet we treat the Jewish and Christian texts re God as referring essentially to the same metaphysical reality. It's pure prejudice, racist at the core.Nishidani (talk) 16:23, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- We might argue on the length of time the respective genders spent praying vs. possibly more productive pursuits, however neither gender uttered (in the vast majority of cases - halachik dissenters might've) the tetragrammaton in whatever language they were praying.Icewhiz (talk) 15:50, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- Generalizations are either high-order syntheses of a complex cluster of facts cautiously made in order not to violate any detail in the secondary order under summary, or they are just impressions, opinions, etc. It's not proven that most Jewish communities prayed in Hebrew, and the reason is simple. You are taking the word 'Jew' as having an inclusive valency which defies the huge variations of Jewish traditions. Your premise, for example above, is gender-biased: while Ashkenazi Jewish men who prayed in a synagogue would use Hebrew, their wives and daughters in Europe would pray in Yiddish, from such sources as the Seyder Tkhines. That means one half of the community did not pray in Hebrew.Nishidani (talk) 15:35, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- And no one could of course pronounce the tetragrammaton anywasy since no one knows how it was to be properly pronounced. You can't speak a word you can't pronounce.Nishidani (talk) 15:04, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
- I enjoyed it because he found in classical Greece an exit ramp, to mix metaphors, from the ideological straitjacket of Judeo-Christian thought.Nishidani (talk) 07:49, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
The Tireless Contributor Barnstar | |
nice article, Khalil Beidas. ORES says it is GA, so you could push it through the process if you wanted a green badge. cheers. Leetotherear (talk) 19:34, 16 October 2017 (UTC) |