The Wikipedia page for Hasan Piker, a far-left streamer who has called the Israel Defense Forces a “Nazi army” and Orthodox Jews “inbred,” has received more than 327,000 views in the past 30 days.
At the top of the page, it states that he has “regularly spoken about the Gaza war, advocating for Palestinians and criticizing the Israeli government.” Readers must scroll down quite a bit to learn that he has praised Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror organization.
Despite an editor recommending it, the page does not note that the U.S. Department of the Treasury reportedly subpoenaed the streamer, who has 2.8 million followers on Twitch and has hosted multiple Democratic politicians on his show, regarding a recent trip to Cuba.
An editor stated in the page’s “talk” section that the crowdsourced encyclopedia should wait for more details to come out before including that detail.
@TobyDersh, senior adviser at the @FDD, told JNS that “a look under the hood shows that anonymous editors hold sway over how figures like Hasan Piker are publicly portrayed.”
“Through structural changes to text, strategic placement of controversies and calls for ‘balance,’ they soften the public image of extremists,” she said, “even when the factual record is so one-sided that balance for its own sake is unwarranted.”
Piker’s entry has one paragraph, out of some 3,000 words, that addresses allegations of Jew-hatred directly.
The paragraph notes that Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) accused him of antisemitism, and Piker denied it. The entry also states that he called Orthodox Jews in Israel “inbred” and that he later regretted saying it.
It cites reporting from The New Yorker, which reported that “when Piker is criticized by the right, it’s usually for soft-pedaling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis,” and from Vox stating that Piker has “lack of issue” with Hezbollah, which is also a U.S.-designated terror group.
Editors opposed a suggestion that the entry should mention Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) @lawler4ny and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) @RepJoshG introducing a resolution in April decrying Piker and Candace Owens, another antisemitic podcaster. Editors stated that it was too soon to determine if the resolution would have any real impact on Piker.
On May 8, an editor removed a sentence from the entry about Piker interviewing a Yemeni influencer, who was on a ship that the Houthis seized in January 2024.
The influencer, who calls himself the “pirate king,” has defended the Houthis, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
“Wikipedia claims to present a neutral point of view on factual information, but this page shows yet again an apparent bias within the Wikipedia community against Jews and Israel in how it underemphasizes or fails to cite the extreme and antisemitic positions of Piker,” Daniel Kelley, senior director of the @ADL's Center for Technology and Society, told JNS.
The ADL, which Wikipedia considers a “generally unreliable” source on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compiled a list of Piker’s remarks that it says show his support for terrorism and his antisemitic ideas.
Some but not all of the remarks are covered in the Wikipedia entry, including his view on comparing Zionists to Nazis, that Hezbollah’s is his “favorite flag” and that he supports “every type of armed resistance against both the settlers and also the Israeli occupying force in the West Bank.”
Piker’s Wikipedia entry was updated on June 4 to include his statement that Hamas is “1,000 times” better than the Israeli government as well as his remarks regarding allegations of rape on Oct. 7.
Kurt Schwartz, CEO of the @CAMERA4Truth, told JNS that “when editors conceal Piker’s indifference to and even denial of Hamas’s sexual assault, for example, these amount to errors of omission.”
They are “errors meant to distort understanding and rewrite history in a Pravda-like manner,” Schwartz said. (The latter was a Soviet official publication.)
@TobyDersh @FDD @lawler4ny @RepJoshG @CAMERA4Truth Dershowitz told JNS that “from Piker’s justification of the deadly attacks on America on 9/11 to his comments that ‘it doesn’t matter if rape happened on Oct. 7,’ the public record merits the full ground truth, however that tips the scale.”
.@lsanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, was banned from the site indefinitely on Monday for promoting an initiative that, among other things, aims to prevent the site from being biased against “currently disfavored views and groups,” including Jewish and pro-Israel views, he told @JNS_org.
“Wikipedia has become more of a mob-rule anarchy than ever,” Sanger said. “In the kangaroo court in which a mob ousted me, Wikipedia’s administrators showed that they are above trivial details like formal charges, a designated prosecutor, basic decorum, distinction between prosecution and judge, dispassionate adjudication and so forth.”
My latest on Wiki for JNS: 🧵
Sanger submitted an application on Friday for community approval on his proposed “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity” for contributors who believe in helping “reinforce Wikipedia’s original, firm commitment to intellectual diversity.”
The crowdsourced online encyclopedia defines a “WikiProject” as being a “group of contributors who want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia” focused on specific topic areas.
The initiative had a series of goals, including making Wikipedia’s decision-making processes more transparent, expanding the number of usable sources and reinforcing “genuine neutrality.”
“We did not want to push Wikipedia to be pro-anything, just not exclusively pro-GASP,” he said, referring to a “globalist, academic, secular and progressive” point of view.
Sanger also told JNS that he aimed to ensure that the site is “not biased against currently disfavored views and groups,” including some Hindus, Christians, Jews, Zionists and those who are politically conservative.
“It is ridiculous that after Oct. 7, antisemitism became open and even mandatory on Wikipedia,” he told JNS. “I have my criticisms of Israel, but you don’t report one side and call yourself neutral.”
“Titling an article ‘Gaza genocide’ and burying any mention of the Israeli perspective deep in the article is not neutral,” Sanger said. “Nor is it neutral to title an article ‘Yahweh’ and say that this was the chief god of an ancient Near East pantheon, in Wikipedia’s own voice, with no mention of Christian or Jewish perspectives, when we worship Yahweh.” (The Tetragrammaton is a Hebrew divine name that appears in the Torah.)
An anti-Israel Wikipedia editor was indefinitely banned on May 25 from editing articles related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The editor, known as “TarnishedPath,” has made more than 54,000 edits on the site and was sanctioned through Wikipedia’s Arbitration Enforcement process, in which administrators enforce rulings issued by the site’s Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia’s highest dispute-resolution body in contentious topic areas.
TarnishedPath and another editor, “Sean.hoyland,” were accused of repeatedly defending “M.Bitton,” an anti-Israel editor who was recently banned from Wikipedia, and, in so doing, of violating Wikipedia policy against turning the site into “a battleground between factions.”
One administrator initially imposed a 90-day ban on TarnishedPath from editing articles related to the conflict over conduct on the talk page for Wikipedia’s main Zionism entry, separate from the original complaint. After reviewing the editor’s broader conduct, other administrators escalated the sanction to an indefinite topic ban.
Sean.hoyland received an informal warning, a notice from administrators cautioning that further problematic conduct could lead to sanctions.
@shlomitlir a University of Haifa researcher who specializes in Wikipedia, told JNS that “the English Wikipedia article on Zionism remains one of the most contested and deeply problematic entries in this topic area.”
She said it was “encouraging” that Wikipedia administrators were recognizing “patterns of battleground editing, procedural obstruction and attempts to flatten or distort the historical meaning of Zionism.”
“This is an important, if overdue, step toward protecting a knowledge space that should represent historical complexity rather than politicized framing under the appearance of neutrality,” she told JNS.
The Democrats who are running to be the next governor of California gave “shocking” answers when asked if Israel is guilty of committing “genocide” in Gaza, according to former Fox News host @SteveHiltonx, a Republican candidate in the race.
Making that accusation against the Jewish state is “offensive,” and “it’s obvious that it was a response to one of the most brutal atrocities in the last 100 years,” Hilton told JNS, of Israel’s reaction to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks.
Using the term “genocide” to “describe a legitimate act of self-defense is preposterous and offensive,” Hilton said.
When the nonprofit news site @CalMatters asked the candidates if Israel is guilty of “genocide,” Hilton said simply “no,” per a video the site released earlier in the month.
The United States and Israel are engaged in a just and legal war against the Iranian regime, which does not, as a matter of policy, negotiate in good faith, according to @EdwinBlackBook, an investigative journalist and book author.
Black, who also hosts an eponymous podcast, spoke to JNS prior to delivering a talk, which centered on Iran and on some of the things that the pope has said about Israel, at the Saban Theatre in Los Angeles on May 11.
The author thinks that the war against the Islamic Republic is going well, but he thinks that the regime has an apocalyptic vision, in which adherents wind up in paradise.
“We’ve had these negotiations, which are completely fruitless, because the Iranians over the past four to five decades have turned protracted negotiation into a tooth-pulling art form,” Black told JNS. “They’ll do anything to buy an hour, to buy a day, to buy 30 minutes.”
“They’re on their way to making nuclear bombs to destroy humanity, because they want to destroy humanity, because they feel that on the ashes of an incinerated civilization, they will rise to their paradise,” he said.
“There is no opportunity for compromise with these guys,” Black added.
The author thinks that the ceasefire, of which he is no fan, is necessary for the Trump administration to comply with the War Powers Resolution, a federal law that requires the administration to seek congressional approval for military action within 60 days, and because the country needs to rearm.
Begun to fight racists, Southern Poverty Law Center became ‘weaponized against right-of-center people,’ experts say
@wajacobson used to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center in the late 1970s, because he thought it was going after violent, racist groups in the right way. Jacobson, now a clinical law professor at Cornell University and director of its securities law clinic, lost track of the center in the 1980s and it didn’t reappear on his radar until he started the website @LegInsurrection in fall 2008.
Jacobson’s first post about the Southern Poverty Law Center on the conservative site came in 2009, when he described it as a “victim of its own success.”
“The Southern Poverty Law Center once served a vital role in shutting down Klan groups and dangerous white supremacist groups. Morris Dees endured death threats and was a heroic figure in the struggle for civil rights,” Jacobson wrote at the time.
But “the reason to be of the SPLC no longer exists. The Klan and other such groups are virtually non-existent,’ he wrote in the post. “The threat to society is from two sources, lone wolves or very small groups of people, as to which the SPLC cannot be effective, and Islamic extremists, as to which the SPLC appears not to care.”
The sticking point, for Jacobson, was the center labeling a conservative scholar, @carolmswain, then of Vanderbilt University, an “apologist for white supremacists” for her review of a film. Nothing in the review “or prior writings, possibly could be considered legitimate fodder to brand her an ‘apologist for white supremacists,’” he wrote in 2009.
“That’s when I started to look at them and said, ‘Well maybe they’re not the people I knew in the late 1970s,’” he told JNS. “They lost their way, they morphed into a more generalized political operation that was weaponized against right-of-center people, against Christians.”
A 32-year-old Jewish man, who was attacked on Monday evening near left Adas Torah, an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles, told JNS that his life flashed before his eyes.
“I don’t know if he said the words, ‘I want to kill you,’ but his facial expression and his attitude definitely gave that message,” said the victim, who spoke to JNS on the condition that he not be named. “I thought it was the end of my life.”
The victim, who said he is a Judaic studies teacher and “just a regular person,” told JNS that “I never would have thought such an incident would happen to me.”
After studying at Merkaz Hatorah Community Kollel, around the corner from the synagogue, on Monday evening, he walked home through an alleyway, as he has done for the past five years, and noticed a blue minivan following slowly beside him. He said he was wearing a kippah at the time.
He made a “Hey, how are you” facial expression toward the driver, whom he described as a black man. The driver made the same expression in response, the victim told JNS.
“All of a sudden, he just opens the door,” he said. “I don’t know what he was saying. He pounced me, immediately put his hands over my neck, shaking me back and forth, trying to choke me.”
The man used “a window breaker or window chiseler, I don’t know what you call it” as “a weapon as he was choking me against my neck,” the victim told JNS.
“He pinned me to the corner, and I don’t even know how, I just see I’m rolling on the floor, and as I’m vulnerable on the floor,” the victim said. “He gives me a stare and he says, ‘free Palestine’ and he goes back to his car.”
“I just ran back to safety, try to find a friend in the kollel, go into his car and call the cops from there,” he told JNS. He added that since the attack, it has been “definitely harder to walk alone.”