Among the falsehoods listed on the site are claims that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital and that reports of Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women are lies.
Wikipedia, founded in 2001, relies on donations to stay alive. Though much of the money it receives comes from individual contributors, there are many larger organizations that donate to the Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit sustaining the online encyclopedia. According to its website, the nonprofit has received a large amount of funding from the George Soros–connected Tides Foundation. Amazon and Facebook, as well as Soros personally, have each contributed gifts in the millions to the Wikimedia Endowment, the fund from which Wikipedia draws to keep its website running.
In its 2016 press release announcing the creation of the Wikimedia Endowment, replete with celebration of the Tides Foundation for its support, the Wikimedia Foundation touted, among other things, its Arabic website, edited by Ziyad Alsufyani, at the time a medical student at Saudi Arabia’s Taif University. Those who have donated to Wikipedia in the past would do well to look at what its Arabic version has been up to since October 7.
At the top of each page on the Arabic-language version of Wikipedia is a black banner showing the Wikipedia globe logo enveloped with a Palestinian flag and a keffiyeh. Next to the icon is a note accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. This banner appears on every page on Arabic Wikipedia, even today’s featured article, one for the prehistoric reptile deinosuchus.
Each phrase in red, “genocide in Gaza,” “killing civilians,” “targeting hospitals and schools,” and “mislead and double standards,” leads to its own Arabic-language article. “Genocide in Gaza” goes to the article for “the Palestinian-Israeli war in 2023,” which the page also describes as “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” “the Hamas War,” “the Third Intifada,” and “the Gaza massacre.” The link referencing civilian deaths leads to a page that translates to “Pogroms during the Palestinian-Israeli War 2023,” which makes no distinction between Hamas terrorists and civilians and claims Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, which, of course, it did not. This being Wikipedia, it is difficult to tell whether many of the people mentioned on this page ever existed in the first place.
That page isn’t the only one to assert that Israel bombed the hospital. The link attached to the phrase “targeting hospitals and schools” brings one to the page for that supposed bombing — which was actually a failed rocket launch from within Gaza — and nothing else.
“The violent Israeli airstrike hit the hospital yard, where dozens of wounded as well as hundreds of displaced civilians, most of them women and children, were displaced,” the page’s English translation reads. “The Israeli massacre caused a real disaster; the bodies of the victims were torn apart and made them scattered and burned, while the hospital turned into a pool of blood.”
The “mislead and double standards” link leads to an overview of “Israeli propaganda.” Among the examples of lies that Arabic Wikipedia offers are reports of Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women and slaughtering children, as well as the general idea that Hamas is a terrorist organization rather than a collection of, as the translated article puts it, “resistance factions.”
More broadly, the Arabic Wikipedia article for Israel contains such claims as Jews not having inhabited the land until around 200 years ago and recognition of Israel having come about only as a result of “betrayal from Arab parties that were loyal to the occupier.”
It is worth noting that Arabic Wikipedia is the only version of the online encyclopedia that has an explicitly anti-Israel tilt. Wikipedia’s own standards include a position of institutional neutrality: The website’s content “must be written from a neutral point of view.”