Weekend Long Read

1.) Ashley Rindsberg at The Cipher Brief on How Anonymous Wikipedia Editors Influence Global Narratives — and AI Systems.

If you ask Google what Al Jazeera is, the answer you receive draws heavily on Wikipedia. The same is true if you ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or many other large language models. Wikipedia has become the working baseline of public knowledge, whether for reporters, students or congressional staffers.

Look up Al Jazeera on Wikipedia today and the encyclopedia describes it as “a Qatari news media organization” that is “a statutory private foundation for public benefit” “primarily funded by the government of Qatar.” Its flagship article assures readers that Al Jazeera was “launched with a mandate of independence,” was “noted for its journalistic professionalism,” and is recognized by scholars as having driven a democratizing “Al Jazeera effect” across the Arab world. This is the conventional wisdom hundreds of millions of people now casually believe.

It is also, in many important respects, wrong.

2.) Jonah Platt on: Antizionism: The Intellectual Veneer on an Ancient Hatred.

There is a version of antizionism that sounds reasonable on paper. It presents itself as a principled intellectual position — rooted in legitimate historical grievance, political critique, and concern for human rights. Walk through a pro-Palestine protest, however, or spend a few minutes on social media, and the gap between that stated premise and its actual practice becomes impossible to ignore.

Antizionism, in practice, has as much to do with opposition to Zionism as antisemitism has to do with opposition to Semitism. Which is to say: nothing at all.

3.) Israeli government report: Laundering Propaganda: How UN actors manipulated information in the Gaza War (2023-2025)

Since the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas, the United Nations (UN) has been the primary source of information shaping perceptions in the international arena on the conduct of the war and the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.

Thousands of reports, bulletins, briefings, and online posts by UN agencies and officials have generated a continuous stream of statistics, statements and viral headlines which resonated globally.

This body of information was used to promote unprecedented political and legal steps against Israel and Israelis and is likely to continue being used for that purpose in the future.

An analytical review of that material shows that key UN agencies and officials exhibited a systemic breakdown of core professional standards and of the principles of neutrality and impartiality in their public statements and reporting on the war in Gaza, resulting in significant factual distortions and consistent bias against Israel and in favor of Hamas.

4.) Natalie Ecanow at the FDD on: 6 Reasons Why Qatar’s U.S. Financial Footprint Warrants Scrutiny

Qatar, a Persian Gulf emirate roughly the size of Connecticut, possesses outsized wealth by sitting atop the world’s largest natural gas reservoir. FDD has meticulously documented that this tiny country has directed more than $400 billion of its petro-wealth to the United States, spanning investments, grants, purchases, and pledges across a range of industries. Qatari money is spread from coast to coast, sometimes presented as straightforward investments that yield returns, sometimes as direct spending on influence, with many ventures falling somewhere in between. But there is no such thing as a free lunch. This vast Qatari spending campaign raises questions that the U.S. government shouldn’t ignore.

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