User talk:BorisG

Welcome!

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Yom Kippur War

Heyo. Welcome to Wikipedia and thanks for participating in the discussion. Before I came on the scene, the Yom Kippur War article was heavily biased and read as though the war ended on the same note that it began. Essentially, everything after the first two days was a fog. In truth, despite the fallout in Israel, the war resulted in a decisive victory for the IDF. See the excerpts below:

• "The brute statistics of war indicated an Israeli victory," London Sunday Times, Yom Kippur War @ page 450.
• "As a military feat, the IDF’s performance in the Yom Kippur War dwarfed that in the Six Day War. Victory emerged from motivation that came from the deepest layers of the nation’s being and from basic military skills that compensated for the grave errors of leadership," Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War, @ page 498.
• "[The Yom Kippur War] is the story of an astounding Israeli victory," Chaim Herzog, The War of Atonement, @ Foreword.
• "The war had profound and long-reaching implications for the leaders of Egypt and Syria. Both Egypt's president Sadat and Syrian president Assad recognized that their countries had come closer to catastrophic defeat than in 1967, and that it was absolutely imperative to avoid another war. That led to Sadat's peace and Assad's 1974 cease-fire on the Golan Heights, never violated since then." Edward Luttwak, Misreading the Lebanon war
• "On October 24, 1973 when Israel finally implemented the cease-fire agreement, nothing stood between its advancing troops and the Egyptian capital. Israel had gained complete control over the entire front. Facing an imminent threat to Cairo and hence to the regime itself, President Anwar al-Sadat was desperately seeking heightened Soviet intervention and even direct military involvement to secure an early cease-fire. But for intense American pressure, Israel would have annihilated the stranded and encircled Egyptian Third Army. The story was more or less the same in the north where the Syrian advances in the Golan Heights were stopped and reversed and the outskirts of Damascus were brought within range of Israeli artillery. After initial surprises and setbacks, Israel had bounced back, stopped the Arab offensive and reversed the course of battle. If the Arab military offensive was motivated by a desire to change the status quo in Sinai or the Golan Heights, Israel had throttled them. The October 1973 cease-fire lines significantly improved Israel’s position." P.R. Kumaraswamy, Revisiting the Yom Kippur War
• "Although the Egyptians continue to tout the Yom Kippur war as a great victory, in truth, their successes were modest and their failures equal or greater than their achievements," Kenneth Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991
• "In material terms, the Israelis won a clear victory in the Yom Kippur war. Israel never held more territory than it did at the end of the Yom Kippur War – a war it had supposedly lost. At the cease fire, the Israelis were only fifty miles from Cairo and thirty miles from Damascus. The Soviet ambassador to Egypt Aleksei Kosygin saw the situation in Cairo at the end of the war as a 'catastrophe.' He declared: 'We must have a cease-fire because otherwise, everything will collapse,'" Johnson and Tierney, Failing To Win, Perception of Victory and Defeat in International Politics, @ page 177.

Fallout in Israel occurred because their memories of the Six Day War were still vivid thus resulting in higher military expectations. Conversely, the Arab defeat in the Six Day War was so decisive that it very much lowered Arab military expectations. On the eve of the Yom Kippur War, the situation was such that anything short of a total Arab rout would be considered an "Arab victory." The open nature of Israeli society and Israeli panache for self-criticism contributed to the hysteria. Conversely, dictatorships in Syria and Egypt glossed over or covered up their failures, which far outweighed their minor achievements. Thus, the perception immediately following the war was one of gloom in Israel and euphoria among the Arabs. However, upon objective reflection, as Rabinovich aptly put it, “As a military feat, the IDF’s performance in the Yom Kippur War dwarfed that in the Six Day War.”--Jiujitsuguy (talk) 07:36, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining your position. I don't think we can rely on Israeli sources here, we'd better use third parties. You did very well in backing up it with sources, but there are other sources (which Sherif quoted) which do not agree. "Israel never held more territory than it did at the end of the Yom Kippur War – a war it had supposedly lost." Supposedly implies that this was somehow a prevailig view, doesn't it? To be sure, I think you are right, at least in narrow military terms. But what is victory and what is defeat is still a matter of interpretation, unless it is either acknowledged by the defeated party (WWI, WWII, Israel war of Independence (nakba)) or results in such large capture of territory as in six-day war. In my, perhaps overobjective, view, our role at Wikipedia is to present facts as comprehensively as possible, and let the reader make interpretations. Or present all interpretations (within reason) and the reasoning behind them, and let the reader judge what's more convincing. This is much better than decide by ourselves which one is more convincing, even, as in the case above, it looks obvious to you. I totally agree that both openness of Israeli society, and inflated expectations contributed to the sense of defeat. But at the same time, Arabs have shown that Israel is not invincible, and that in itself may be regarded by some as great victory, after defeats in War of Independence, The Sinai campaign, and the Six-day war. Some historians (sorry don't remember who) speculated that not only realisation that Israel cannot be defeated, but also redemption of sorts after the disaster of 1967 have contributed to Sadat's decision to reconcile with Israel. BTW Alexey Kosygin was Soviet Prime Minister, not ambassador to Egypt.BorisG (talk) 17:30, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the correction above in connection with Alexey Kosygin and thanks for bridging the gap in connection with the lead. Best regards,--Jiujitsuguy (talk) 01:34, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Michael Oren

BorisG, I understand your concern about recentism and not turning this encyclopedia into a compendium of news article. Nevertheless, if we abided by your interpretation of recentism, we would have nothing placed in the "Ambassadorship" section of Michael Oren's page. Everything currently in there can be interpreted as irrelevant. And what would be an example of something he has did or will do that IS notable? Everything an ambassador does can be viewed as simple daily actions. Thoughts? I appreciate your concern. Plot Spoiler (talk) 18:24, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Yom Kippur

Thanks for rewriting that "ineptitude" sentence! RomaC (talk) 11:31, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

DRV

Regarding this, the recourse is deletion review: WP:DRV. The close is so obviously out of whack with the discussion, that it will almost certainly be reversed. Momma's Little Helper (talk) 20:33, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tapuah junction stabbing

This afd in which you participated is being discussed at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2010 March 12.--brewcrewer (yada, yada) 00:02, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

your user page

• You have two "Русский язык — родной для этого участника." userboxes on your user page, and a number of other typos and glitches. I could fix them, if you want. Or not, if you don't want. :-) • Ling.Nut 06:40, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

OK, I would appreciate it. I could probably do it myself but I do not have time now. Thanks. - BorisG (talk) 03:52, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Thank you

For this I appreciate the fact that you've recognized my contributions.--Jiujitsuguy (talk) 17:02, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

You are welcome. I said this because I felt that way. I am happy that this unfortunate incident is over. This looked really weird all round. Cheers. - BorisG (talk) 15:49, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Don't give up

Regarding Six-Day War, don't give up yet. I'm hoping that if some simple ground rules can be enforced by an admin or two who stay out of the argument but remain engaged in the argument's conduct, then progress can be made toward improving the article. Folks other than JRH could be suggesting changes too. ~Amatulić (talk) 00:26, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Update: JRH has now been banned indefinitely from the article. ~Amatulić (talk) 17:02, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh, you know that already. Saw your comment. ~Amatulić (talk) 17:57, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Amatulić, you are an admin and an uninvolved one at that (as you were only involved in an administrative capacity). Why do you comment in the involved editors section and not in the decision section below? - BorisG (talk) 18:16, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi Boris

So, your native language is Russian? Mine is too. BTW I have been to Perth. Western Australia is a beautiful place. We rented a car and drove to Exmouth, where I snorkeled with whale sharks, then in Coral Bay I snorkeled with manta rays, and then in Monkey Mia I fed the dolphins, but the biggest adventure was driving on the "wrong" side of the road, not to say that kangaroos and emus were crossing the road just in front of our car :). Sorry for the image. Those are my old film pictures taken with point and shot camera, but just to give you an idea about our adventures in Western Australia. Have you ever been to those places?--Mbz1 (talk) 03:20, 4 September 2010 (UTC) Thank you for your kind message. No I haven't been to those places yet, this is a very long drive for me. In my ten years here (gosh!) I have been all over the South West and also in beautiful rain forrest of Far North Queensland. BTW why are you retired but still involved? I am a little confused. Didn't know if a message on an inactive User talk page is appropriate, but how else can I reply? Cheers. - BorisG (talk) 06:54, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

I am retired, no more new articles, no more new pictures. I just was passing by, but I did change it to semi-retired at least for now, when I feel I need to make a few comments here and there. Let's better keep our conversation here. Your talk page is much more private than mine is. Cheers.--Mbz1 (talk) 11:01, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

My wikipedia story

Here's the article that I wrote a few months ago Robert Kennedy in Palestine (1948). You cannot imagine what followed after I did. I was dragged over fishing SPI, and even when it came out as unrelated, I was not allowed to remove the absolutely ungrounded accusation neither from the article's talk page nor from the article's deletion request. I was discussed at AN/I endlessly and unfairly blocked. My DYK nomination for the article was denied by user:Gatoclass, who abused his administrative power, when he took the hook out of a Queue. In the deletion request of the article user:Gatoclass claimed it was a "rant". Then I wrote another article about 800 years old Maimonides Synagogue. Once again DYK nomination was declined by user:Gatoclass, who wrote: "This looks to me like another exercise in POV-pushing from Mbz. Could there be any more demonization of Muslims crammed into this article" The comment was made on April the second. If you are to look at the history of the article, you would see that there was no "demonization of Muslims" at all. After that I filed my first ever AE about user:Gatoclass conduct. My AE is here (please click "show" to expand it). If you are to read it, you will see that user:Gatoclass has opposed many DYK nominations that were positive to Israel and/or negative to Arabs. As a result of my AE I was topic banned for 3 months. My ban was enforced very strictly, and I was blocked 3 times for so called ban violations. After my second block I appealed the ban. It still hurts to read this appeal over. Not only it was angrily denied, but I was threatened with "escalating blocks" or even a permaban. One of the users, who urged to decline my appeal was user:Vexorg. In case you were lucky enough never meet that user, let me please introduce him to you by only 2 of his many contributions:arguing that the "Zionist Occupation Government" conspiracy isn't anti-semitic;removing a note that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is anti-semitic.Here's one of his recent appearance on AN/I. For some unknown to me reason that user was never topic banned, he's running free and continues to introduce his nonsense to the articles, and that kind of user commented on my appeal! It seemed so extremely unfair. Some of the other commentators, who argued to decline my appeal were not any better. No matter what eventually I have learned to love my topic ban because it helped me to write quite a few articles that I enjoyed writing, and that probably would not have been written, if I was not topic banned. Why? It might sounds silly, but I wanted to prove to my banning administrator that I am capable of making useful contributions because every time he/she blocked me he/she added a template to my talk page that read in part: "You are welcome to make useful contributions after the block expires." So I tried really, really hard to make those positive contributions, but my blocking administrator never liked me anyway. But back to user:Gatoclass. One of the articles I wrote was Sol Hachuel. Poor user:Gatoclass has missed the DYK nomination for that one, so the article got promoted and appeared at the main page. Still user:Gatoclass made a few comment on the article's talk page. One of them read: "The presentation is overtly sympathetic to the subject, which violates NPOV". Then there were a few other incidents with Gato,but we did work together at the two articles I wrote, and he helped to fix my English, and remove my POV :). I am not saying that I have not done anything wrong, but I am sure that I did not deserve even 50% of what was done to me. Sorry for the long message. I wrote it in the response to your post, where you wrote that you "do not have enough experience to know what is the bar here". So I felt like sharing my own "experience" with you. Please feel absolutely free to delete it. Best.--Mbz1 (talk) 20:34, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Sorry to hear this. It appears that the battleground mentality is entranched to a greatert extent than I thought. And spills over to AE pages. And admins are very much involved, can abuse their previleges and get away with it. Seems also that NPOV editors are driven to one side or the other. Sad really. - BorisG (talk) 01:59, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

BTW, it your retirement directly related to this story? - BorisG (talk) 05:15, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Your objection to my proposed edit

BorisG, in expressing your opposition for my proposed edit, you said:

The sentence is sourced to a RS. Unless it is shown that this is not what the source says, it can stay. I don't have the source to check.

The question is not whether the cited source says what the article says it says. The question is whether the UNEF mandate says what the cited source says it says, and I've demonstrated to you that it does not. Again, the current version says:

After the 1956 war, Egypt agreed to the stationing of a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai, the United Nations Emergency Force, to keep that border region demilitarized, and prevent Palestinian fedayeen guerrillas from crossing the border into Israel.

This sentence does not accurately reflect the UNEF mandate. UNEF was established by the General Assembly under Resolution 1000 (November 5, 1956), which "Establishes a United Nations Command for an Emergency International Force to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities in accordance with all the terms of General Assembly resolution 997 (ES-I) of 2 November 1956"[1]

Resolution 997 noted "the disregard on many occasions by parties to the Israel-Arab armistice agreements of 1949 of the terms of such agreements, and that the armed forces of Israel have penetrated deeply into Egyptian territory in violation of the General Armistice Agreement between Egypt and Israel of 24 February 1949". It urged a cease-fire, urged withdrawal from Egyptian territory.[2]

The statement on the UNEF mandate that currently exists is therefore a demonstrable mischaracterization that patently violates WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT. Again, the question of whether the source says what the article says it says (I presume it does, and am not contesting that at all), is irrelevant. What is relevant is the actual UNEF mandate. The article MUST accurately reflect what that mandate was. The current wording does not. Hence my proposed fix:

After the 1956 war, Egypt agreed to the stationing of a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai, the United Nations Emergency force (UNEF), "to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities".

I fail to see what could possibly be controversial about this, or what reason you or anyone else could possibly have to object to this, other than that you just don't like me (please correct me if I'm wrong). I am sorry if I've offended you in some way on the talk page. But please don't allow your personal feelings towards me cloud your judgment with regard to this proposed edit. Whatever you and I may think of each other, the real issue here is the article itself, and I would like to think you and I can work together amicably and reasonably to improve the article. Sincerely, JRHammond (talk) 05:48, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

JRHammond your proposed statement is not wrong. But you have not shown that the existing one is wrong either. You suggest that these statements are mutually exclusive, but they are not. It appears that the discussions at the UN were that Israel required the UN to station troops (to prevent guerrilla attacks) as a condition of its wirhdrawal. Nasser initially objected but then relented. In any event, the lack of this precise statement in the official mandate does not prove that this wasn't the intent. Maybe the source [25] has further explanation, but I do not have it. More generally, assessment of what is right and what is wrong in a RS is OR. We need to see what the source says and how it explains it. I oppose the deletion of information from reliable sources. Sincerely - BorisG (talk) 06:51, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

BorisG, you are not addressing the issue, which is that the current wording, in grossly mischaracterizing the UNEF mandate, is a blatant violation of WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT. Once again, the current wording is:

After the 1956 war, Egypt agreed to the stationing of a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai, the United Nations Emergency Force, to keep that border region demilitarized, and prevent Palestinian fedayeen guerrillas from crossing the border into Israel.

Look at the UNEF mandate for yourself. You'll see that there's nothing therein about "keep[ing] that border region demilitarized". As for "prevent[ing] Palestinian fedayeen guerillas from crossing the border into Israel", that would be encompassed in the mandate "to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities in accordance with all the terms of General Assembly resolution 997". However, this mandate does not explicitly refer to fedayeen raids. Again, you can verify this for yourself, as can anyone else. On the other hand, it does explicitly refer to Israel's attack on Egypt. Recall the context is the 1956 war, in which Israel invaded Egypt. The creation of UNEF was a direct response to this war, and UNGA resolution 997 does explicitly refer to the fact that "the armed forces of Israel have penetrated deeply into Egyptian territory in violation of the General Armistice Agreement between Egypt and Israel of 24 February 1949".

In sum, the current wording characterizes UNEF as being mandated to prevent Arab attacks on Israel, when in fact the mandate explicitly states that it was in response to the attack by Israel upon Egypt. Again, this is a blatant and incontrovertible violation of WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT. My proposed fix quotes directly from the actual UNEF mandate is is neutral. JRHammond (talk) 09:19, 5 September 2010 (UTC)