The widely used online encyclopedia Wikipedia deems the Anti-Defamation League and NGO Monitor to be “generally unreliable” sources to cite when discussing Israel and the Palestinians, but it maintains that an organization with a documented history of antisemitism, including lauding the Oct. 7 terror attacks, “can be cited as an opinion source” on Israel and the Palestinians.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is “an advocacy organization on a controversial topic, and should be used with attribution for factual claims,” Wikipedia states on its list of “reliable” and “perennial” sources. The group appears “to gather and responsibly report claims and information gathered directly from primary sources, and is widely used with attribution by reliable news sources,” Wikipedia states.
The group, whose founder and chairman praised the Oct. 7 attacks and which has accused Israeli soldiers of harvesting Palestinian organs, has been cited 95 times on Wikipedia.
“This is exactly the problem with the absence of fairness and standards in websites like this,” Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, told JNS. (B’nai B’rith created the ADL in 1913, but the latter is now independent.)
“It leads to bias, and in these cases, worse—the perpetuation of misinformation, disinformation and blood libels,” Mariaschin said. “If you are the one writing and editing these entries, and you are a fellow traveler in the anti-Israel realm, you can be an ultimate arbiter of ‘truth.’”
“This egregious, malevolent distortion and double standard proves the point,” he added. “Trumpeting the big lie, where there is zero accountability, is more than just an editorial issue. It is downright dangerous.”
Gerald Steinberg is the president of NGO Monitor, whose profile of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor notes its links to Hamas. “This is outrageous, but not surprising,” he told JNS, of Wikipedia trusting the group more than his nonprofit. (JNS sought comment from the Wikimedia Foundation and Euro-Med Monitor.)
“Wikipedia’s decision-making process, especially on highly disputed arenas like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, amplifies prevailing ideological biases and agendas,” Steinberg told JNS. “Advocacy NGOs and their allies have invested years in attempts to silence NGO Monitor research. This is far from preservation of knowledge.”
Richard Falk, the chair of Euro-Med Monitor, is a “conspiracy theorist known for publicly supporting terrorist attacks on civilians and producing a ceaseless stream of false justifications for theocratic fascists and nihilistic killers—provided, of course, their bombs detonate in the general direction of Washington or Jerusalem,” according to Vladislav Khaykin, executive vice president of social impact and North American partnerships at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Falk’s “moral equivalencies between liberal democracies and violent authoritarians romanticizes reactionary violence simply because it opposes Western power,” Khaykin told JNS. He added that Ramy Abdu, the group’s founder and chairman, “peddles the same rationalizations of terror, disinformation and antisemitic slander on social media.”
Euro-Med Monitor “shrugs off Hamas rockets as if they were passing rain showers yet indicts every Israeli act of self-defense as criminal,” Khaykin said.
The group’s reports “read more like releases from the Hamas press office rather than sober human rights assessments,” he added. “Credible human rights organizations don’t circulate modern-day blood libels accusing Israel of harvesting Palestinian organs, which is precisely what Euro-Med did in the wake of Oct. 7.”
David May, research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS that Euro-Med Monitor “is part of a decades-long campaign by Palestinian terrorists to infiltrate the human rights space.”
“Wikipedia’s acceptance of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is another victory for terrorist-tied organizations, but it’s also another sign of the demise of Wikipedia,” May said. “Editors at the collaborative encyclopedia have launched a coordinated campaign to spread an anti-Israel narrative. The dramatic turn for Wikipedia, once widely regarded as a neutral source, will poison people against the Jewish state and its supporters, the Jews.”
‘Downward spiral’
Wikipedia determines whether a source is “reliable” via a process it calls “consensus,” in which editors discuss the source, and in some instances, a poll (“request for comment”) is taken of the editors. A “closer,” or a Wikipedian who is uninvolved in the topic, then renders a verdict based on the vote and the strength of the arguments.
The “closer” on Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor ruled on June 22 that the consensus of editors was that the organization was “marginally reliable,” meaning that it can be used in certain contexts.
“This is an advocacy organization on a controversial topic, and should be used with attribution,” the closer stated. “The organization does appear to gather and responsibly report claims and information gathered directly from primary sources, and is widely used with attribution by reliable news sources.”
The closer also ruled that Euro-Med Monitor’s accusation that Israeli soldiers harvest organs amounts to it expressing “concern about possible organ theft in this instance and to call for an investigation,” and the group “accuses Israel of violating related international laws.”
“If appropriate to the scope of an article, those accusations can be reported in Wikipedia as opinions of Euro-Med, presumably with context and additional sources that give due weight to other points of view,” the closer said.
While Wikipedia sees Euro-Med Monitor as a source that can be cited for its opinion, it deems the ADL, which was cited extensively in the Biden administration’s national strategy on combating antisemitism, “generally unreliable,” which means it “should normally not be used,” on Israel and the Palestinians, and NGO Monitor “generally unreliable” on all subjects.
“This is a deeply troubling decision and yet another downward spiral by Wikipedia, bowing to extremist anti-Israel pressure,” Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights lawyer and CEO of the International Legal Forum, told JNS.
“Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is not a credible human rights organization,” Ostrovsky said. “It serves as a propaganda arm for Hamas, whose founder openly celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre and which routinely spreads antisemitic blood libels under the guise of human rights.”
“To deem such an extremist group a reliable source, while casting doubt on respected organizations like the ADL and NGO Monitor, is not neutrality,” he added. “It is complicity in legitimizing terrorist propaganda that also severely undermines Wikipedia’s own credibility.”
‘Digital malpractice’
A Jewish Wikipedia editor, who has worked on many Israel-related pages on the site and who declined to be named, told JNS that for the online encyclopedia, “generally unreliable” means “you’ve got evidence to show that this is more than just a simple case of sloppiness, but it’s actually distorting the factual record.”
“There were a couple of instances where EuroMed was basically laundering propaganda and mixing facts with opinions and things that weren’t factual,” the editor told JNS. The editor, therefore, said that Wikipedia should view the group as “generally unreliable” rather than “marginally reliable.”
“I don’t think it’s worth ever really using,” the editor said.
The Jewish editor thinks that the Wikipedia closer’s decision was a positive outcome despite ranking the anti-Israel group as more reliable than the ADL and NGO Monitor.
First, some editors had argued that Euro-Med Monitor should be considered “generally reliable,” and it was good to see a lack of support for that, per the Jewish editor. Also, the editor said, Wikipedia essentially downgraded the group because the closer attached new limitations to its use in citations.
The editor of the Wikipedia Flood blog, which documents what it calls anti-Israel bias on the encyclopedia, told JNS anonymously that the “marginally reliable” rating for Euro-Med Monitor means that anti-Israel editors on the site can use it to further perpetuate messages that are “tediously and monolithically anti-Israel.”
Khaykin, of the Wiesenthal Center, told JNS it is “digital malpractice” to consider the ADL unreliable when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“As we warned in our 2025 Digital Terror and Hate Report Card, Wikipedia has become a breeding ground for anti-Israel bias, where truth is distorted, hate is amplified, and Jewish voices are censored,” Khaykin said.
Khaykin called for Wikipedia to “stop giving a platform to those who justify murder under the guise of human rights.”
Shany Mor, a lecturer in political theory at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and a researcher at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, told JNS that Wikipedia’s sourcing decisions represent “a downstream effect of the capture of academia by anti-Israel forces, something that was already more or less complete by the early 1980s.”
“It will take decades of work to reverse that,” he told JNS.