The Digital Pogrom Came First

Editors turned doxxed Australian Jews into "conspirators"

The massacre of Jews in Bondi Beach will forever change Jewish life in Australia. The extent of the shooting, the seeming helplessness of law enforcement present at the scene for over 10 minutes, the deliberate, clinical targeting by the gunmen: almost no framework of normal communal life can withstand such an onslaught.

The shock of events often compels us to zoom in, to become hyper-focused on the particulars of the present case. But one of the many gruesome lessons history teaches about the systematic targeting of Jews is that the violence is almost always a manifestation of carefully laid ideology. In this case, that ideology hasn’t just been out in the open—but, brick by brick, is busy building its ideological altar, including on the world’s biggest knowledge platform: Wikipedia.

Many still think of Wikipedia as a crowdsourced online encyclopedia rooted in the principle of neutrality. It’s a compelling story, but it omits the fundamental dynamic at work on the site—which is that it is a critical information layer in virtually every ideological or geopolitical battle playing out online. The unfolding global attack on Jewish communities is no exception as Wikipedia articles increasingly serve as a legitimizing reference point for narratives that cast Jewish collective life as an inherently legitimate target for “resistance”—of both the information and kinetic variety.

This September, I reported for Tablet Magazine that a number of leaders of the Gang of 40—an edit cartel that works to delegitimize Israel, sever ties between Israel and the Jewish people, and whitewash the activities of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah—had successfully pulled off its most audacious and impactful operation. Leaders of this group inserted language into the first sentence of the lead of the “Zionism” article, the most important resource online defining Zionism to the world. This group then froze the lead section with a “moratorium,” an unprecedented move in this context, so their ideological edit to the lead could not be altered.

Two of the most important actors in this operation—Nishidani and Zero0000—are Australian academics. Another account, TarnishedPath, worked to implement the moratorium, pushing to extend its initially proposed three-month duration to a full year—the length of time the six ringleaders of the Gang of 40 would be banned before the possibility of an appeal. The ban, resulting from an investigation triggered by my October 2024 report on the Gang of 40 in Pirate Wires would be handed down by Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia’s equivalent of a High Court, just weeks after the moratorium was put in place.

TarnishedPath, who was not part of the internal Wikipedia investigation into the Gang of 40, is a highly experienced and intensely active editor. He has appeared in the effort to smear journalist Andy Ngo (Andy Ngo) as a “far-right influencer.” The user has led an attack campaign against J.K. Rowling, slapping a neutrality dispute box on her entry in June in an attempt to brand the author as “anti-trans.” He fully controls the entry on independent journalist Avi Yemini, contributing nearly two-thirds of its content, and he has been instrumental in enforcing orthodoxies concerning COVID-19 lab leak theory—among many other similar ideological campaigns waged by him.

But TarnishedPath, who is very likely Australian, has also positioned himself as a gatekeeper to a critical digital attack on Australia’s beset Jewish community.

Last year, hundreds of Australian Jews were victims of a coordinated doxxing campaign, known as Zio600 or Z600. The episode began after New York Times reporter Natasha Frost leaked material from a private WhatsApp group of Jewish creatives and academics. A cadre of anti-Israel activists “enriched” the dataset, adding photos, names of members’ spouses and children, which was made publicly available. Several victims filed police reports, and the incident sparked a national debate over the need for stronger protections against doxxing.

In the subsequent weeks and months, an effort was launched to revise the history of the Z600 doxxing. The locus of this effort is Wikipedia, where two editors, TarnishedPath and Damien Linnane, gained control of the Wikipedia entry, “2024 J.E.W.I.S.H. creatives and academics doxxing incident.” Working closely in tandem, TarnishedPath and Damien Linnane succeeded in inverting the moral dynamic of the events, turning the Jewish victims of the doxxing into members of a “conspiracy” who were justly targeted.

This effort began early in the lifecycle of the entry, which was created on January 18. Three days later, Linnane initiated the revisionist attack, inserting into the entry’s lead a key assertion: “members in the [J.E.W.I.S.H.] group discussed ways to jeopardise the employment of pro-Palestinian activists.”

To substantiate this claim, Linnane cited a single source—an opinion column by Bernard Keane, the political editor of news site Crikey who posts anti-Israel content on social media at near-obsessive levels. Linnane furthered the attack with another key edit the same day, altering a sentence about the doxxing that read:

The ostensible justification for the leak was a desire to expose Australian Zionists, who the leakers contended were conspiring in the group chat against pro-Palestinian public figures.

Importantly, this phrase was not written in Wikivoice—the site’s own perspective used to assert plain, unobjectionable facts (e.g. “The sky is blue”) but expressed the viewpoint of a certain group, in this case the “leakers.” Linnane, however, would remedy that, replacing the sentence with a definitive assertion, this time very much in Wikivoice:

The justification for the leak was a desire to expose Australian Zionists, after a minority of the members of the group conspired in the group chat against pro-Palestinian public figures…

Once again, the source for this claim was the same opinion columnist—the same column—mentioned above.

A day later, Linnane advanced the narrative by removing “antisemitic” from the description of the event as a “mass antisemitic doxing.” But Linnane went further, adding that “some defended it as a form of whistleblowing.”

The source Linnane used to support this claim was an oped in The Conversation, a UK-based platform for academics to share opinion and commentary. The author of that column is a PhD student in sociology, whose “Disclosure Statement” states that he “signed a statement of solidarity with Palestine from academics in Australian universities.”

According to Wikipedia’s policy on Reliable Sources, material published by The Conversation is to be viewed under the site’s WP:RSOPINION policy, which holds that “Some sources may be considered reliable for statements as to their author’s opinion, but not for statements asserted as fact.” In this case, the The Conversation oped was used not to show the author’s opinion, but to support the assertion of a fact. The “some” of Linnane’s inserted phrase was actually just one pro-Palestinian academic activist.

Over the subsequent weeks, Linnane and TarnishedPath continued to build this narrative. In February, TarnishedPath removed a number of media citations from the article’s lead. A look at those references reveals that they advanced a point of view that discounted the one he and Linnane were building through their edist.

One of these excised references, published in Ynet, is titled, “Doxing, arson, and graffiti: Can Australia combat the surge in antisemitism?” Another, by Seth Mandel in Commentary Magazine, is titled “Casting out Australia’s Jews,” and described “Jew-baiting chaos that seemed completely uncharacteristic of a country known for its relaxed vibes.” A third reference stripped out by TarnishedPath wrote that “every single member [of the list] was scapegoated — and photos and employment details of 200 were shared on social media so they could be further targeted — because of an unshakeable belief that groups of Jews discussing their concerns amounts to an evil conspiracy.”

Edit by edit, the doxxing was turned on its head. The mass antisemitic doxxing of Australian Jews was diligently reframed as a mere “leak.” That leak soon became a case of whistleblowing. Jews were not “victims” of the attacks but, as one subtle edit has it, “subjects” of the events. Jews who were targeted with abuse, even death threats, were transformed from victims into conspirators.

Jewish members of the group were subject to bans and cancellations, including some who were blacklisted from galleries and theaters.

Talia Emsalem, a Jewish influencer in Sydney who was a member of the doxxed group, says the online targeting of Jews is a mirror to the physical violence. “It’s like the digital pogrom that preceded the physical one,” Emsalem says. “Anti-zionism is the excuse everyone gets to hold onto for not being antisemitic because they can go to the Wikipedia page about Zionism and justify that it’s a hate movement, or whatever they’ve decided it is. Every part of our history, our identity, our self-determination is being re-written.”

What happened at Bondi did not begin with the gunmen—and it won’t end with them either. In footnotes and leads, “neutral” sentences have quietly trained readers to see Jewish collective life as sinister and Jewish self-definition as extremist—even, or especially, in that community’s own victimhood.

This is the danger of Wikipedia’s capture. It does not shout: it normalizes. It teaches millions of readers—and the super-intelligent machines that now learn from them—that Jews are the problem, that those who dox them are “whistleblowers,” and that those who are attacked somehow had it coming.

Editor’s Note: NPOV launched a little more than eight weeks ago. And while we’re off to an incredible start, we need your help. Please subscribe if you haven’t. But, just as importantly, I’d ask you to send this article to one or two friends. This is critical in our mission to raise awareness about the Wikipedia Crisis.