What's in a Name?

I am a firm believer in the authority and efficiency of Wikipedia. Certainly, one can find inaccuracies therein, but the majority of articles, especially about current or popular topics are well-researched and, well, let’s not say well-written. Nonetheless, there are so many writers with different viewpoints that the result often conveys a good idea of the consensus on a given topic. There are only sometimes edit wars, and they usually result from differences in deep-seeded ideological beliefs.

Such was only partially the case when I discovered the enormous, mind-boggling war over the use of the Arabic term “Gaza massacre,” attested to in at least 10 Arabic media sources (far more than are usually necessary), to describe the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At a recent check, the phrase was allowed to remain, but fully half the “talk page” (a place for discussion of the progress of the article) was devoted to arguments about the appropriateness of this phrase.

My point is, if the phrase is being used by Arabic sources, then let it be used in reference to these sources in the English Wikipedia. The phrase is undoubtedly expressive of a single point of view, but if Al-Jazeera uses it to describe the entire conflict, it belongs in the article. My real point is, it is exactly this type of debate which is at the heart of the intractable Middle Eastern conflict. When ridiculous matters of semantics are allowed to overrun political or other discussion, the conflict can quickly escalate. The position in the Middle East has become such a mire of bureaucracy, religious tenets held without rationality, and hatred for hatred’s sake that I despair of ever finding a solution. The violent (by Wikipedian standards) controversy over the simple inclusion of one side’s phrase on a neutral website is a good metaphor for this nightmare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_conflict