== Apologies == 

 I think I overreacted yesterday (about the closing AfD). We're having a fairly annoying problem here; as you can see from WP:APARTHEID, we have an organized group of users, including admins, who are deliberately posting inflammatory articles and openly blackmailing other users into a quid-pro-quo ("I'll accept the deletion of this article about country X only if we get the one about Israel deleted"). This is obviously a massive abuse of WP:POINT and WP:NPOV and I actually do not see how we might get out of it short of a big ArbCom case. 

 In addition, this has a strong opportunity to be a media disaster if a reporter happened to see it. I deal with the media on behalf of Wikipedia and I could already foresee how such a story could be twisted. 

 This is why I would have preferred that the discussion would have been closed with a lengthier explanation... My comments were probably cruel and I apologize for that.