"

(r to my favorite editor, started before Spotfixer commented:)
Not months, years. He'd been shoveling that shit on Shapiro since 2006. Anyway, thanks for the kind words - coming from one in your time and place it's especially touching that you'd be aggrieved over my two week time out from a website.
I often despair of ever getting anything done here. The most basic, obvious, and straightforward applications of policy often take many man-hours, and even a victory never establishes any kind of precedent - the same discredited arguments are just brought to a new forum. Outright deceit goes unpunished; editors say X=100, citing a source that says X=-5, and get away with it. I mean, look at my own block log, for example.
The first time I was blocked, it was because a devotedly Jewish and obsessively Zionist admin baited me until he ran out of his 3 reverts - he actually put ""rv#1, rv#2, rv#3..."" in his edit summaries - then, literally five minutes later, a notorious ""kamikaze edit warrior"" with a laser-like focus on Israeli-Palestinian articles shows up to make his first ever edit to the article, I revert him, and then I've crossed the magic 3RR trip wire and I'm blocked. Ffs, even the guy that blocked me - who incidentally was a United States Air Force reservist with a combat record over Afghanistan - ended up scolding Humus Sapiens for his actions. But no sanctions, of course - that's reserved for people who say ""fuck"" or click ""undo"" four times instead of three, not for deranged ethno-nationalists who conspire in secret. Those types get admin bits instead, in honour of all the vandalism they've cleansed from articles about Pokemon.
The second time I was blocked, it was because I lost my temper with a semi-literate buffoon, who quoted in boldface ""huge numbers of Palestinians were also driven out of their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces"" claiming it supported his text, ""the vast majority of Palestinians fled of their own accord."" He quoted this triumphantly, as if he had convincingly refuted my argument and exposed me as a liar. The microcephale in question now appears to be on track to becoming an admin. He'll be in good company.
This is not an anomaly. Just prior to my block, I was working on the lede of our article on the 2008 Gaza war, which for some reason still bears a euphemistic title ""Israeli-Gazan conflict"" or some such nonsense. The lede claimed that ""other Palestinian estimates differ"" from the ""Hamas-run"" Gazan hospital system; the only relevant article cited, a piece in the conservative ""home team"" Israeli newspaper Jerusalem Post, actually noted a very close correlation between Ministry of Health estimates, endorsed by the World Health Organization, independent estimates, and even the Israeli estimate of overall fatalities (although IDF insists that the number of combatants was far greater, but only off the record and without specifics.) Two separate editors reverted my correction. I mean, how can we stand for this? Who the fuck cares about ""incivility"" and ""personal attacks"" when editors are lying about the content of sources and getting away with it? These people didn't read the sources. They didn't care about the sources. They just knew, because they wanted it to be true, that Palestinian casualty counts were all lies, so they edited the article to say so. I am sick of dealing with this kind of bullshit. What can I say, my patience is not unlimited.
I don't mean to make this out as if every editor who has a pro-Israel point of view is some kind of Satanic monster. I respect Steve/sm8900. I respect Avraham. I respect Ceedjee (and I still don't know where he stands except that he's downright mean to anybody who doesn't stand with him!) Hell, I even respect JayJG in my own twisted way, at least he's entertaining, if only in the fashion of a heel. But this endless stream of nonsense wears one down. I genuinely enjoy reasoned debate on talk pages, ok? But when people lie, cheat, dissemble, and filibuster, I'm going eventually to blow up. Deal with it.

(I note with irony my own advice to a newbie: Try and keep your cool, because WP seems to take an extremely hard line against ""incivility"" from editors perceived as pro-Palestinian. They will always portray you as a crazy extremist, so it is best to support your arguments with solid ""mainstream"" sources. [...] You have to be kind of single-minded, I think. Don't allow any opportunity for them to turn the discussion away from the real issues. Word your comments carefully so they cannot be twisted into some alternate interpretation to be used against you. Even when you know full well that somebody is lying, just say, ""I'm afraid I can't understand how you read the source material in that way: it clearly says XYZ..."" WP doesn'