Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1660 Safed massacre
by nominator responding to user Norton's "strawman" argument above and to Anarchangel. This began as a classic  scenario, with a user adding articles making  claims of mass murder, sourced to self published works, blogs, etc. and on talk pages claiming a conspiracy of editors to hide details of massacres of Jews in the Ottoman empire. The clearly self published sources of this article are now gone, but what has been substituted are 1. A book by David Dolan, an American journalist, published by a charismatic Christian publisher with no reputation for fact checked or peer reviewed academic works. 2. A book by Jacob de Haas, who per his Wikipedia bio, served on the propaganda committee of the World Zionist organization. 3. An article from another Zionist organization, the Theodor Herzl foundation. (My argument regarding Zionist sources is that they should be regarded as advocacy organizations, not as impartial reporters of fact,  for the purpose of these kinds of assertions.) 3. The Joan Peters book From Time Immemorial per our own article about it, is highly discredited as a source. 4. That leaves the Jewish Encyclopedia, the only work written by actual professors in an academic style, which includes ''a single sentence'' saying that Safed--not the Jews of Safed, merely "Safed"--was destroyed in 1660, with no context or detail. This is significant because another editor, responding on a talk page to another effort of the article creator, 1011 Córdoba pogrom, has pointed out that an opposing army killed the whole town, Jews and Muslims together, and didn't single out the Jews as the article claimed.   says, "Exceptional claims require high-quality sources". A claim of mass murder is an exceptional claim. I am still waiting for someone to bring a high quality, peer reviewed academic history which actually tells us what happened in Safed in 1660, and that's not happening. The fact that multiple unreliable,  casual or polemical tertiary sources all "agree" doesn't give us enough context on which to base a Wikipedia article
— User:Jonathanwallace, 02:41, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Stance: comment
Cited policy: WP:REDFLAG||WP:REDFLAG (Wikipedia:Verifiability)