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Katrien Hertog devoted a very long piece on Assaily’s work. I don’t know whether this malicious caricature is deliberate or not, but the downloaded article runs to 44 pages, entirely devoted to her analysis of Assaily’s Library on Wheels for Non-violence and Peace Association – LOWNP, which is mentioned 249 times. What apparently Icewhiz did was not read the piece, but rather google rapidly a keyword through it. Even then he got things wrong. He is mentio ned 60 times: 6 as Assaily and 54 times as Nafez. I.e. Icewhiz is not a reliable analyst. He didn’t read the source, and his judgements on the others are just obiter dicta.] (]) 16:50, 29 August 2018 (UTC) Katrien Hertog devoted a very long piece on Assaily’s work. I don’t know whether this malicious caricature is deliberate or not, but the downloaded article runs to 44 pages, entirely devoted to her analysis of Assaily’s Library on Wheels for Non-violence and Peace Association – LOWNP, which is mentioned 249 times. What apparently Icewhiz did was not read the piece, but rather google rapidly a keyword through it. Even then he got things wrong. He is mentio ned 60 times: 6 as Assaily and 54 times as Nafez. I.e. Icewhiz is not a reliable analyst. He didn’t read the source, and his judgements on the others are just obiter dicta.] (]) 16:50, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
:*Nishidani, please refrain from personal attacks. ] ''<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant:small-caps;">]</span>'' 05:04, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Revision as of 05:04, 31 August 2018

Nafez Assaily

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Nafez Assaily (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Non-notable activist. Sourced to a couple of interviews, his homepage, and what would seem to be a self-authored bio. Icewhiz (talk) 15:12, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Icewhiz (talk) 15:17, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Israel-related deletion discussions. Icewhiz (talk) 15:17, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Palestine-related deletion discussions. Icewhiz (talk) 15:17, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
Keep he has multiple book mentions. 1, 2. And Newsweek magazine (accessed at Google Books) mentioned him at 1990 article (that is 28 years ago). -- Gprscrippers (talk) 17:28, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
Passing mentions, random quotes, and some directory listings. None of these are in depth.Icewhiz (talk) 17:38, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
WP:BIO does not require any in-depth coverage. If the depth of coverage in any given source is not substantial, then multiple independent sources may be combined to demonstrate notability. I don't think the sources, especially the more recently added ones, reach the point of being trivial - they often devote several paragraphs to him and lay out his basic biography. Several such sources (which the article has, now) is sufficient to pass WP:BIO. --Aquillion (talk) 22:47, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
Many of the added sources are not RSes, and many are brief blurbs and quotations - responded below with a complete analysis of each one.Icewhiz (talk) 03:45, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Books that mention him are not supportive of notability, they are:
  • A Land Full of God: Christian Perspectives on the Holy Land]] by Mae Elise Cannon, the mention is brief and not usable because it inaccurately describes Assaily as "sociologist" and sources statements about him with two citations, one is to the "Library on Wheels," the organization Assaily is described as running, and the other is to: "Assaily, "Naffez Assaily's page". This is not a reliable source.
  • Humanitarian Law in Action Within Africa, a scholarly book by a non-bluelinked author, Jennifer Moore, merely cites an article Assaily co-wrote.
  • Connecting with the Enemy: A Century of Palestinian-Israeli Joint Nonviolence by Sheila H. Katz, mentions Assaily as founder of the ‘Library on Wheels for Nonviolence and Peace,' and quotes him, before being cut off by one of google's this-page-is not messages.
  • India's Israel Policy by P. R. Kumaraswamy merely contains the statement, in the "acknowledgements" forward, "I interacted with a number of Palestinian figures including... Naffez Assaily..."
  • These are mere mentions that fail to demonstrate notability, (if someone can access the rest of the mention in "Connecting with the Enemy," and considers it to me SIGCOV, I request that they copy out the full relevant text on in this discussion.E.M.Gregory (talk) 18:20, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Delete Much of what in in the article is primary, and searches turn up passing mentions that, like material in article, is sourced to statements made by Assaily and not interdependently verified. Moreover, while there are hits in books and media, they are brief mentions, or, as in one case now on the page, a quote. He established a bookmobile called the "Library on Wheels for Nonviolence and Peace," but there is no indication that it was notable, or that it still exists. Fails WP:BASIC. E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:07, 27 August 2018 (UTC) withdraw for lack of time.E.M.Gregory (talk) 22:50, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Comment. Oh come now, gentlemen. You, Gregory, have devoted extensive amounts of time to making wiki articles on even the most recondite incidents of Palestinian violence, scraping through memes repeated in provincial newspapers, and now repudiate the idea that an article on that rare thing, a Palestinian pacifist, should be tolerated on Misplaced Pages? Is this where NPOV lies?Nishidani (talk) 21:07, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

  • Keep. This needs a lot of cleanup, but sources that satisfy WP:BIO were pretty easy to find. (Note that the article has been substantially expanded in terms of sourcing since this AFD began.) --Aquillion (talk) 22:12, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
    @Aquillion: - the article does seem to look better following the addition of many citations since the AfD begun. However, lets look at the critically (numbered by the order under "Sources"):
    1. ref1 (Assaily 2004), ref2 (Assaily 2006), ref3 (Assaily, 2009), ref4 (Assaily, 1991) - all authored/co-authored by the subject (some are in non-RS). Do not establish notability in any shape or form.
    2. ref5 (Burrowes, 1991) - two sentence mention, citing Assaily's call for non-violence.
    3. ref6 (Cannon) - not sure if this would be a RS, however this is a one-sentence mention of him in the context of his organization facilitating a meeting.
    4. ref7 - incident report from Christian Peacemaker Teams. Most probably not a RS, in any event this is mainly about the family's grape arbor.
    5. ref8 (De Vries, Minke) - RSness doubtful. I don't have page 173 open on preview, however searching the Assaily via the google-search in the book brings up little, and it seems this is a short blurb as well.
    6. ref9 (peacereporter.net) - This does not seem to be a RS. In any event this is an interview - and a fairly short one. Interviews generally do not establish notability.
    7. ref10 (sfgate) - One of a few people interviewed for this piece. Interviews generally do not establish notability.
    8. ref11 (Nicoletta) - I have my doubts on the RSness here. Regardless - this is again an interview of Assaily and does not establish notability.
    9. ref12 (Hertog) - not about Assaily. He is mentioned as the director, and is quoted very briefly. RSness also questionable. Does not establish notability.
    10. ref13 (Mattar) - cites a paper author by Assaily once with a brief quotation. Does not establish notability in any manner.
    11. ref14 (1995 JPost piece) - not available online (and JPost's archive is online) - seems to be a mention of Assaily being interviewed in a film (which is already covered in ref10 (sfgate)) - not an indication of notability.
    12. ref15 (Katz) - part of a single paragraph (which itself is mainly on the Library), followed by a short quote.
    13. ref16 (Levin) - Very briefly thanked in the acknowledgements. Seems also to be self-published / non-RS - this is by Hope Publishing House. Does not establish notability in any form.
    14. ref17 (Moore) - mentioned in a list (as "Palestinian Sufi Nafez Assaily" with a citation of Assaily himself to back up his mention). 4 words do not establish notability in any form.
    15. ref18 (paxchristi) - probably not RS. In any case this a profile of the organization, and mentions Assaily precisely once as the contact (if you will - this also lists a phone number and fax number). Does not establish notability of the subject.
    16. ref19 (Schilling) - mention of job title, followed by a brief quote of Assaily. Does not establish notability.
    17. ref20 (Tessler) - His 1988 position paper is cited. No coverage of Assaily himself.
    18. ref21 (Walz) - I'm not sure of the RSness of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, however this piece is not about Assaily, it is about Awad. Assaily is mentioned in a single paragraph as replacing Awad - does not establish notability in any form.
  • In short - it seems that every brief mention of this individual available online was added to the article. However, RS concerns aside, most of these are very brief blurbs, mentions, and very brief quotes - they do not establish notability. A couple of position papers he wrote in 1988 and 1991 get cited (scantily), he gave the odd interview, and facilitated meetings for visitors. This is a local librarian, running a small on-wheels library, and taking over the position of the more notable Mubarak Awad, who mainly in the 1990s was cited/interviewed a few times.Icewhiz (talk) 03:44, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Snow Keep, ...search books.google.com, and you find Nafez Assaily mentioned in loads of books, as acting director of Mubarak Awad's Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, based in East Jerusalem, or receiver of IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award. Oh, I get it; "Most Palestinians are terrorists"....right....Huldra (talk) 22:13, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Misplaced Pages:Citation overkill, article has been reference bombed with a large number of articles, including many that are passing mentions, it would be more useful to have added a small number of WP:RS containing WP:SIGCOV. It is hare to believe that an editor actually read all of these sources, or examined their reliability, in the time expended adding them. It would be of use to editors here for someone to bring a few persuasive examples of SIGCOV to this page.22:50, 27 August 2018 (UTC)E.M.Gregory (talk)
To cite just one of the numerousarticles on Palestinian terrorism you write up, Death of Binyamin Meisner, 37 cites, almost all dealing with 2 moments, reportage of his death 1989, and reports of the prisoner release exchange decades later, involving his killer. He's not notable, but the ref stacking makes it look that way. I.e. double standards. Assaily has been regularly reported for 30 years in books and articles on peace activists.
First the objection was there are not enough sources. One supplies 21, several reliably published books, and the response is: too many sources. Let's look at the category of Israeli settlers, for comparable data.

From Category Israeli rabbis. (Assaily is a religious figure as well)

I.e. Why are you both deeply troubled about an article, well sourced, on a Palestinian peace activist of international repute? Nishidani (talk) 07:40, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Many of those meet SNGs (e.g. Yogev - a MK) and it would be easy to find several high quality sources for them - as opposed to this schoolteacher/librarian/activist. Adding several very low quality references - some self-authored, some non-RS, and some mentioning the subject in passing (in as little as 3 ( - "Contact: Nafez Assaily) or 4 ( - "Palestinian Sufi Nafez Assaily") words) - does not establish notability. Care to point out 3-4 actual RSes that discuss the subject in an independent (not an interview or self-authored) and WP:INDEPTH fashion?Icewhiz (talk) 07:50, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
You think that 'many'(? how many) are SNGs. But you have no evidence. It's an opinion. What my little exercise aspires to show is that, were a POV warrior to set out thinking 'Jewish people' go for deletion of their wiki bios if they are undersourced, the result would be havoc. Sensible editors don't take out articles on technical grounds. They improve them. Assaily, despite all of these pseudo-objections, is manifestly significant in the relevant I/P peace activism area. My impression is this was targeted because (a) I wrote it and (b) the person is Palestinian. The arbitrary focus on him, rather than thousand of bio articles which are manifestly undersourced and dealing with, to date, people who have no international or even national profile, is very, very odd.Nishidani (talk) 10:00, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
@Nishidani: I provided an example (Yogev - MK), however to spell this out in relation to your WP:OSE list above - Ya'akov Asher, Yoav Ben-Tzur, Shlomo Dayan, Avraham Deutsch, Moshe Ze'ev Feldman, Reuven Feldman, Simcha Friedman, Yitzhak Levy, Moti Yogev, Eli Cohen (politician born 1949), Zvulun Kalfa, Shai Piron, Orit Strook are all patently trivial passses of WP:NPOL having served in the Knesset and thus meet "members or former members of a national, state or provincial legislature" and are presumed notable (and it would be fairly trivial to provide better sources for them). Your first example - Ran Kadoch - trivially passes WP:NFOOTY and would be easy to source with the sport/gossip rags. I fail to see the relevance of calling out "POV warrior", "Jewish People", or the subject here being Palestinian. Prior to nominating this article - I did a BEFORE - and I saw very little (not too many instances in which he provided a random quote - and not all of that). Following the AfD nom, the article underwent Misplaced Pages:Citation overkill additions (which include passing mentions in a lists). Care to point out high-quality, in-depth, sources covering this individual? All I see is a school-teacher/library on wheels operator who replaced the founder of Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence (itself a very small outfit - and quite possibly non-notable - I doubt it would pass WP:NORG), who is quoted very briefly in RSes vis-a-vis his minor actvist role (and the scant coverage, such as it is, is mainly jointly with the Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence).Icewhiz (talk) 10:33, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
What you are saying is that anyone in the world who manages to get elected in a state or national legislative for, say 4 years, and serves without distinction or reportage, or anyone who manages to play a couple of games of major league football, or tennis, ping pong, or beach volleyball, etc, is automatically someone whose wiki bio can't be erased, even if the person left no notable record of his performance other than a note in the archives of sporting papers or the respective archives of the Knesset, the Diet, Hungary's National Assembly or Nauru's Parliament, whereas someone mentioned in 10 RS books, and numerous newspapers over a thirty year period has to have his notability proven. Pull the other leg. The objections are pettifogging, policy cavils that, were they applied across the board, would automatically cause the deletion of tens of thousand of articles, without anything like the documentation we have here, whom no one has thought to contest. Nishidani (talk) 12:39, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
Elected - even if serving 1 day. Also applies to Palestinian Legislative Council. The SNG states presumption of notability - and such individuals usually have copious media and (possibly subsequently) book references. I personally think NFOOTY frivolous, however it is policy - and soccer players do get coverage in RSes (various sport rags). Regardless - this is policy. Do you have any policy based argument for the notability of this individual? Saying WP:GHITS (which are low, by the way), or throwing out "10 RS books" (some are not RS, and regardless in all of them - these are passing mentions!) does not cut it in terms of meeting WP:SIGCOV. How about presenting the best 3-4 sources here?Icewhiz (talk) 12:55, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
Do all the flagwaving you want to. One often sees what one wants to see.Death of Binyamin Meisner for example. Would you ‘Care to point out high-quality, in-depth, sources covering this individual?’ or any others above. They don't in 98% of the cases exist. And all of these cavils are disregarded, partially, I believe, because they are not Palestinians. With Palestinians, one applies the nanoparticle sensitive microscope.Nishidani (talk) 13:07, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
Article subjects being or not being Palestinian is irrelevant from a policy perspective.Icewhiz (talk) 13:25, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
In fact, none of the above repetitive policy exclamations will have the slightest impact on the result of this deletion process. They are obviously barrel-scraping.Nishidani (talk) 13:37, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Delete. He runs a mobile library out of a truck. All the sources are passing mentions, short quotes, not reliable, or stuff he wrote himself, does not pass GNG.יניב הורון (Yaniv) (talk) 15:48, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Keep per Nishidani. Plus he does a lot more than just "runs a mobile library out of a truck". Enough verbiage already. --NSH001 (talk) 15:54, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Speedy Keep this is a WP:SNOW situation if I've ever heard of one. Simonm223 (talk) 17:13, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Merge to Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence. After taking the time to read the sources, and running searches, what I find is a man who makes himself available to meet with sympathetic foreign visitors foreign journalists and writers. They mention meeting him and sometimes quote him. The way they quote him varies oddly, he is not, for example, a "sociologist." What I am not finding is that the few things he has published have been cited in a way that makes him a notable scholar or writer. He is described as a "pacifist", although he likes to tell visitors about his "incessant" activity removing concrete security barriers and teaching children to remove them. He is usually described as running a bookmobile stocked with pacifist books. It is far from being a notable institution. He was a follower of a more notable pacifist, Mubarak Awad who founded the Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence, where the far less notable Assaily followed him as director. I suggest we selectively merge Assaily there.E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:17, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Comment. You are using a double standard. To take but one example, in one of your endless articles on Muslim/Palestinian violence, namely 2016 Jerusalem shooting attack it came up for an AfD and I argued there that the substance of that article was already fully available at the List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, July–December 2016 here. Since your article already was covered in a comprehensive list, why the independent page? You didn't want a merge. After all this is an incident where a Palestinian resorted to violence, and deserved a separate page. Here, you want to merge this wiki bio, making out the author is not an independent subject, someone who nonetheless for three decades of individual activism has been cited by at least 12 book RS. You wish to drown him in the Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence article, which was created by someone else, and which Assaily oversaw for some years, while then branching out on a different career. What you appear to be implying is: let's merge Palestinian articles on peace-makers/peacemaking, and multiply articles on Jewish victims of Arab violence. This is obvious POV pushing. In any case, this article has an aesthetically unified, comprehensive overview of the subject, and to mash it into another article which no one has seriously worked yet, would create aa eyesore, besides jarring two discrete entities, a peace activist, and an institution which he was once a director of, only part of his larger story. The obvious merge is of Mubarak Awad with the centre he created, and not that centre with Nafez Assaily. Finally, this article is 26,399 bytes long -near the optimal high end for a biography of this kind. To conflate it with any other article would only induce confusion and tedium (WP:TLDR) in the reader.Nishidani (talk) 20:56, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

The policy concern is the lack of notable accomplishment, beyond getting quoted "as a Palestinian" by visiting writers. Lack of WP:SIGCOV of anything he has actually done, beyond giving interviews.E.M.Gregory (talk) 21:32, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
Read the article, please- You think providing tens of thousands of poor children and youths in a war zone with inadequate access to media a free access to ideas of peace, or being regularly invited throughout Europe and North America to talk of peace and conflict resolution, is not notable, the world thinks otherwise. If you are a Palestinian who murders someone you can get an immediate wiki bio ort incident showcasing. If you are a Palestinian who works to avoid such scenarios, you are threatened with wiki erasure.Nishidani (talk) 07:37, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Keep - and obviously so. Im not sure the delete voters are actually looking at the same article and its sources, but even a cursory look at them shows coverage across a range of sources over a range of time. nableezy - 22:56, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Keep This AfD has become ridiculous and for the most part ignores the question: is this person sourced well enough to pass WP:GNG? I really appreciate IceWhiz's review of the sources, but WP:GNG isn't that high of a threshold, and while this is a valid nomination and borderline call I'm convinced by a couple of the articles get him over the line, particularly the Weekly Standard, German language article, and Peacereporter.net articles. SportingFlyer talk 13:10, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Comment. I didn't reply point for point on Icewhiz's 'impressive' research. This consisted in examining 18 sources (10 of which are RS books) which cite Assaily and then asserting that each cite does not establish notability. That is so farcical a procedure as the mere assertion that in his view this or that might not be RS, than I didn't bother to reply. But I'll give you one exemplary instance of why his 'analysis' is totally unreliable.

Hertog) - not about Assaily. He is mentioned as the director, and is quoted very briefly. RSness also questionable. Does not establish notability

Katrien Hertog devoted a very long piece on Assaily’s work. I don’t know whether this malicious caricature is deliberate or not, but the downloaded article runs to 44 pages, entirely devoted to her analysis of Assaily’s Library on Wheels for Non-violence and Peace Association – LOWNP, which is mentioned 249 times. What apparently Icewhiz did was not read the piece, but rather google rapidly a keyword through it. Even then he got things wrong. He is mentio ned 60 times: 6 as Assaily and 54 times as Nafez. I.e. Icewhiz is not a reliable analyst. He didn’t read the source, and his judgements on the others are just obiter dicta.Nishidani (talk) 16:50, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

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