Maps, Directions, and Place Reviews
earlier unsigned comments
This article is too 'colourfully' worded and biased. Someone needs to revise this article in terms of the Wiki article guidelines.
I agree .. most of this was almost definitely written by member of SA
Yes, I have tried to clean it up but to no avail. I once went to an SA meeting a few years ago and there were no 'workers' save for one academic. They all basically a student group, hence their intense involvement in student politics. That also leads me to question their claims regarding continually growing membership. It seems that they have always been a rather small and extreme group.
- There were articles in The Age and other Newspapers about this group, I dont have the time, but someone ought to put the allegations of anti semitism up, since it's the most major publicity that the group has got thus far.
I'm very good friends with an excellent writer, who is an ex member of SA. I will ask her to review and correct the 'beliefs and ideology' section so it doesn't read like one of their pamphlets. The issue about antisemitism I would love to write up myself, as my partner (a lef-wing israeli academic) was barred from meetings of one of their recruiting fronts, SAWAR, during the Israel/Lebanon conflict - but that fact takes any chance of an NPOV away for me :)
In reference to the above comment about numbers & workers, two points: any SA member will tell you to your face that they don't care who signs up, they're all about numbers...and they firmly believe that the workers are too self-concerned and ignorant to start the revolution; the middle class students will save us! svunt 18:19, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
Sort it out
People editing this article need to understand what Wikipedia is. You seem to understand the principle of neutrality, but not that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, which is to say a tertiary source. Everything on Wikipedia should already have been published elsewhere and hence be verifiable and ultimately cited. mgekelly 00:59, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
- I removed the reference to Sydney University regarding SA defeats at their strongholds in the 2006 elections. Firstly, Sydney Uni is hardly a stronghold of Socialist Alternative, and secondly they actually did quite well for SA. They polled 11%, after breaking off from Keep Left this year. The Keep Left candidate was defeated for President by 37 votes, and I'd argue the overall left-wing campaign wouldn't have been as strong without SA's campaign doing well. Also, the left didn't decide not to deal with SA at Sydney Uni, they made a preference deal with Student Power (Grassroots Left). Ben Raue (Talk) 14:02, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
UMSU 2006 Elections
Someone seems to think that the UMSU negotiations aren't important enough to list here. As a concession, I've modified that section to be sympathetic; please don't remove it again. I feel for anyone in SA who thinks they got messed about, but denying what happened won't accomplish anything aside from bad blood. EvilFuzzyDoom 04:49, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
Please, please, please clean up this article!
It reads like a promotional pamphlet. I think this article needs to be completely re-worked by someone who isn't a member of SA. We can't let any persuasion start using Wikipedia as a promotional tool. 155.143.227.132 11:20, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
I just did a quick cleanup, but didn't make it through the whole article: as a Wikipedian, I found it too insulting. If anyone feels anything should be replaced/reverted, I think they should (out of fairness) propose it here first. The grammar is also absolutely terrible. 155.143.227.132 11:32, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
I've moved the section on anti-semitism under a new "Controversy" heading: it seemed as if it was being used to make the media look like it was attacking SA's "Beliefs and Ideology", which isn't very encyclopaedic. As you will notice, I have also expanded it. It is fully referenced and I have given no preference to either 'side'. Also, by moving it to a new "Controversy" heading, I've created a distance between accusations of anti-semitism and SA's "Beliefs and [Ideologies]", which I think is much fairer to SA. Bbarone 02:44, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
Original point
I hark back to my original point: this article is just too 'colourfully' worded, making it sound biased. Just get rid of some (most) of the adjectives and adverbs. They are making it sound too promotional and not ecyclopaedic - this, I think, is the main problem. Bbarone 02:18, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
I have corrected the SA response to accusations of antisemitism. The main point is that to attack Israël is not to attack Jews, Israêl claiming incorrectly to represent Jews in general. Johncmullen1960 02:55, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
antisemitism?
I have moved the passage hereunder to the talk page. Obviously for a Left wing group an accusation if antisemitism is very serious, and this passage cites one article in one newspaper - it's not enough to merit inclusion.
Furthermore, the article from The Age does not make any specific allegations of any sort against Socialist Alternative (read it folks!) The only specific accusation is that SA members didn't allow the Israeli ambassador to speak - a time honoured form of protest which has nothing antisemitic about it.
I don't know the law in Australia - perhaps, like in other places, it is illegal to put out antisemitic propaganda. IN which case SA would have been prosecuted. In the absence of any real evidence, it is unfair to leave such smears. They were left for a couple of months, which is enough for the accusers to have backed up the accusations with evidence. Johncmullen1960 13:40, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
((==Controversy== In an article published by The Age on September the 4th, 2006, Members of Socialist Alternative were accused of engaging in anti-semetic behavior and of exploiting ethnic tensions in order to increase their numbers. [1]. SA was likewise accused of being unsympathetic to semetic groups during the highest period of anti-semitism since the 1940s [2][3] and demonstrating on university campuses where the majority of this was occurring[4]. However, SA claim that they are not anti-semitic as Israêl does not represent jews, it simply claims to do so. "We take a firm stand against all forms of racism" Vashti Kenway (Students Against War and Racism, SA member). Any official outcome is yet to be seen.))
Now that some excitable sorts are accusing me of vandalism, why don't we vote on keeping this section or not ? I don't know how to do that, but please tell me Johncmullen1960 08:15, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I see that the section has been cleaned up a little. Nevertheless it remains very POV, along the lines of "they claim to have stopped beating their wives." Johncmullen1960 17:23, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Apollo someone put back an old version of the controversy section, which had many faults, some of them listed above. I have deleted it, but perhaps Apollo has an opinion (beyond the insults he put on my user page!) Johncmullen1960 11:10, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Paul Coats
isn't this a statement of one person of an organisation that does not necessarily reflect the organisation, I'm using a similar argument to here [[5]] that individual member's views or actions do not represent the wider organisation (unless endorsed as official organisation policy) Michellecrisp 04:58, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
Gicven the high levels of groupthink within this group, we can safely assume that any public views on Israel expressed by any member of this group also accurately reflects the entire's sect's views. Besides, the article only says that members of the group have strong views on Israel, and provides Coat's views as an example. Apollo1986
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