Skip to content
Shoresh Wiki

Pierre van Paassen: what Wikipedia removed

Pierre van Paassen was a journalist whose reporting on the 1929 Palestine violence directly contradicted the official statements of the Mufti of Jerusalem. Through 2010 the opening said that after ‘his reporting on the massacres contradicted both the Mufti’s statements and local British officials’ news releases, he became the target of several assassination attempts.’ Today’s opening ends before reaching this material, and the word survives once in the body. A reader today does not learn that van Paassen’s coverage of the massacres directly contradicted the Mufti’s own account.

The word “massacre” appeared 1 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 2010. Today the opening carries none; the body carries 1. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.

The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot

Section titled “The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot”
word20052010201520206 October 20232025
massacre010000
colonial032222

Counts are of the opening paragraph only, the part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote.

What was taken out

Section titled “What was taken out”
  • A capitalization detail in the description of his birthplace was reworded, not removed.
  • A description of his popular storytelling in human interest journalism is gone from the opening.
  • The account that his reporting on the massacres contradicted the Mufti’s statements, and that he later faced assassination attempts, is gone from the opening.

How it opened then, and now

Section titled “How it opened then, and now”

2005 (revision 17283378):

Á Pierre van Paassen ( 1895 - 1968 ) was a Dutch - Canadian - American journalist , writer , and Unitarian minister . Van Paassen was born in Gorcum , The Netherlands. He emigrated with his parents to Canada in 1914 . He left thelogical school to serve with the Canadian army in World War I . After the war he traveled extensively working as a columnist for the New York Evening World , in which capacity he gained fame reporting on the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. He was generally identified as a Zionist , and was a staunch opponent of fascism . Van Paassen was ordained in 1946 and became a United States citizen in 1947 . His books include: Days of our Years (1939; autobi…

2025 (revision 1288975106):

American journalist and minister (1895–1968) Pierre van Paassen (February 7, 1895 – January 8, 1968) was a Dutch-Canadian-American journalist, writer, and Unitarian minister. He was born in Gorinchem , Netherlands , then emigrated with his parents to Canada in 1914. After entering a seminary, he served as a missionary to Ruthenian immigrants in the Alberta hinterland, where he helped with medical work. In 1917 he left theological school to serve with the Canadian army in France in World War I as an infantryman and sapper . In 1921 he became a journalist with the Toronto Globe , and a year later moved to the U.S. and began writing a syndicated column for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution . Fro…

Section titled “Related”

Wikipedia text is quoted under CC BY-SA 4.0. This page is not affiliated with Wikipedia.