Talk:Milton Balkany

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A fact from Milton Balkany appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 6 April 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Chabad rabbi Milton Balkany misappropriated more than $700,000 of federal grant money from a charitable organisation that cared for disabled children?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2007/April.

Wikipedia

Beware libel[edit]

The contents of this article may violate WP:LIBEL. IZAK 02:54, 10 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unbalanced[edit]

Reading this article makes me think that he only got involved in controversies. Did he do anything else? --PinchasC | £€åV€ m€ å m€§§åg€ 03:09, 10 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

He built and runs a Beis Yaakov in Boro Park known as "Balkany's" (can't think of it's official name) and thousands of good Jewish girls have attended it over the decades, and he has been involved in a lot of community building. He is supporter of Republicans so that is why he gets heat from the liberals and the media who hate Orthodox Jews and Republicans to boot. They would never give a pro-gay (or gay himself), soft-on-intermarriage, liberally outspoken Reform rabbi anywhere near this kind of heat or attention. So it goes. IZAK 07:45, 15 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Use of primary sources in a BLP[edit]

I am not sure that the section Misappropriation of charitable funds is properly sourced. Primary sources, such as court records, should not be used in BLPs for controversial material. Please find secondary sources to support the material in that section. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 03:11, 10 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Court decisions are reliable per WP:RS. There may be an issue here about whether it is notable, but that's not really a BLP concern as I understand it. JoshuaZ 03:33, 10 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Specific issues.[edit]

Ok, specific problems with this article: 1) The section "deal with proescutors" isn't clear which above issue it is talking about. It should be clarified and moved into that section. 2) Do we have any citation for the last sentence in the Luchin's section? I'm skeptical about it for a variety of reasons, including the issue that rabbinic courts generally won't do anything unless both parties are present, so if Luchin was not attending (as discussed above) it would be halachically problematic for the court to convene (unless I'm missing something here. The hilchot of beit dinim isn't an area I know a lot about). 3) The article in some locations uses "beit din" and others "rabbinic court". I'm not sure if some distinction is meant here, but if so it should be cleared up. If not, we should just use rabbinc court and link to beth din(the main article) and maybe use the term "beit din" once the first time either term appears in the article. JoshuaZ 03:32, 10 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oh my Lord[edit]

This is the blatant AD I have ever seen in wikipedia "and in the end everything was found to la de da!" He is a saint no doubt. This article is a total mess. Lobojo (talk) 00:56, 18 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Convicted criminal, in the federal pen.[edit]

He was convicted of extortion. He's doing four years in the pen. That qualifies him as a criminal. Please don't try to delete that. Really, the article is favorable compared to, say, The Forward's article, "The storied career of an indomitable ultra-Orthodox political fixer appears to have entered its final phase with the conviction of Rabbi Milton Balkany, known to the press as the “Brooklyn Bundler."[1] Thanks. --John Nagle (talk) 22:36, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, but can anybody explain Balkany's website [2] to me? It reads like a joke, but I somehow have a feeling that it isn't meant to be, Ajnem (talk) 08:05, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That domain is registered to a "John Roe" in Phoenix, AZ. At the bottom of the page are links to "recipetrove.com" (a page of AdSense ads), "cooknfood.com" (more ads), and "cardsense.co.uk" ("Bad Credit Credit Cards"). That page probably has nothing to do with its subject. It looks like part of a link farm. --John Nagle (talk) 18:46, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely a link farm. Each page has a few links at the bottom, no more than three per page but different on each page, like "Payday Loan Affiliate", "Instant Access High Interest", "Blue Shower Curtains", and even "Christian Boot Camp". There's also a Wordpress-hosted blog for Balkany [3], which looks somewhat more legitimate. The Wordpress-hosted blog hasn't been updated since February 2010. The link farm site has roughly similar content to the Wordpress blog, but it's not a direct copy, and stories continue to be added even though the Wordpress blog is now static. The stories look plausible at first glance, but see [4], in which Balkany is supposedly endorsing Giuliani for Mayor of New York in 2011. Giuliani isn't running for mayor; he was mayor from 1994 to 2001. That has to be some item out of the past, rewritten and recently added just to make the site look active. The link farm site is clearly bogus, and the Wordpress-hosted blog is iffy. Neither qualifies as a reliable source. --John Nagle (talk) 19:19, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment comment[edit]

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Milton Balkany/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

-while this article seems to contain mostly accurate information

-it is unfairly biased and potentialy libelous -facts are inferred and further extrapolated on -when they are not directly listed in the referenced sources

-the author(s) take tremendous journalistic freedom that does not belong in any encyclopedia

Last edited at 12:05, 23 May 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 00:07, 30 April 2016 (UTC)