The website worldle.teuteuf.fr contains a daily geography quiz. Players receive six tries to guess the country or territory pictured. After correctly identifying the country, players have the chance to guess the featured country’s neighbors.
On January 9, the featured country was Cyprus. (The entire island was pictured, with no mention of its de facto division since 1974.)
After identifying Cyprus, this author moved to the second part of the challenge: identifying Cyprus’ neighbors. Five boxes were shown, although one of them (item #3) contained no picture. The author identified Lebanon (item #1) and Turkey (item #4).
Item #5 presented Israel within its pre-1967 borders.
The oddest part of the challenge was item #2. This item portrayed all of modern Israel, including the part included in item #5. (It even seemed to include the Golan Heights, or at least, it included the entirety of the Sea of Galilee and the land around it.) What could it be?
Worldle.teuteuf.fr identified it as Palestine.
The mere inclusion of “Palestine” may or may not be controversial. The initial featured image sometimes shows a territory, as opposed to a state. One day last week, the featured image was South Georgia island, a territory of the United Kingdom. Some time ago, the featured image was Taiwan; China is quick to condemn (if not kneecap) companies that dare identify Taiwan as anything other than a Chinese province.
What is shocking is the website’s identification of “Palestine” as including all of Israel. This is what Israel-haters mean when they refer to Palestine “from the river to the sea.” The “river” is the Jordan, and the “sea” is the Mediterranean. That includes all of pre-1967 Israel. What the phrase means, and what the picture means, is that Israel should not exist at all, that it is really part of Palestine.
A short time after discovering worldle.teuteuf.fr’s politics, this author found that the list of neighbors in the daily quiz had been altered to include just three countries: Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey. “Palestine” no longer showed up. (Interestingly, neither the “before” nor “after” versions included Greece.)
Here’s how it showed up in Safari:
The Chrome version:
And in Opera:
LIF has not been able to determine who owns the https://worldle.teuteuf.fr website, although according to whoislookup, worldle.com is registered by Dynadot LLC. All other information about worldle.com is “redacted for privacy.” Dynadot is a privately held ICANN-accredited domain name registrar and web-hosting company headquartered in San Mateo, California.
[January 15, 2023: Edited to include hyperlink to archived copy of altered quiz from January 9, 2023.]
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