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Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

theguardian.com

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Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be because your comment is too vague, personally I don't understand what you mean. Who are the ownership/leadership of media companies?

I saw this in a comment here recently and thought it was informative about this topic: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-dec-19-oe-stein...

The thread topic is News media, not Hollywood.

Global news media is dominated by Rupert Murdoch (not Jewish) and while the second tier lesser Murdochs are mostly rich billionaires not many are Jewish.

eg: Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (recent chair of The New York Times company) is neither Jewish by birth—according to traditional Jewish law—nor by choice. (He was raised Episcopalian, his mother’s faith.)

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the one that insults the other first loses the argument.

Quite the opposite. The last person to present credible evidence is often the only person telling the truth. If you can forever prove the West wrong, don't keep us waiting.

could be but you brought no new information besides a low level personal insult so the person you insulted added more to the discussion than you

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree with you if the BBC simply chose to not report any news on the Israel/Palestine conflict. However, as luck would have it, the BBC published 3 separate pieces of news about Israel/Palestine today. 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mz8gxzg82o 2. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rp31lk7mzo 3. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2k14n9d8y9o I’ve read all three articles, and I skimmed them again quick…

Your Al Jazeera link goes to a page that now states at 'least 95 Palestinians killed' but when I click the link next to that stat it takes me to an article that gives no numbers, no sources for numbers. I'm not sure why you would expect the BBC to publish something like that or why you hold that up to be good journalism?

I also find these live blog style news pages confusing. Scrolling down, I find the following

> Gaza death toll hits 95 as Khan Younis attack casualties rise

> At least 95 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli attacks since dawn, hospital sources in Gaza tell Al Jazeera.

> According to Nasser Hospital in the southern part of the enclave, the death toll of the Israeli attack on the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis that we reported on earlier has increased to seven people.

then there is this tweet that is Arabic and contains a video > https://twitter.com/AJA_Palestine/status/1942671277883273250

with the following translation

> Translation: A Palestinian boy injured in an Israeli bombing asks his sister for food as he is starving while he waits to receive treatment.

My reply still stands in that BBC still has made no visible attempt to report a story with any casualty figures for Gaza this day even though they did publish 3 other pieces of news concerning the conflict. Therefore, the "relevancy bias" does not apply to the BBC here because the BBC considers the conflict relevant enough to report on 3 times within 24 hours.

Why does the BBC not consider the daily toll of casualties in this very same conflict sufficiently relevant to report on?

No "preliminary estimates on this breaking story"?

No "unconfirmed reports at this time"?

Nothing.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#394
post #31

since key players realized decades ago how much sway news outlets hold over public opinion, a vast amount of them have been co-opted to spread propaganda [0]. at least a dozen countries and probably more (including Israel) are tapped directly into the five/fourteen eyes [1][2] intelligence network, countries which share "raw sigint" [3] with each other and strategically disseminate international propaganda to the all…

murdoch empire, from zero to hero. also broligarchs are falling over themselves to own media companies. it doesnt take an einstein to see whats going on.

[deleted]

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite. The last person to present credible evidence is often the only person telling the truth. If you can forever prove the West wrong, don't keep us waiting.

could be but you brought no new information besides a low level personal insult so the person you insulted added more to the discussion than you

[flagged]

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is neither forcibly conscripting nor are they preventing anyone from leaving the country should they wish. Ukraine is doing both at an increasingly absurd scale, all the while people wave their flag-of-the-week in their social media profile, either aloof of what they support or seeing no problem with it. The same was probably, more or less the same, during slavery. People adopting views based on tribe rather t…

Totally wrong. Are you a Russian bot or simply ill-informed, unserious human talking out of your posterior? Russia doesn't give out passports to men until they've fulfilled military requirements. Please inform yourself. https://youtube.com/channel/UC9HHZMXng9reLBQmNc1Y8iA

You're conflating two things. There is indeed conscription in Russia, Scandinavia, and many countries in the world where people are expected to do some period of time of military training within a country. These people are generally not used in active conflicts, though it does entail enrollment in the equivalent of Selective Service in the US meaning they can be called up later (2 years in Russia) for "real" service in the case of a draft/mobilization. Russia carried out a limited mobilization once early on in the war in 2022, and it was horrifically unpopular, leading to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians from the country. People don't want to risk being called up to possibly die for a war they may not even agree with. Since then they have relied exclusively on volunteer forces.

Ukraine, by contrast, immediately after the war began they made it illegal for men of "fighting age", which they define as between the ages of 18 and 60, to leave the country. And they have been relying on forced conscription for an ever larger percent of their entire armed forces since then. This is why you can find countless highly disturbing videos of Ukrainian TCC (conscription) officers brutalizing and even killing civilians in efforts to conscript them and throw them on the front lines. Wiki has some sampling of incidents here [1] which I will not quote. In many cases they are, again, quite disturbing.

People really have no clue what they are supporting over there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Center_of_Recruitm...

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine China started doing to the Uyghurs exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and on the exact same scale. For that matter you can even say for the exact same justification - there have indeed been multiple mass death terrorist style incidents carried out by Uyghurs. Would you expect remotely similar framing? The entire population of Gaza was only ~2 million and Israel has now killed/wounded hundreds o…

> we would have long since been calling it a systemic genocide Without knowing what "we" means, allow me to cite a few more recent BBC headlines, these related to "genocide": Gaza war: UN rights expert accuses Israel of acts of *genocide* (March 26) UN experts accuse Israel of sexual violence and *'genocidal acts'* in Gaza (March 13) Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of *acts of genocide* in Gaza over water access (D…

Effective propaganda, when truth is not on its side, does not simply ignore the truth. There's an ICC arrest warrant out for Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and so forth. Never saying genocide and ignoring all allegations would be a red flag to the point of absurdity. You'd never convince anybody that wasn't already completely convinced.

So the way that real propaganda works is by taking some issue people generally feel a way about, expressing some empathy towards that, and then working to shift that person's perspective. For instance here [1] is the first article you linked: "UN rights expert accuses Israel of acts of genocide". It not only spends much of the article softly trying to undermine these claims, but even leans on one of the most classical propaganda techniques - appeals to emotion. This is a quote from that article:

----

Not surprisingly, Israeli diplomats are angry [at the claims]. Its ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, described the report as "an obscene inversion of reality", and accused Ms Albanese of questioning Israel's right to exist. Many Israelis, too, are likely to be shocked. And the suggestion of genocide, towards a state which was founded as a direct result of Nazi Germany's genocide of Jews, will cause deep offence.

In the wake of 7 October attack, and the fact that so many Israeli families are still waiting for news of loved ones taken hostage, hearing such outspoken condemnation is hard. Noam Peri, whose father Chaim was taken hostage, also travelled to Geneva. Her focus, naturally, is that her father not be forgotten.

"My father was kidnapped from his own home," she said. "He's an 80-year-old person that was sitting in his home with my mother, and he was brutally taken from there, and has essentially disappeared since. He has no communication, with no-one in the world."

----

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68667556

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#398
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree human nature hasn't really changed since Plato's time and technology is the main thing that has. But the tech provides much more information and communication which leads to things like slavery going. Also I think most people are shocked that trench warfare is still going on but the Russian leadership seems a bit behind the times. Apparently Putin spent time during the lockdown reading previous centuries hist…

It cannot happen in even 1000 years because it would need evolutionary pressures to select for saner and more intelligent people. The idiocracy ain't going to let the happen.

I think there's a more fundamental issue at play. Two people, both rather intelligent and completely sane, can come to complete different conclusions on things. For instance, I think fertility is one of the most critical issues facing civilization in modern times. I can offer reasons why, though you've already done so yourself in part, but that's outside the scope of this post for now.

By contrast, others may see the fertility crisis as not even an issue, let alone a crisis. After all humanity's not going to go extinct anytime in the foreseeable future, and billions of people is a lot of people. There are even some who think it may be a good thing - fewer people could reduce the impact of human emissions for instance.

So this difference in worldview would lead to radically different perspectives on seemingly completely unrelated things, like LGB representation in childhood education. Add in a bit of a radicalism and these otherwise reasonable disagreements gradually breed extreme hostility.

And I don't think there's any real solution here. No side can ever win, because neither view is really wrong. The best solution is probably general decentralization. But most people don't realize their opinions are opinions, and think they are factually and objectively correct - and want to impose their views on everybody, which trends towards attempts at centralization, inevitable collapse, and repeat.

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#399

The PR only works on very old people and very low IQ people. It's just brute force at this point. Everyone knows what they're doing. Everyone here can identify the fake comments. They think they're slick but it's just the Streisand effect at this point.

"Everyone". Basically, you're suggesting that propaganda only works on the feeble-minded and dumb, and "All True Scotsmen" know better than to fall for it. Wow.

Like for example, your comment makes no sense. It reads like you got paid to write it. You're not contributing anything at all - just expressing that you feel something that most people would call "exaggerated" and "performative" and "embarrassing"

Re: Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even calling this genocide is biased. Going into a country to kill the people from it of a race, and then texting celebratory texts that you killed some of that race, and capturing people of that race, is at least attempted genocide, if not completed. Retaliating to that to get your hostages back and to stop the endless attacks on your race is not genocide.

> Even calling this genocide is biased. I do not agree. Unless this applies to European Jews then? They were not all killed. Some were captured, some were used as labor or for experimentation. Some started a new state! If a sustained campaign is not successful in killing every single individual, how many before you might call it a genocide? This is a poor metric. If the borders of a country are eliminated (first poli…

> Unless this applies to European Jews then? They were not all killed.

I didn't say anything about "not all killed". Please - all these silly distractions and fallacies permeate any attempts to discuss this. You're not talking to an avatar representing all the worst, easiest to counter arguments from the "other side". You're talking to a real person who is articulating a view.

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