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

theguardian.com

421–430 of 434 posts

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

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have a single example of a protest you try to summon here? I very much doubt it Here's one example. The UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, faced calls to have her visit to the LSE cancelled by various groups, including Campaign Against Antisemitism and Union of Jewish Students. She was also called unfit for office by the US ambassador to the UN. On another occasion, an organizati…

You don't link to why she was called unfit. There are seemingly valid concerns with her ability to be an impartial UN Rapporteur as required for that position. The Lancet item was a letter, not an article. It is a speculative letter than was then pushed as a 'Lancet article' (something you do in your comment) to give it credibility/authority it does not have.

More background on the UN Rapporteur:

In July 2014, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese fundraised for her former employer UNRWA by posting that America is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”

In January 2015, immediately following the Charlie Hebdo terror attack, Albanese posted an article from Iranian state-owned media PressTV with the title “CIA and Mossad carried out the Paris attack.”

In November 2022, Albanese told a Hamas conference: “You have a right to resist.”

On October 7th, 2023, as the Hamas massacre was still unfolding, Albanese minimized the atrocities by posting: “Today’s violence must be put in context.”

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

#422
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't comment like this on HN, no matter what it's about. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The parent submission is off-topic and spreads Jew hatred (attack on a person because Robbie Gibb is Jew and should be removed from board, similar to Columbia University president Claire Shipman comments). As someone who's grandparents experienced similar attacks during Stalinism because they were Jewish aka "zionists", this is extremely scary and totalitarian. I just don't understand how this is allowed.

I agree the thread is a trainwreck and we let it fall off the front page due to all the toxicity. We'll go through and ensure all the guidelines breaches are flagged and see if further action needs to be taken against other users. This is standard moderation but it takes time.

We need everyone to hold themselves to a high standard if they expect us to hold others to a high standard.

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

#423
post #259
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who call it "Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza" is hardly a reliable source. And the entire criticism is amount of coverage per death? I men the Israeli deaths have names attached to them and you can verify them, the Palestinian ones are just numbered by Hamas. Obviously the coverage will be different. I skimmed the article by CfMM and it's hardly a neutral source. Like they complain that BBC doesn't call Palesti…

The Palestinian dead have names too, and it doesn’t take much to verify them. Beyond the deaths, the hostages taken by both sides are exactly that: hostages. Why do you suggest Palestinian prisoners are not? What makes you think anything akin to “due process” is happening in Gaza right now?

> and it doesn’t take much to verify them.

Really, and how exactly would you verify them? And of course they would never just make up the numbers, right? https://www.cfr.org/blog/un-halves-its-estimate-women-and-ch...

> Why do you suggest Palestinian prisoners are not?

A hostage is taken randomly to force the other party to do something. The Palestinians arrested were arrested because of a specific reason pertaining to them, some have been tried in court, some have not, but none were taken randomly.

You can call some of them prisoner of war, but of course those would be combatants, and again they were taken because they were fighting.

None were taken randomly, so none are hostages.

> akin to “due process” is happening in Gaza right now?

I'm not surprised you are getting basic information wrong, most Palestinians activists know almost nothing about Palestine or Gaza. To give you a correction the prisoners we are talking about were arrested in the West Bank, not Gaza.

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests oh no, not students checks notes exercising their rights. > every BBC interviewer asking you in the perfectly aggrieved RP tones why you hate children so much dude you're literally commenting in a thread about how the BBC is complicit in preventing coverage of Israeli crimes because of conflicts of interest.

> > you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests > oh no, not students checks notes exercising their rights. Check your notes again. At least part of the "fiery" was not within students' rights. The "not peaceful" was definitely not within students' rights. Harassing Jewish students is not within students' rights; not being harassed by other students is .

.... ..... ..... will you be trotting out the IDF did nothing wrong trope again?

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

#425

Offending or over-accusing sides of this conflict is a very asymmetric risk. Misrepresent Palestinians negatively and you may eventually get an angry, vague letter - with a quarter of signatories doing so anonymously. Misrepresent Israelis negatively and you get very powerful and well-organised protests. BBC is sadly doing the rational thing of staying clear of suggesting Israel may be doing some bad things. It is a…

There was a study about negative bias towards Israel at the BBC. It contradicts your explanation. Do you have a single example of a protest you try to summon here? I very much doubt it.

Yes, the study certainly overrides anything your senses may be telling you.

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

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make no mistake, occupiers can and frequently will use terror tactics. They don't plow through a crowd with a truck or plant a bomb in an everyday place because they don't need to do that to instill terror, those are tactics of the weak. No, they disappear the people around you, with the same aim, and from a position of power. Which is the greater terror? A truck that detonated downtown or knowing a relative that got…

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to diminish the suffering of people who have to live through this degrading and stressful experience. I just think the word terrorism used to describe the action of (usually militarily weaker) insurgent actors trying to destabilize a society is not the same as using the word terrorism used to describe the intentional oppression by a state (using military and police) towards a minori…

I really don't think there is a definition of terrorism that is sufficiently satisfying and also faithful to its etymology.

The definition that most people have in mind is probably what just mentioned earlier: how similar is it to the examples of irregulars "setting bombs in public infrastructure", "suicide trucks", and "suicide bombers".

But as the dictionary definition betrays, the ambiguity due to etymology exists, and is frequently exploited as a rhetorical technique by people using the word.

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

#427
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not “unknown”, that’s an antisemitic quote from neo-nazi Kevin Alfred Strom.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I don’t think agreeing with a neo-nazi about the foundational tenets of nazism is a good use of that idiom. It’s supposed to be for things like “pickles on pizza are actually pretty good” not “we are all slaves to the Jews who control society.”

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

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they didn't, their original comment stands as logical fallacy, ad-hominem. I do not want to make the same mistake as you, turning discussions into personal attacks (aka ad-hominem), but you were the only one using ad-hominem in this discussion, if you felt attacked because OP said that western leaders use Putin as a scapegoat, I think that is totally on you.

Okay. I'm still waiting for a substantiation of the original claim, either from you or the OP.

You'll be waiting a really long time :D

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests > oh no, not students checks notes exercising their rights. Check your notes again. At least part of the "fiery" was not within students' rights. The "not peaceful" was definitely not within students' rights. Harassing Jewish students is not within students' rights; not being harassed by other students is .

.... ..... ..... will you be trotting out the IDF did nothing wrong trope again?

Didn't know the IDF was active in UK universities.

Students can be stupid and this is a special demographic that thinks it was touched by Jews. And yes, if they use violence and intimidation, their hobby perhaps needs some examination.

For the unrelated conflict in the middle east it certainly isn't helpful in preventing any death. On the contrary, they often demand and justify "holy" wars, fueling even more hatred.

So f these guys, really.

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

#430
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that hard for a new idea to look good for a couple short months/years. Building an ongoing, self-sustaining society that doesn't go completely off the rails is a whole other thing. There's a reason all these idyllic examples people give (Catalonia, Pre-USSR Ukrainian socialism, Paris Commune) were short-lived. If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today.

> If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today. I don't think so. Pretty much all the negative things about Bolsheviks were already prominently there by 1919. Anti-democracy, mass terror, torture, concentration camps, you name it.

I guess 1919 is a bit late for rose colored glasses--though there's a shocking number of people who are still nostalgic for Bolshevism after _everything_.

You get my point, though. It's one thing to propose an idyllic society. It's another thing to try to implement it. In all cases where there's been a serious attempt at implementation on any scale above local and short-lived, we view the results with horror.

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