Remember that Oxford Street antisemitic attack four weeks back, when a coach of young Jewish kids celebrating Chanukah were abused and spat at by a bunch of Asian youths? The BBC report cited anti-Muslim slurs heard inside the bus, in response to "allegations of anti-Semitic abuse". No one else has been able to hear these supposed anti-Muslim slurs, while the antisemitism is clear and blatant. The Jewish Chronicle has refused to let this go. Here's their latest report today:
THE JC can reveal damning new evidence which appears to undermine the BBC’s claim that an anti-Muslim slur was uttered by a victim of the antisemitic Chanukah bus attack on Oxford Street.
The Charedi students whose panicked voices can be heard in a video clip of the attack have categorically rejected the BBC’s allegation that they used any racist phrase whatsoever.
And a dossier of exhaustive analysis by forensic audio experts and a distinguished, independent linguist, commissioned by the Board of Deputies, appears to confirm their testimony.
The revelations heap further pressure on the BBC to justify its claims to the Jewish youngsters. So far it has refused to apologise, causing outrage.
Rabbi Schneur Glitzenshtein, who organised the bus trip, told the JC that he had personally spoken to those whose voices are heard in the video. “All they were doing was trying to protect each other,” he said. “That insult did not happen.”
Separately, the Board of Deputies commissioned digital experts DigFind and D3 Forensics, who used audio technology to slow down and clean up the recording so that each syllable of the phrase in dispute could be heard.
Professor Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages as the University of Adelaide inSouth Australia, one of the most senior experts in his field, then studied the tape.
The Professor, who is fluent in 13 languages, including Hebrew, and is a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, established that the “slur” was actually a Hebrew phrase, “Tikrah lemishu,ze dachuf” meaning: “Call someone, it is urgent.”
Professor Zuckermann suggested that BBC editors may have fallen victim to a phenomenon known as the “Apollonian tendency” — the wish to make order of unfamiliar information by applying ideas that are already in the brain of the person listening. This is a concept explored by Professor Zuckermann in his book Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan 2003).
Or, as I said at the time, "of course, to the specially attuned ears of a BBC journalist, any Hebrew is going to sound like a slur against Muslims".
Board President Marie van der Zyl told the JC: “A community charity shouldn’t have to use its precious funds to commission experts to disprove the BBC’s flawed journalism. At the very least, the BBC should apologise and give us our money back.”
Writing in the JC this week, Ms van der Zyl described the BBC’s reporting of the incident as a “colossal error”.
She writes: “It has added insult to injury in accusing victims of antisemitism of being guilty of bigotry themselves. Others will have to judge whether the corporation has a legal case to answer here.
“But what takes this from an egregious failure to something far more sinister is the BBC’s behaviour when confronted with its mistake. Instead of admitting it was wrong, it has doubled and tripled down. This raises serious questions about deep-seated biases within the BBC towards Israelis, and indeed towards Jews in general.”
The BBC continues to stand by its allegations against the Jewish youngsters. But the findings will increase pressure on the corporation, which this month faced a mass protest outside Broadcasting House over its coverage of the attack.
BBC Director-General Tim Davie is due to meet the Board of Deputies next month to discuss its coverage of the 29 November attack, the JC has learnt.
Professor Zuckermann, the author of the report commissioned by the Board, has 25 years’ experience in forensic linguistics, has taught at Cambridge University and has 10 postdoctoral fellows.
He was asked to consider both phrases — “Dirty Muslims” and “Tikrah lemishu, ze dachuf” — to see if one could be definitively ruled out. He studied both the uncompressed raw footage and the version that had been cleaned up by forensic experts, to ensure the audio had not been tampered with. At the disputed point in the recording, at three seconds in, Professor Zuckermann says that only the modern Hebrew can be heard.
He writes: “Given the above native pronunciation of ‘mishu’ and ‘dakhuf’ and given the cohesiveness of the complex sentence in Israeli (“Call someone, it’s urgent”), it is clear to me what is heard around the three second mark is a native Israeli sentence rather than an English expression.
“I hypothesise that the BBC … misheard ‘mishu’ as ‘Muslim’ and perhaps even the preceding ‘tikrah’ as ‘dirty’.”
One of the reasons why the BBC came third last week in the Wiesenthal Center's antisemitism list, after Iran and Hamas.
What possible reason could BBC have to report what was said on the bus except trying to mitigate, with the purpose to somehow excuse, the behaviour of the hooligans in the street? However, the attempt is futile since if only experts can make out what was said on the bus it is highly improbable that persons on the outside, given the prevailing noise and language incompatibility, could do so. Thus, it is not plausible that the hooligans were provoked, their behaviour cannot be mitigated and, unfortunately, the BBC is again in the hot water.
Posted by: Mar | January 01, 2022 at 03:00 PM