See, this is why my entire point was just that native speakers can tell other native speakers, no particular linguistic expertise required, and not whether the particular analysis in this case is credible. There are so many people with so much invested in believing one side or the other, and willing to rationalize their pre-judged views that I’m not willing to spend any time sorting it out. Particularly because this is all about a brief audio track without any verified provenance.
Edit: to be clear, by “people invested in believing one side or the other” I mean people in region reacting to the events in their backyard, not the people commenting in this thread.
This. Especially because it doesn’t matter. It appears to be an errant missile from somewhere within Gaza, based on evidence that no one seriously contests. It doesn’t actually matter much who within Gaza, unless they bombed the hospital on purpose, which seems extremely unlikely.
This seems a little harsh. I am a UK citizen but have only visited the UK twice, once when I was eleven. The second trip I did go to Scotland, but Edinburgh.
I guessed either working class Edinburgh (Spud in the movie Trainspotting) and then realised it was Glaswegian.
If you are familiar with UK accents, from watching films or series it is not hard to identify which accents come from which area.
I don’t place much faith in a recording. I’m not remotely qualified to say if it sounds authentic and this proves nothing even if true. However, given its wide release and presumably multitude of listeners, one presumes obvious problems would have been pointed out.
The hospital fiasco was likely an unfortunate accident, and no one is going to admit culpability. The Israelis have a better track record for accountability than a terrorist group, but not so much that one places much faith in any account based only on words.
Though not definitive, the preponderance of evidence - intact buildings, shallow crater, damage largely from fire, etc. makes a missile attack much less likely. I have more trust of the US sources and The Economist, and suspect they are correct. My degree of confidence would be 80-90%.
I believe terrorists, without evidence, claimed American weaponry was behind this disaster. Clearly far too many people died, whatever the number. Some newspapers did seem to jump the gun on assigning blame, especially on websites.
Regardless of this, people will believe what they wish and this issue has already disrupted humanitarian talks and aid. It is not true or fair to insist all Gazans support terrorism when a majority do not. Thus it is not lawful nor moral to deprive people of food, water, medicine and medical care. Targeting a hospital is problematic irregardless of whether if it is involved in shenanigans.
Some accounts of this neglect to mention how this started. Of course Israel must defend itself, and should do so lawfully (according to accepted norms) and pragmatically. But the goal should be long-term stability, and this is not truly feasible if it does include better options for Palestinians.
I am also unqualified to say if it matters which specific terrorist contingent likely did this. This is a political question, of an act with significant diplomatic and humanitarian consequences. It might.
One also presumes better evidence was shown to politicians and diplomats than the public.
So while it’s not impossible, my problem with this (other than vagueness of the source discussed above) is if this was true it wouldn’t take any rare expert knowledge of technology or linguistics to discover it, it would just require someone who is fluent in Palestinian Arabic.
I have real trouble believing the only people fluent in Palestinian Arabic to hear this recording and point out it’s an obvious fake (among the millions of Palestinian Arabic speakers, including ones at media companies and online) are some unnamed experts contacted by a British TV news show.
Read the comments on Twitter under the video of the audio recording. Of the 11,585 comments to the video, a significant number are saying it sounds fake. Of course, one doesn’t necessarily know the credentials of the commenters.
I believe only someone fluent in Palestinian Arabic can offer any serious analysis into the language issues of the recording.
That’s literally what I have been saying the entire time. That’s the problem with just believing analysis from unnamed “Arabic Journalists.” I’m sure they speak Arabic. They may be good journalists. Without knowing their background we can’t know how deep is their knowledge of the linguistics involved. Apparently it’s much more subtle than “They have Saudi accents not Gaza.”
Again, we’re getting back to the issue of whether investigative reporters at the top of their profession, who have decades of experience in doing exactly this sort of work, have the ability to ask the right questions to the right people.
My belief is they do, unless proven otherwise.
ETA: I mean, I don’t think anyone in this thread is an investigative rporter, but many have worked out that the right people would need to be questioned to get the required answers. This would be elementary bread-and-butter stuff to an experienced investigative reporter.
Yeah anonymous commenters after the Channel 4 tweet do not add to the veracity really.
I have real trouble believing that if this was obviously fake there wouldn’t have been countless people pointing that out seconds after it was posted. Especially given how many threads I saw analyzing every last pixel of the other evidence posted at the same time
I’m not talking about the tweet from the Channel 4 investigative journalist, I’m talking about the tweet that was released by the state of Israel that included the audio recording.
It was posted earlier in the thread. Here’s a link to the post:
What questions? In the end it’s still an opinion offered by someone unknown with unknown qualifications besides knowing how to speak Arabic. If that reporter said he spoke to a linguist who didn’t want to be identified it would hold more weight than he spoke to some guys he knows who speak Arabic. I believe he is reporting what was said to him accurately. I have no reason not to. The people he talked to may believe it. That’s not the same as it being correct.
I’m not sure what point you’re attempting to convey in your post.
I was replying to the comment from griffin1977 that questioned why only a supposed handful of people had questioned the veracity of the audio recording. This is clearly not the case, as evidenced by the Twitter comments. Thousands of other people did too.
I’m not sure what point you’re attempting to convey in your post.
Anonymous people on X (formerly known as twitter) which is packed with bots. I can point to twitter posts with thousands of people saying the earth is flat. That does not provide evidence that the earth is flat. It does not even provide evidence that human beings posted those twitter posts.
This argument has gone beyond weak, and has progressed into just arguing for argument’s sake. It’s over. There is no “fake accent story” Give it up.