Prof Liz B 🇬🇧🇮🇱🇺🇦🇵🇸

Sarah Deech ☕️ Verified account @londonette · Nov 1

How did I miss this jaw-dropping anecdote from Lucie Kon @imluciekon last week.

Apparently a BBC diversity officer told a Jewish staff member, who’d been trying to set up a Jewish BBC support group a few years ago, that it wasn’t needed “because Jews run the media”.

A ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ officer.
This is just dystopian now.

(@DailyTPodcast int here: youtu.be/sqB2GDunRZU?is…)

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Oleksandra Matviichuk Verified account @avalaina · Oct 31

The evacuation of people from Oleshky has finished. Buses with people are finally in Ukraine. And I cannot stop thinking that just five years ago, these people lived peaceful lives, raised their children, tended their gardens, and were happy. Then Russian soldiers came to their land. 

People were hunted with drones, isolated and starved, and their homes were flooded when the Russians blew up the Kakhovka dam. Throughout all these years, they watched their neighbors and relatives die before their eyes. It reached the point where people could no longer bury their dead, and dogs tore apart their bodies. 

After months of relentless horror, Russia finally allowed them to be evacuated. It took the intervention of the Pope, the First Lady of the United States, persistent appeals from the UN, a hunger strike by the Vice-President of the European Parliament, and a months-long campaign by Ukrainian volunteers. And now these exhausted people are leaving their homes, the graves of their loved ones, and their entire lives behind, traveling by bus into the unknown. 

These people leave the land of their ancestors. And before long, Russia will settle the occupied territories with Russians, who will gladly move into other people’s homes from which their owners were driven out. This is a policy of artificially changing the demographic composition of the population, which Russia has pursued throughout all the years of the war, starting with the occupation of Crimea.

Russian propaganda portrays this evacuation as a display of the Russians’ lofty humanism. But it is nothing but cynicism. 

The case of Oleshky shows exactly what Russian occupation is. And it also demonstrates that Russia can commit the most horrific crimes in the occupied territories right before the eyes of the entire world.

Video Marian Kushnir

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Alex Armstrong Verified account @Alexarmstrong · Oct 31

Yet another BBC story.

“Vetting failure” you only have to look at her X account for 2 minutes to see her views.

That institution needs completely gutting, let’s face it, the left won’t be paying for it.

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Trisha Posner Verified account @trishaposner · Oct 26

A day after it was revealed that the BBC paid £400,000 to Oscar-winning producer Lucie Kon for doing nothing after colleagues victimized her in the wake of October 7, it gave Green activist Ashok Kumar free rein on Politics Live to castigate a Jewish woman that her support for Jewish self-determination is antisemitic—then cut her off when she tried to respond. He gloated that the panel “looked like they were about to cry” and declared Zionism belongs in the “ugly dustbin of history” along with apartheid and Jim Crow.

This is the same odious man who, on October 7, posted that the Nova festival massacre had “consequences” for “partying on stolen land next to a concentration camp.”

The BBC not only platformed this radical activist to attack a Jewish guest but made no effort to do real journalism and correct his outrageous statements. The Beeb cannot hide its anti-Jewish/anti-Israel bias. A litigation settlement does not make a dent in their prejudicial and false reporting.

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Jonathan Sacerdoti Verified account @jonsac · Oct 19

A man jailed for immigration deception after a judge condemned his “deliberate, extended manipulation” of the system is now the BBC’s principal data scientist for Responsible AI, helping shape how the corporation uses AI and how news is represented through it.

Hicham Yezza (picture here with Moazzam Begg, the former Guantánamo Bay detainee) was sentenced to nine months in prison in 2009 after falsely claiming he had permission to remain in Britain. He had overstayed his visa by more than five years. He later successfully appealed against deportation and is now a British citizen.

Before joining the BBC, Yezza also described Hamas rocket attacks as “resistance”, accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and called it an apartheid regime built on stolen land.

He founded the pro-Palestinian Ceasefire magazine and later joined BBC Monitoring in 2021, where The Telegraph says he produced reports concerning Gaza.

His current BBC role involves guiding responsible AI policy and developing benchmarks for how AI assistants represent public-service news.

There is an extraordinary contrast here.

When the Asserson Report used AI alongside data scientists and other researchers to analyse millions of words of BBC Israel-Hamas coverage, the corporation responded: “We have serious questions about the methodology of this report, particularly its heavy reliance on AI to analyse impartiality.”

Yet the BBC now entrusts a senior role in determining how AI should approach and represent news to someone who had publicly expressed such strongly anti-Israel views before joining it.

The BBC says Yezza’s controversial statements and immigration case pre-date his employment, that he has not breached its social-media rules while working there, and that he stopped working for Ceasefire when he joined. So that's all OK then!

An extraordinary background — and an extraordinary contrast in the BBC’s attitude towards AI scrutiny of news.

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