DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — When Ellie, a British-Iranian living in the United Kingdom, tried to call her mother in Tehran, a robotic female voice answered instead.
“Alo? Alo?” the voice said, then asked in English: “Who is calling?” A few seconds passed.
“I can’t heard you,” the voice continued, its English imperfect. “Who you want to speak with? I’m Alyssia. Do you remember me? I think I don’t know who are you.”
Ellie, 44, is one of nine Iranians living abroad — including in the U.K and U.S. — who said they have gotten strange, robotic voices when they attempted to call their loved ones in Iran since Israel launched airstrikes on the country a week ago.
They told their stories to The Associated Press on the condition they remain anonymous or that only their first names or initials be used out of fear of endangering their families.
Five experts with whom the AP shared recordings said it could be low-tech artificial intelligence, a chatbot or a pre-recorded message to which calls from abroad were diverted.
It remains unclear who is behind the operation, though four of the experts believed it was likely to be the Iranian government while the fifth saw Israel as more likely.
Only the second most terrifying story I’ve read today
Kindly refrain from putting such stupid words in my mouth, and keep them in your own, where it seems they rightly belong, thank you.
You asked about Israel and Hamas, then instantly conflated this particular conflict with a broader conflict to come between Israel and Iran, which are not the same thing. That’s beyond moving the goal posts, we’re no longer even discussing the same events. You’re also conflating Israel with Jews as a whole here. Calling for the state of Israel to no longer exist and calling for all Jewish residents within its borders to be either killed or displaced are two rather distinct things.
I know of no definition in which a single attack in isolation, or merely killing civilians during a war, is considered to constitute genocide. Even if this were the case, the civilian casualties in the many conflicts between Israel, Hamas, and more or less all of Israel’s neighbors in the region have been decidedly lopsided. Israel suffers far fewer civilian deaths than those they inflict on others, so even if we were to entertain the notion that Hamas’ resistance to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories constitutes a genocide and we accept that the Iranian regime is in some major capacity responsible for such actions because they provide funding and support to Hamas (which, lol, even Israeli media admits Israel did, too), just going by the casualties, we’d have to conclude that Israel is either a decidedly more genocidal regime, better at genocide, or both.
Israel continues to interfere in the affairs of other sovereign nations, support settlers stealing other peoples’ land and is actively engaging in a brutal genocide. If the Israeli state were to be dismantled and Israel ceased to exist as a nation, I could only say that it’s past time for it to happen. And before you put more hysterical words in my mouth, note well: Israel no longer existing as a sovereign theocratic ethnostate and the Jews who currently live in the region being in any way harmed are two entirely separate things. Calling for a particular state to no longer exist is not a call for genocide, in and of itself.
Tl;dr: Get lost with your hasbara attempts, they’re woefully transparent.
Indeed it is. From the IRGC: “Either you must choose ‘gradual death’ in hellish life in shelters or save your lives from the 24-hour missile rain and flee as soon as possible from the lands usurped by your ancestors, so that you may survive.” https://iranwire.com/en/news/142321-irgc-says-it-fired-2000-kilometer-range-missiles-at-israel/
So they literally are “calling for all Jewish residents within its borders to be either killed or displaced” which is distinct from calling for “the state of Israel to no longer exist”. So we’re clear about Iran’s intent now, this isn’t putting words into your or the IRGC’s mouths. This is coming directly from the mouths of the IRGC.
Does this mean the IRGC is committing genocide?