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
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I’m genuinely curious to understand your point of view.
For what it’s worth, my personal answer to those questions is the same for both questions, I think - “mostly”.
I think the US is ultimately the one to blame for the vast majority of conflict around the world, as they’ve been destabilising fledgling democracies, installing puppet governments, supplying tons of weapons, assassinating leaders, generally manipulating and bullying many countries for many decades. In general I think the US is the world’s biggest bully, and has a ton of rich people who profit from war, and the middle east has been one of their many warmongering playgrounds for a long time, sadly.
However, I do also think both Iran and Israel are really shitty, for many reasons - from what I’ve seen as an outsider who has never been to either place, both countries seem to have a long standing, deep rooted racially motivated hatred towards one another, and both are very willing and eager to use force and start wars. Not to mention the variety of human rights abuses in both countries.
So basically I think “everyone sucks here”, but I do think the US is ultimately responsible for most of the conflict. They’ve been meddling in Iran for decades, and Israel has been essentially an extension of the US’s usual bullying for decades, unfortunately accelerated by Netanyahu’s excitement to escalate and expand their territory through genocide and settlement, supported by US and various other western countries’ military supplies…
I’ve seen a few of your messages recently and it seems like you’ve got a lot of anger, but I’m confused about who it’s directed at and why 😅
Would you be willing to explain your point of view on the conflict, or link me to a post where you’ve already explained it?
I’m not angry… are you sure you’re not angry?
I have concerns that people on this site where everyone is winding each other up with stochastic terrorism talk universally agreeing that certain countries are evil (and some posts indicate some believe everyone in these countries are evil too). There’s a lot of dehumanizing Israelis, and I’ve met few Israelis in my travels, perfectly normal people to talk to and have a beer with or whatever. Israelis aren’t evil colonizers, they’re people born in an area where a lot of people around them hate them for exiting in that area.
Well it takes two to tango doesn’t it? Well there’s a lot to untangle about this, it’s the Middle East shit’s always complicated.
For the Iran conflict… kinda. But Iran has responsibility too. In his first term, Trump cancelled the agreement that Obama made with Iran. Countries don’t declare war but they give signals like cancelling treaties and start making ultimatums. Trump did all that in his first term. But the thing with Trump is, he’s an idiot. So Trump essentially declared war on Iran and then… didn’t do the war. And then he assassinated an Iranian General which is an act of war. And then didn’t have a war.
There’s levels of stupid to unpack here. First it would be stupid for the US to go to war with Iran as long as they were following the treaty, which all reports indicate they were. But if you make all the moves to start a war, you’re kinda committed and it’s stupid to not have a war after you committed to it. So Trump created a big mess there.
So it’s kinda strange to assign blame to the US because it was all Trump’s incompetence. But I guess Trump was and is the President, so I guess the US (Trump) is responsible for making a mess of a diplomatic agreement that the US (Obama) made with Iran. That sounds so stupid without indicating the Presidents, but here we are. I can’t stress enough how much of an idiot Trump has been. The US doesn’t have a cohesive foreign policy anymore.
But we can’t ignore Iran’s responsibility in this. They have been supporting a lot of terrorist organizations, including Hamas which massacred Israeli villages, took hostages to Gaza forcing Israel into a ground war in a densely populated urban environment. Hamas tactics are designed to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties in attempt to foment hatred toward Israel. Hamas won the propaganda war, though they’ll probably be destroyed along with a significant part of Gaza. But but they successfully spread of Israel so that’s a win?
So Hamas is responsible for the Israel-Hamas war. Hamas is Iran’s proxy, so Iran is complicit in that. And that brings us back to the Israel-Iran conflict.
So Iran is the ultimate source of all of this suffering and destruction. Throughout the region. So does that justify a war on Iran? Maybe maybe not.
But there’s more… Iran has many times officially stated they want to wipe Israel of the map. So they’ve very publicly declared they want to be an existential threat. And there’s been indication from the UN Atomic monitoring agency that Iran has been hiding things in their nuclear program, not answering questions about things and enriching more uranium than the level they agreed to limit themselves to. They also announced they were going to start testing a missile capable of carrying a 2 ton warhead to Israel.
So whether or not the Hamas war justifies Israel going to war with Iran, all of the nuclear stuff does. This is life or death for Israel, if a country that’s said they want to wipe you off the map gets the capability to do so? They can’t allow that to happen.
So Iran is also responsible for this war. Iran’s proxies attacked Israel, the threats of wiping Israel off the map, the nuclear stuff, all of that means there will be a war.
So I guess in summary:
Trump could have NOT cancelled the Treaty. Trump could have NOT assassinated the general. Iran could have NOT supported terrorist groups. Iran could have NOT threatened to wipe Israel off the map. Iran could have NOT done all the the nuclear stuff.
But they did do those things. So there’s sheer incompetence from Trump and a lot of incompetence and horrible actions by Iran and it’s proxies that all added up to a war.
But most people on these threads just reduce all of this complexity down to Israel=bad, US=bad, Iran=innocent victim of the bad guys. It’s really a mix of incompetence and hatred of Israel that’s caused so much destruction. Sure Israel has done some bad things with the settlements, but the level of hatred feels like it stems from a lifetime of indoctrination under fascist rule. Hatred of Israel hasn’t resulted in anything good for Palestinians and it hasn’t done any good for Iranians. I know it’s a problem for some Muslim sects for Jews to be living where they’re living, but at certain point… just release the hostages and accept that Israel has a right to exist. Israel has been convinced to withdraw settlements, but it’s hard to convince them to concede any ground when everyone around them are trying kill them.
I think a Palestinian non-violent resistance movement would be successful in establishing a Palestinian state. Does it really look like a violent movement is being successful?
But a lot of people are acting like elementary school shitheads constantly egging on their classmates to fight. Violence obviously isn’t working for Palestinians, how many of them have to die before everyone realizes that? It feels like people think Palestinians exist only to be cannon fodder just for their sick games.
Thanks for taking the time to reply! I’m definitely not angry, I personally think all of these countries suck and it’s none of my business really so there’s no emotion in it for me, I’m just curious to understand where people are coming from when they post inflammatory / heated messages.
For what it’s worth, I definitely don’t think Iran is any better than Israel overall - they’ve both done pretty awful things over the years. I just think Iran is slightly more of a victim of the US (starting with the 1953 coup) whereas Israel has always had unconditional support from the US. When you’re talking about a war-hungry country with the worlds largest military, that’s a big deal.
I’ve just asked this prompt to an unbiased LLM and read through the responses, would love to hear your take on the below and if there’s anything you disagree with / think is false in it’s responses:
“throughout the last few decades, in all of the conflict in the middle east, has Iran been more of a bully or a victim? and, how much of the conflict in the middle east, including anything with Iran or Israel, has been ultimately caused by the US (directly or indirectly)? please try to remain unbiased in your response, I’m interested in plain facts as much as possible (even though I know I’m asking a subjective question)”
LLM response here; I know it’s a lot of text but it’s super informative, IMO worth a read and I’d love to hear your response if you do read it! https://gist.github.com/beveradb/d35beffc4f26299e24c34fb8889fbb8e