Yanny or Laurel?

There are, perhaps, shades of that 'blue/back or gold/white dress?' phenomenon from a few years back, or - even more relevantly - the 'Yanny or Laurel?' phenomenon that followed where people saw and heard different things and couldn't unsee or unhear them without a huge effort, even after the science behind each phenomenon was explained. 

The Board of Deputies of British Jews has, with the help of Gnasher Jew, analysed that ''racial slur about Muslims'' that the BBC claims came from Jewish people inside the Oxford Street bus and proved it was no such thing.

  

The @bbc needs to correct its report and apologise to the victims. @bbclondonnews @bbcnews pic.twitter.com/7Z0GIZZ84w

— Board of Deputies of British Jews (@BoardofDeputies) December 4, 2021

 

The BBC thinks the phrase ''dirty Muslims'' was used, and I on listening and listening to the video and audio versions of the incident began to hear that too - and I was, frankly, astonished that some people couldn't hear it at all, only a male voice speaking Hebrew.

Mea culpa.  

So GnasherJew has found, as so many people had said already, that the male voice alleged by the BBC to have making that ''racial slur about Muslims'' really was actually talking in Hebrew and saying ''Call someone, it's urgent'' - ''tathakshar lmishu, ze dahof''. 

So I've re-listened and re-listened and quickly began to clearly hear the quieter ''ze dahof'' bit. So I could now hear ''dirty Muslims, ze dafof'' - which, of course, didn't make sense. 

So I used the pause button to stop it and play it again in fractions of a second and, yes, gradually began hearing various syllables one at a time from ''tathakshar lmishu''. 

Now I've no doubt whatsoever that the male voice on the bus was indeed saying ''Call someone, it's urgent'' [''tathakshar lmishu, ze dahof''] and not ''dirty Muslims'', and that the BBC's allegation is false...

...but it took a lot of use of the pause and re-wind functions to prove it to myself. It's very hard to unhear something sometimes. Then again I never saw that blue/black dress as anything other than gold/white, or heard Laurel as anything other than Yanny, even after seeing/hearing them explained.

There's now a chorus of people calling on the BBC to correct this too, and apologise.