According to a report at the Guardian, the new site will “steer clear of controversial subjects”, which is the diametric opposite of Memri’s approach of seeking out what can be misinterpreted, and duly misinterpreting.

See also MideastWire, and Brian Whitaker’s review of it here.

MEMRI Transcript #1050:
Arab-American Psychiatrist Wafa Sultan: There is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century

The ‘Aqoul blog criticised the translation and the way the debate was edited. Referring to the full Al Jazeera Arabic transcript, “Meph” published a full translation, which we reproduce here:
Transcript Translation: al-Jazeera – The Opposite Direction (26/02/2006)

See their extensive discussions before: Fatwas and Wafa Sultan
With: Wafa Sultan: Bigger, Longer, Uncut – The Full Sultan Jazeera Transcript
And after: On MEMRI & Translations[...]

See also their subsequent posts about MEMRI:
MEMRI Mendacity, brief thoughts
Debating the merits of MEMRI[...]

Related: WAFA SULTAN: Reformist or opportunist?

Maybe Bin Ladin was indeed talking about American states, but maybe not. If he had meant American states, he could easily have said so. Short of asking him, there is no way of knowing his real intention. Other translations rightly preserved the ambiguity of the original Arabic and MEMRI was wrong to jump to conclusions. It was also a clever bit of election propaganda on MEMRI’s part, implying that Bin Ladin wanted Americans to vote for Kerry. The idea was taken up by Fox News on November 1, when John Gibson, anchorman for its evening news program, The Big Story, told viewers, “Over the weekend we finally got a good translation (i.e. from MEMRI) of Usama bin Ladin’s tape, which suddenly appeared on the air on Friday. Back on Friday, it sounded like gibberish. Now, it’s a bit more clear. Usama was trying to make a deal with Americans, along these lines: If you vote against Bush, we will not attack you. So, if Ohio votes for Kerry, Usama will not attack. If Florida votes for Bush, Usama will attack.”

Viewers would have little trouble interpreting the message there: a vote for Kerry was a vote for Bin Ladin, and all right-thinking Americans should vote for Bush.

Arabsats Get the MEMRI Treatment
By Brian Whitaker

“Dear Dr Bautista,” the email began. “You may be interested in the Middle Eastern media … I would therefore like to take this opportunity to introduce the Middle East Media Research Institute … MEMRI has just launched a TV project, which monitors approximately 18-20 Arab TV stations, translates them in real time and sends them immediately to Western news channels,” it continued. “MEMRI does not advocate causes or take sides. It is an independent, non-profit organization … Since the institute was founded in 1998, our translations and analyses have reached tens of thousands of people around the world and have become a trusted source of information for politicians, irrespective of party, as well as for researchers, diplomats and journalists. MEMRI sources have been used in parliamentary debates and the international press: Al Jazeera TV consults us frequently, while The New York Times describes MEMRI as “invaluable.”

It sounds impressive, and the recipient of this message — Dr Julius Bautista, in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University — duly forwarded copies of it to his colleagues.

Deceptive emails to academics, editors and politiciansare one way that MEMRI has established itself as an “independent” source of information about the Middle East, especially among those with little or no first-hand knowledge of the Arab media.

MEMRI may not directly “advocate causes,” but it is far from impartial. Its co-founder and current director is Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence and a long-standing opponent of the Oslo accords.

In 2002 he gave testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Relations in the US, in his capacity as head of MEMRI but without mentioning his Israeli intelligence connection. Among other things, he informed the committee that the Arab media “overwhelmingly approved” of the September 11 attacks on the US, and praised Usama bin Ladin. He continued: “Many articles in the Arab media have said that the attacks were the work of the United States government itself and/or a Jewish conspiracy. Recent Gallup polls show a large majority of the Arab world continue to believe it.” The poll findings were Mr. Carmon’s own invention, as the Gallup Company later confirmed.

Mr. Carmon’s partner in setting up MEMRI was Meyrav Wurmser, one of the authors of the now-famous “Clean Break” document which proposed reshaping Israel’s “strategic environment” in the Middle East, starting with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The document, originally produced as guidance for the incoming Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996, later played a key role in shaping the Bush administration’s Middle East policy. Ms. Wurmser is a close associate of Richard Perle, the chief architect of the war in Iraq (and a co-author of “Clean Break”). She is also an ardent Zionist who has written that leftwing Israeli intellectuals pose “more than a passing threat” to the state of Israel.

This political background, besides undermining MEMRI’s claims of impartiality, helps to explain its agenda when selecting items for translation. “Quotes are selected to portray Arabs as preaching hatred against Jews and Westerners, praising violence and refusing any peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue,” William Rugh, a former US ambassador, told a media conference held in the UAE in 2002.

“This service does not present a balanced or complete picture of the Arab print media, because its owners are pro-Israeli and anti-Arab,” he said. “One might argue that it is unfair for MEMRI to portray the Arab print media in such a negative light, but we cannot say that MEMRI has actually made up or fabricated the passages that it quotes.”

For those unfamiliar with the Arab media (which in the West means almost everybody), the cumulative picture obtained by relying on MEMRI is a false one. It gives the impression that Arab readers and viewers are fed a daily torrent of extremism, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, and very little else.

In its translations from the print media, MEMRI makes scant efforts to disabuse people of this. It rarely gives a proper indication of how significant (or not) the publications that it quotes really are, or how representative the opinions expressed may be. To do so might damage its broader message.

In theory, MEMRI’s move into TV monitoring is a good idea, since television is far more important in the Arab world than newspapers. Happily for MEMRI, the endless live discussion programs also provide a ready supply of stupid remarks of the kind that it loves to circulate to a Western audience.

Unlike MEMRI’s press extracts, the TV clips have a visual impact. Besides being able to understand the words, Westerners can now see strangely-dressed men with beards ranting and gesticulating — and be suitably terrified.

There is clearly a public demand for this sort of material in the West, in the same way that people enjoy watching horror films. MEMRI’s lists of the most-viewed clips suggest that the more outrageous the remarks the more popular they are likely to be with visitors to its website.

One problem with the video clips is that MEMRI plucks them out of their original context and recycles them without adequate explanation. Clip 596 is about a computer game produced by Hizbullah. There are snatches of conversation in which a reporter from Al Arabiya TV discusses the game with two boys.

“You are supposed to kill Israeli soldiers,” one of the boys says. “We learn from this that anyone who occupies my land — I should kill him and get my land back. This is how the confrontation should be.”

The reporter asks “What does one get for winning?”

“He reaches the martyrs’ paradise, and lives among the young men he had been with during the days of Jihad, who liberated the land with their blood.”

Was Al Arabiya trying to promote the game? Is it widely available? Where were the children from, and what was their background? What sort of program was the clip taken from? MEMRI’s researchers make no attempt to tell us.

In the field of TV monitoring, MEMRI has some long-established competitors such as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and BBC Monitoring, which are linked to the American and British governments. Both provide translations on a paid-for subscription basis, while MEMRI’s services come free of charge — thanks to the generosity of its anonymous backers.

Although the FBIS and BBC services are not comprehensive, they do try to identify broadcasts that are politically significant and relevant to current events. MEMRI’s approach, however, produces some bizarrely unbalanced results. Authentic though the individual clips may be, together they present a grotesquely distorted picture.

A search for “tsunami” on MEMRI’s website, for instance, identifies 14 video clips. Eight of these are from clerics or religious people claiming the disaster was God’s punishment for sex tourism, homosexuality, drunkenness, corruption, religious disbelief, etc. Other clips accuse Zionists of abducting children from the disaster area and say the US was guilty of “passive murder” for not notifying Asian countries of the approaching tidal wave in time. Among the three clips that deal specifically with Arab support for the tsunami victims — a notable feature of the international relief effort — one highlights odd items donated by Saudi citizens: gold, company shares, and a 1988 Chevrolet.

Similarly, a search for “Lebanon” reveals just six clips in the month or so following Rafiq al-Hariri’s assassination — with barely any reflection on the momentous changes that were taking place there. The clips include: “Wife-Beating Debated on Lebanese TV Channels,” “Palestinian Mufti Ikrima Sabri on Rafik Hariri’s Assassination and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” “Anti-Zionist Rabbis Join Hizbullah and Hamas At Beirut Pro-Palestinian Convention,” and “Walid Jumblatt: Shab’a Farms Belong to Syria — Not to Lebanon” (the latter headline is not exactly substantiated by the transcript that accompanies it, but we’ll let that pass). There are also two predictably rhetorical extracts from speeches by the Hizbullah leader, Hasan Nasrallah.

Given the relative lack of other translations from the Arab media, MEMRI’s impact has been considerable — especially in the US. According to ex-ambassador Rugh, in a 17-month period up to January 2003, it was cited in more than 350 American newspaper articles. The Washington Times quoted it once a month on average, and The Wall Street Journal more often. Thomas Friedman, The New York Times’ influential Middle East commentator, also makes frequent use of it. Al Jazeera’s Jihad Ballout, on the other hand, was surprised to hear that MEMRI claimed the channel as a client; Ballout says, “We monitor all kinds of publications and media. I doubt very much that we would use this as a source of information because we can go directly to the Arabic sources.”

One of MEMRI’s most effective interventions came just a few days before last year’s presidential election when Al Jazeera broadcast a new tape from Usama bin Ladin. In the recording, Bin Ladin argued that al-Qa’ida had refrained from attacking countries that had not shown themselves to be enemies of Islam — Sweden, for example. He concluded: “Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qa’ida. Your security is in your own hands, and any state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.”

A couple of days later, MEMRI announced that everyone — the US government, the BBC, Al Jazeera, etc — had “mistranslated” the tape; what Bin Ladin said, or meant to say, was: “Any US state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.” An article by MEMRI’s director, Yigal Carmon, said the tape contained “a specific threat” to each US state, “designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W Bush.” Carmon’s claim was based on the fact that in talking about “any state” Bin Ladin used the Arabic word wilaya. This is the normal term for an American state, though it has other meanings and has been used by Islamists to refer to nation states, such as the wilaya of Pakistan. The more usual Arabic term for states in general is dawla.

Maybe Bin Ladin was indeed talking about American states, but maybe not. If he had meant American states, he could easily have said so. Short of asking him, there is no way of knowing his real intention. Other translations rightly preserved the ambiguity of the original Arabic and MEMRI was wrong to jump to conclusions. It was also a clever bit of election propaganda on MEMRI’s part, implying that Bin Ladin wanted Americans to vote for Kerry. The idea was taken up by Fox News on November 1, when John Gibson, anchorman for its evening news program, The Big Story, told viewers, “Over the weekend we finally got a good translation (i.e. from MEMRI) of Usama bin Ladin’s tape, which suddenly appeared on the air on Friday. Back on Friday, it sounded like gibberish. Now, it’s a bit more clear. Usama was trying to make a deal with Americans, along these lines: If you vote against Bush, we will not attack you. So, if Ohio votes for Kerry, Usama will not attack. If Florida votes for Bush, Usama will attack.”

Viewers would have little trouble interpreting the message there: a vote for Kerry was a vote for Bin Ladin, and all right-thinking Americans should vote for Bush.

In his article, Prof. Cole alleges that MEMRI had chosen a misleading interpretation of the word “wilayah” in their re-translation of a speech by Osama bin Laden, which was originally broadcast on, and translated by, Al Jazeera. The speech was a few days before the election which saw George Bush re-elected, defeating John Kerry.

(Bin Laden:)“In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaeda. No. Your security is in your own hands. And every state [wilayah] that doesn’t play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.”

(Cole:) MEMRI is claiming that the word used for “state” in this sentence means state as in Rhode Island and New Jersey. But while they are right to draw attention to the oddness of the diction, their conclusion is impossible.

Prof. Marc Lynch (“Abu Aardvark”) wrote earlier on a similar vein: MEMRI’s disgusting partisanship. And see his detailed follow-ups on the issue: [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] – and he has a dedicated section for his discussions on MEMRI.

Prof. Cole went on in the article to raise questions about MEMRI’s funding and the political goals its work serves, as well as describing its approach as “cherry-picking”. In response, Yigal Carmon wrote to Prof. Cole disputing his claims and threatening him with legal action.

The letter, together with Prof. Cole’s points in response, are found here:
Intimidation by Israeli-Linked Organization Aimed at US Academic; MEMRI tries a SLAPP (23/11/04)

The following compilation of comments from the blogosphere is instructive, including follow-up links: Bloggers Respond (25/11/04)

See also:
More on MEMRI (25/11/04) – Contains testimony from another editor (Norbert Mattes, INAMO, Germany) who was threatened with legal action by Yigal Carmon
MEMRI Funding (24/11/04)
MEMRI and Bias (24/11/04)

So what happened next? MEMRI Watch asked Prof. Cole, and he said that he heard nothing more about it since then.

Distorted MEMRI (July 2004)

MEMRI reports reaction to Qaradawi’s non-existent fatwa (October 2004)
See also: Analysis by Marc Lynch (Abu Aardvark)

Pro-US Arabs Petition the UN to Establish an International Tribunal (November 2004)

Qaradawi and the tsunami (February 2005)
See also: Analysis by Marc Lynch (Abu Aardvark)

Qaradawi not anti-semitic shock (February 2005)

Observer attacks Qaradawi … with the assistance of MEMRI (August 2005)

Mad Mel and Robert Spencer denounce FO memo on Qaradawi (September 2005)

Another MEMRI attack on Qaradawi (March 2006)

Qaradawi calls for financial aid to Palestinians (May 2006)

Wahabbism and the World Cup (June 2006)
See also: Analysis by Rasheed Eldin (Eye on Gay Muslims) Part 1 and Part 2

All-party parliamentary inquiry distorts Qaradawi’s views (September 2006)

More lies about Qaradawi (September 2006)

“What they’re trying to do is to pretend that the effect of the conflict is the cause of the conflict.” (Ali Abunimah)

What follows is an edited transcript from a debate between Yigal Carmon of MEMRI and Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada. It took place on Q&A with Zain Verjee, CNN, 29 July 2002. The transcript was originally prepared by CNN and has words missing.

VERJEE: [...] Yigal Carmon, tell us a little bit first about your organization and why it’s important.

CARMON: Well, our organization monitors the Arabic and Farsi Iranian media, of text books, of schools in the Arab world, and what is being said in the mosques, and it tries to translate it into English and other European languages — in fact, all — in an attempt to mirror what is happening in the Arab world and in Iran as clearly as possible.

Because what we have seen is that what comes to the West from there is sometimes lacking in terms of what is being — you have from the Arab world almost a double message. What is being said in Arabic is not reported in English or other languages, and so there was a need to reflect that, to mirror it. And this is what we are doing for the last few years. We have a website where people can find it, wwww.memri.org.

VERJEE: Ali Abunimah, what about Electronic Intifada?

ABUNIMAH: electronicIntifada.net is a resource really for everyone who is interested in countering the spin about the conflict, attempts like those of MEMRI to try to spread this kind of racist nonsense, that Arabs and Iranians can’t be trusted; they say one thing in Arabic and another thing in English. We really get to the truth of some of those kinds of things at electronicIntifada.net, as well as providing analysis of the media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

VERJEE: They just translate articles, though. They don’t offer any commentary, Ali.

ABUNIMAH: Well, they translate very selectively. If I wanted to go to the Israeli press and find racist anti-Arab, anti-Muslim expressions, it’s very, very easy. In fact, you find them every day, and what they’re doing with this so-called think tank, MEMRI.

(CARMON DENIES THIS – CROSSTALK)

VERJEE: Yigal, I’ll give you a chance to respond in a moment. Make your point, Ali.

ABUNIMAH: My point is that what they’re trying to do is to pretend that the effect of the conflict is the cause of the conflict. The cause of the conflict is the fact that 4 million plus Palestinians do not have basic freedom and human rights, and no amount of spin, no attempt to pretend that it’s just media spin will take that away.

VERJEE: Yigal Carmon, I’ll give you a chance to respond to that.

CARMON: Yes. Well, first of all, whoever goes into our Web site sees the amount, the huge amount of positive, so to speak liberal voices that we translate from the Arab world, and I don’t know what Mr. Abunimah is talking about. However, let me give you an example so that we understand what we are talking about.

When the editor-in-chief of the main paper in Egypt, “Al Ahram,” writes that the United States is dropping genetically treated food into minefields in Afghanistan, when the United States was dropping food. Now, this is of course not said in any broadcast that comes out from Egypt in English. This is just an example. I think that Mr. Abunimah would do a better job in trying to show what happens in Israel and do the same thing with regard to Israel.

(CROSSTALK)

VERJEE: Do you do that?

ABUNIMAH: I’d be happy to. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

CARMON: Why don’t you do it? Why don’t you do it?

ABUNIMAH: I mean, here it is. You know, this kind of incitement is going on in the Israeli media all the time. Here’s a little Israeli girl with a sign saying “Expel The Arab Enemy!”.

VERJEE: Yes, OK, but there is also plenty of that going on in the Arab world as well. I mean…

(ONGOING CROSSTALK OVER FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH)

CARMON: …The leaders of the society, and we are talking about the leaders. We are talking about the public opinion makers. About official education system of what is being taught by the government of mosques. The main mosque in every Arab country. It’s not some girl that says something somewhere.

VERJEE: Ali.

ABUNIMAH: I mean, this is just exactly the kind of attempt I’m talking about to try to make people believe that the fact that now 1/5 of Palestinian children are seriously malnourished, according to the United States government, because of the Israeli siege, that that’s all an effect of sermons in the mosque?

I mean, you can find this everywhere. You have the former chief rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, who said Arabs should be annihilated from the face of the earth and God regrets making them. You have former P.M. Edhud Barak, who said Arabs are congenital liars. You have the president of Israel, Moshe Katsav, who says that Arabs and Palestinians are from another planet. You even have the so-called liberal speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, who said, on American television, that Arabs are, quote, “not the kind of people you would want your daughter to marry.”

And in the Israeli cabinet today, you have leaders, ministers, heads of parties, who openly advocate ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Of course you can find this on all sides. This is the effect of the conflict, and not the cause of it. No amount of effort…

VERJEE: Yigal Carmon. Yigal Carmon. Can you take up his point?

CARMON: Of course. Of course. What you can find in the Israeli media is different than what I am talking about. You wouldn’t find things like what I quoted from the editor-in-chief of “Al Ahram” or from people like…

ABUNIMAH: What about calls for ethnic cleansing? Isn’t that worse? I have not seen on your Web site any condemnations of the frequent calls for ethnic cleansing from Israeli party leaders in the Hebrew press. What they’re saying in Hebrew and we’re translating from [---], and yet [---] is not the same as what they’re saying in English. Last week, your government…

(CROSSTALK)

VERJEE: All right. All right. Look. Look. We only have a minute left, and I’d like to pose this question to the both of you. Let me pose this last question to the both of you, if I may, briefly. Is hate propaganda the cause or the result of the conflict? Ali, you first. 30 seconds. 30 seconds.

ABUNIMAH: Obviously, it’s the result of the fact that 4 million people are living under a brutal foreign military dictatorship, the Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation does not need help inciting against itself. We’ve had over 300 children killed, over 1,000 civilians killed, many hundreds of civilians killed on the Israeli side as well. Of course that produces hatred.

VERJEE: Yigal.

CARMON: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy, but we don’t focus on that necessarily. We deal with the whole Arab world, from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria. Of course, you know that those who hijacked the planes on September 11th were not under Israeli occupation. This is hate that is nurtured in [---].

ABUNIMAH: Oh, this is just a red herring. What an attempt to confuse the issue.

CARMON: So, please, this is red herring for you? 4,000 people dying, innocent people dying.

(CROSSTALK)

VERJEE: Look, we’re going to have to leave our discussion there, and perhaps continue it another day. Ali Abunimah, Yigal Carmon, thanks for speaking to us on Q&A, in spite of the fact you didn’t agree on anything. Thank you.

Language matters

A new online translation service provides the west with an English-language digest of the Arabic press, writes Brian Whitaker

The idea of a “mysterious” east has been around for centuries, and even today there is nothing more mysterious for the average westerner than an Arabic newspaper with its squiggly back-to-front writing.

“As far as I can tell,” William Rugh, former US ambassador in the Middle East told a conference a couple of years ago, “there are no prominent American politicians, state governors, members of congress, members of the government, or members of the national press corps among those reading Arabic newspapers. In the entire US government … only a handful of people can read Arabic and they are so busy these days that they generally do not have time to read Arab newspapers.”

This is not particularly surprising but if we look at the situation the other way round there’s a very different picture. Large and increasing numbers of Arab politicians, government officials and journalists are fluent in English. Many of them – thanks to the internet – are now avid readers of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian and other western newspapers.

It’s much the same among ordinary Arabs, too. Even if they don’t read the foreign newspapers, they still tend to know more about what westerners are thinking than westerners know about what Arabs are thinking.

Considering the central role of the Middle East in western foreign policy and the latest US attempts to win hearts and minds in the region, this is a serious gap in our knowledge.

“Americans are not entirely ignorant of what appears in the Arabic press,” Rugh said, “but the few items of which they are aware have often been translated selectively and with hostile intent.”

The pioneer in this field was the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), which has been circulating translated snippets from the Arabic press since 1998. It has become influential in the US among politicians and journalists, and was once described by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as “absolutely invaluable”.

Though Memri claims to be “independent”, its founders were Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence – who is currently its director – and Meyrav Wurmser, an ardent Zionist who helped to draft the now-famous 1996 Clean Break document proposing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a step towards reshaping Israel’s strategic environment.

“This service does not present a balanced or complete picture of the Arab print media,” Rugh said. “Its owners are pro-Israeli and anti-Arab. Quotes are selected to portray Arabs as preaching hatred against Jews and westerners, praising violence and refusing any peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue.”

Having written about Memri at length before, I don’t propose to do so again here. Readers unfamiliar with the organisation and the controversy surrounding it can refer to Wikipedia, where there’s a page with background information, links to the relevant articles and discussion of the pros and cons. Since I first wrote about Memri, however, several other English language sources have come along, and they are worth a look.

The two leading pan-Arab dailies, ash-Sharq al-Awsat and al-Hayat both publish some of their content in English translation on their websites. There’s also the Iraqi Press Monitor, produced by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which provides a daily summary of items from the Iraqi newspapers. These sources are all free of charge.

For a general view of what the Arabic newspapers are saying – as well as some of the Farsi newspapers in Iran – the most useful and affordable service is the recently-launched Mideast Wire, which monitors more than 50 publications and provides extracts from 30-40 news items and opinion articles every day. It’s not free, but at $87 (£50) a year, the basic-rate subscription is quite modest considering the amount of copy supplied – around 10,000 words a day.

Mideast Wire was started by four journalists associated with the Daily Star in Beirut; two Americans, Nicholas Noe and Seth Walls, and two Lebanese, Majdoline Hatoum and Maha al-Azar.

After subscribing for several weeks, I think it’s safe to say there’s no obvious political agenda apart from a desire to inform people about what Arabic newspapers are saying.

“I realised there was a lot more diversity of opinion than was being portrayed,” Noe said during a visit to London last week. “Ultimately, that’s our core mission.”

“We’re not seeing ourselves as a counterbalance to Memri,” he said. “We’re interested in the whole range of opinions. The Arab media isn’t black and white … often we try to put together a number of different sources on the same issue.”

One example of this was after the London bombings in July, when Mideast Wire translated six different editorials commenting on the attacks. “This is our big difference with Memri,” he said.

Unlike Memri, which has always been secretive about its financial backers, Noe was happy to talk. Mideast Wire got $25,000 start-up money from Abdrew Rasiej, a New York internet entrepreneur, he said – though in future they hope to rely on subscription income as their best guarantee of independence.They have a team of 12 people but keep costs down by not having an office, and they work on the blogging principle, Noe said, discussing what to translate and generally keeping in touch with each other over the internet.

Making use of the time difference between the Middle East and the US, they get their translations ready in time for Americans to read them each morning. This is an important benefit, though there’s a trade-off between speed and polish. Some of the translations are a bit ragged, though they are adequate for most purposes.

As elsewhere in the world, Arab newspapers range from the serious to the sensational. Some are government and some privately owned – often by politicians or businessmen with an axe to grind – and there are very few that can truly be considered independent. The quality of the journalism also varies a great deal.

Even a perfect translation is only as good as the original article and particularly in the Middle East, it’s essential to know the quality of the source before jumping to conclusions about a story.

Over the last few weeks, Mideast Wire has translated a lot of articles – from a variety of sources and viewpoints – about Syria, Lebanon and the ongoing investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri.

They included several stories from a Kuwaiti newspaper about strange goings-on in Syria which, if true, would have been astounding. It seemed a bit odd that a Kuwaiti newspaper should have knowledge of the innermost machinations of the Syrian regime, so I asked a Kuwaiti journalist what he thought of the reports.

“Probably 50% accurate,” he replied. So I’m still trying to work out which 50% was accurate and which was not.

At present Mideast Wire (along with Memri) gives very little information to help readers judge the reliability or importance of the sources it translates. When I put this to Noe, he said they had already recognised the problem and would shortly be providing a background guide to the papers they monitor, including circulation figures.

In the meantime, around 2,000 people have signed up for the service, he said. They include journalists, researchers, NGOs, government bodies, sections of the US military and writer and activist Noam Chomsky. Since this is probably the first time that Chomsky and the US military have seen eye-to-eye on anything, it surely counts as a recommendation.

“My problem with Memri is that it poses as a research institute when it’s basically a propaganda operation. As with all propaganda, that involves a certain amount of dishonesty and deception.” (Brian Whitaker)

The following e-mail exchange between Brian Whitaker and MEMRI president Yigal Carmon was published in the Guardian on 28 January 2003. It followed the critique and response published in the same paper the previous year.

Yigal Carmon:

How does Memri select items for translation? We aim to reflect main trends of thought and when possible general public opinion. We feature the most topical issues on the Middle Eastern or international agenda. As you might expect, we are now publishing articles from the Iraqi media. We also translate discussions on social issues, such as the status of women in Egypt (Special Dispatches 392, 393, January 2002) and debates on Al-Jazeera TV which reach an estimated 60 million viewers. When controversial matters are aired before such a large audience, Memri does not need to fight shy of translating their contents.
Are the examples chosen extreme? While some of the topics covered do seem extreme to the western reader, they are an accurate representation of what appears in the Arab and Farsi media.

If mainstream papers repeatedly publish the Jewish blood libel; accuse Jews and Americans of deliberately spreading Aids or the US of dropping genetically modified foods with the intention of harming people in Afghanistan (the latter allegation made by no less than the editor in chief of the most important government daily in Egypt) Memri is entitled to translate these articles.

There are even more extreme views – like those expressed by most Islamist organisations – which we rarely translate. Brian Whitaker, however, chooses to relate to Ibrahaim Hooper, spokesman of the Council on American Islamic Relations, as referee and includes such organisations on his website.

Does Memri ignore the Israeli media? Memri was founded in l998 and for the first three years we translated items from the Israel media. However, almost half of Israel’s media is now available in English (the main daily Ha’aretz; Jerusalem Post; Globes; Jerusalem Report; as well as many broadcast and private media outlets), so we have cut down our output.

Brian Whitaker appears to feel that holding up a mirror to the Arab world will reflect badly on them. Moderate and courageous elements in the Middle East might disagree.

We would have been happy to discuss these issues with Mr Whitaker had he contacted our Washington or London offices, but now look forward to his response and to dealing with the other issues he raises.

Brian Whitaker:

Taking up your point about the Hebrew media, there’s an excellent service in Jerusalem called Israel News Today. It provides summaries of the Hebrew-language newspapers and radio bulletins, and translates articles, too. Foreign journalists working in Israel pay to receive it because it gives them a fair and balanced picture of what the Israeli media are saying on the issues of the day.

If Memri did the same sort of thing in relation to the Arab media, I would have no quarrel. The Guardian and other papers might even pay for the service so that you wouldn’t have to rely on your anonymous benefactors for funding.

My problem with Memri is that it poses as a research institute when it’s basically a propaganda operation. As with all propaganda, that involves a certain amount of dishonesty and deception. The items you translate are chosen largely to suit your political agenda. They are unrepresentative and give an unfair picture of the Arab media as a whole.

This might not be so bad if you told us what your agenda is. But Memri’s website does not mention you or your work for Israeli intelligence. Nor does it mention Memri’s co-founder, Meyrav Wurmser, and her extreme brand of Zionism which maintains that Israeli leftists are a “threat” to their own country. Also, you’re not averse to a bit of cheating to make Arabs look more anti-semitic than they are.

In your Special Dispatch 151, for instance, you translated an interview given by the mufti of Jerusalem to al-Ahram al-Arabi, shortly after the start of the Palestinian uprising.

One question the interviewer asked was: “How do you deal with the Jews who are besieging al-Aqsa and are scattered around it?” Memri translated this as: “How do you feel about the Jews?” – which is a different question. That left you with a reply in Arabic which didn’t fit your newly-concocted question. So you cut out the first part of the mufti’s reply and combined what was left with part of his answer to another question.

Maybe you weren’t personally responsible for that bit of dishonesty, so let me ask you about a statement you made in your testimony to the US Congress on April 18.

Citing claims in the Arab media that the September 11 attacks “were the work of the United States government itself and/or a Jewish conspiracy”, you said: “Recent Gallup polls show a large majority of the Arab world continue to believe it.” Please tell us the dates of those Gallup polls, the wording of the relevant questions, and their findings.

Yigal Carmon:

I am disappointed to see that your reply continues to question points I have already addressed and that you descend into insulting accusations such as “cheating, deception, dishonest, unfair, concocted”. You offer no justifications for your quite serious attacks. This not only fails to enhance the aims of this dialogue but goes against the very condition required by the Guardian that “the tone [of this debate] should be measured and civil”.

An example of your superfluous antagonism is the request for details such as “the dates, wording of the relevant questions and their findings”, regarding the Gallup polls quoted in my testimony to the US Congress. I was referring to a major project, The 2002 Gallup Poll of the Islamic World, full details of which are available at www.gallup.com . Harold Evans, former editor of the Times, wrote recently, “millions and millions believe this rubbish, as a recent Gallup poll has found”. I wonder if you would have questioned him so closely? You also seem to focus mainly on the anti-semitic material we cover as if it were the only topic we translate from Arab media. While it is certainly a notable issue, it constitutes less than 10% of our output.

To address the points made:
1) Memri is not a news agency or a press review service and, as you noted, summaries of the Hebrew-language press are readily available. That is precisely why Memri does not need to duplicate this “excellent service”.

2) You are right: we do have an agenda. As an institute of research, we want Memri to present translations to people who wish to be informed on the ideas circulating in the Middle East. We aim to reflect reality. If knowledge of this reality should benefit one side or another, then so be it.

3) On checking Special Dispatch 151 (November 2000) we have to admit an error in translation. The question should indeed have read “How do you deal with the Jews?” rather than “How do you feel about the Jews?” As for the claim that we have “cobbled together” one answer from two questions to make “Arabs look more anti-semitic than they are”, the fact is that the following question referred to the same subject. As we have translated several hundred items since then, it is perhaps reassuring that you had to go back so far to find a mistake. I understand that the Guardian is occasionally subject to errors, so perhaps you will be understanding of this one.

4) As for myself, I make no secret of my past. I appear regularly on various media outlets, including Al-Jazeera, and my background is always mentioned. For your part, you omitted the fact that I retired from service over 10 years ago.

5) Dr Meyrav Wurmser is a distinguished academic, who co-founded Memri but who left us two and a half years ago. Our staff include people of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths and they hold a range of political views.

6) You repeat that our representation of the Arab world is unfair. Can you give us examples of articles that reflect widespread and topical trends which we leave out of our translations?

Brian Whitaker:

I have no wish to sound uncivil, but Memri has placed itself in a glasshouse by claiming to represent the views of the Arabic media to the English-speaking world. Given your political background, it’s legitimate to ask whether Memri is a trustworthy vehicle for such an undertaking. The evidence suggests it is not. You now concede an error of translation in the interview with the mufti, but ignore the more serious charge of dishonest editing. Indeed, you persist in misrepresenting the original Arabic question, in which the mufti was asked how he dealt with the Jews besieging the mosque.

Your translator turned this into a question asking how he felt about the Jews (ie in general). Your “corrected” version, once again, fails to recognise that in the Arabic text it was not a general question. It was about a specific group of Jews who were behaving in a hostile manner.

Having misrepresented the original question, you then had to misrepresent the mufti’s answer. There is no excuse for this sort of textual manipulation, and I can only surmise it was done for political reasons – to make his remarks look more anti-semitic than they actually were.

More recently, in Special Dispatch 407, you translated a poem from the Arab-American weekly, al-Watan, likening President Bush to an ape. Anyone reading your introduction could reasonably assume the poet was an Arab-American, when in fact the poet is a Palestinian.

The Arabic version made clear he was writing from the West Bank and included his location – “Ramallah” – immediately after his name. Memri cut the word “Ramallah” from its translation, enhancing the impression that the author was Arab-American.

Annoying, dishonest little tweaks like this seem to crop up quite a lot in Memri’s work. Again, the only reason I can see for it is a political one – in this case to further denigrate Arab-Americans in the eyes of their fellow citizens.

This behaviour does Memri’s credibility no good, and it means that journalists who make use of your translations without checking the original Arabic also put their own reputations at risk.

Checking the original texts can be difficult because of the way you reference them. Occasionally you provide internet links, but more often you only cite the publication and the date, without page numbers or headlines. The first time I tried to look up one of the articles you had translated, it turned out that you had given the wrong publication date.

Regarding the “Gallup polls”, you now admit that there was only one, though I’m sure the plural sounded more impressive in your evidence to Congress. But I am still baffled by your claim that this poll, published last February, found a large majority of Arabs who believed that the September 11 attacks “were the work of the United States government itself and/or a Jewish conspiracy”.

Gallup’s findings are no longer available on their website except to subscribers, but I have looked at several newspaper reports of the poll and can find nothing to substantiate your claim. Did you make it up? If not, please produce the evidence.

Before we move on to discuss Memri’s purpose, you may also wish to reconsider (a) your claim that your background is “always mentioned” when you figure in the media, and (b) your comments about Israel News Today which make little sense in relation to what I wrote earlier.

Yigal Carmon:

When I asked for an open debate following your attack on Memri, I had hoped for an exchange of views and facts, rather than a sort of verbal arm-wrestling. Sadly, you seem unwilling or unable to move forward, preferring to go to points already answered, using insults rather than evidence.

Memri has never claimed to “represent the view of the Arabic media”, but rather to reflect, through our translations, general trends which are widespread and topical. You accused us of distortion by omission but when asked to provide examples of trends and views we have missed, you have failed to answer. Missing footnotes, use of the plural form, or similar incidentals – aren’t these sidelines to the whole issue? You continually refer to my supposed “political background” as if I had something to hide, and I wonder if I am your real target here. As a civil servant and adviser on counter-terrorism to both Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, prime ministers from opposing camps, my role was not a political appointment.

If your complaint is that I am Israeli, then please say so. Is being an Israeli enough for you to consider me inevitably biased and anti-Arab? I note your website is “Al-Bab”, (“The Gateway” in Arabic). Would I be justified in concluding that you are not, in fact, completely neutral about the Middle East, even though you are Middle East editor of a national newspaper? I wonder how you would judge an editor whose website was called “Ha-Sha-ar” (“The Gateway” in Hebrew)? I am the one to be “baffled” by your quibbles over the Gallup polls singular or plural. Gallup interviewed 10,000 people in depth and continues to update its surveys. If you find it easier to accuse Memri of “making it up” than for your newspaper to fork out $90 [£55] to access valuable information, then I am sorry you aren’t taking this debate more seriously – or courteously.

As one who has been invited to give testimony before the US Congress on a number of occasions, I have no need to “impress” them, and certainly no cause to change or embellish evidence.

I am even more “baffled” that you apparently fail to acknowledge the widespread belief in the Arab world that the US itself and/or the Jews perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. A wealth of evidence of such belief is freely available as this issue has been discussed throughout the world, from the New York Times to Al-Jazeera and from the Hindustani Times to Al Riyadh.

Regarding Special Dispatch 407, we felt the important issue was the fact that Al-Watan, which defines itself as a “national weekly Arab-American newspaper” and appears in four major US cities, chose to publish poems such as ” Yes, I am a Terrorist” and “Bush is an Ape”. The identity of the poets was not the point. You have accused Memri of altering a text and so “making his (the mufti’s) words look more anti-semitic than they actually were”.

We have already addressed your comments about the interviewer’s questions. However, let’s look at the substance. The mufti of Jerusalem enthuses about “martyrs” who kill Israelis. “The younger the martyr – the greater and the more I respect him” he says, adding “I talked to a young man (who) said ‘I want to marry the black-eyed (beautiful) women of heaven.’ The next day he became a martyr. I am sure his mother was filled with joy.” In the same article, this spiritual leader remarks: “I am filled with rage toward the Jews. I have never greeted a Jew when I came near one. I never will. They cannot even dream that I will. The Jews do not dare to bother me, because they are the most cowardly creatures Allah has ever created.” (Special Dispatch 151, 9 November 2000)

This same grand mufti, Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, interviewed in La Repubblica (March 24 2000 – “Too many lies about the Holocaust, Wojtyla free us from the Jews”), opined “Six million Jews dead? No way, there were much fewer. Let’s stop with this fairytale exploited by Israel to capture international solidarity. It is not my fault if Hitler hated Jews.”

As I write, a soap opera based on the hoax “the protocols of the elders of Zion” is about to be screened for Ramadan on Egyptian, Iraqi and Hizbullah television channels, and a book by Mustafa Tlass (Syria’s minister of defence), which treats the infamous 1840 Damascus blood libel as history, is selling well. With facts like these, any attempt on our part to exceed our brief as translators is completely unnecessary.

Brian Whitaker:

I agree entirely that any attempt to exceed your brief as translators is unnecessary. So why do you do it?

I would readily put it down to incompetence or carelessness – except that the tweaks, cuts and mistranslations always seem to point in the same political direction.

I won’t introduce more examples now, since we’re at the end of this debate and no closer to a proper explanation of those I’ve raised already. You still haven’t explained why you saw fit to mutilate the mufti’s interview instead of just translating it. His views on the Holocaust do not give you a licence to misrepresent what he says.

You appear to think this is a trivial matter, but it goes to the heart of Memri’s credibility. On any self-respecting newspaper, a reporter who messed about with other people’s words like that would be in serious trouble. Again, with your translation of al-Watan’s poem, you offer no explanation as to why the only word omitted, between the title and the last line, was the word that identified the poet as a Palestinian rather than an Arab-American.

You say the poet’s identity was not the point, but in the context it was clearly relevant.

Once again, I must return to the deeply troubling question of the Gallup poll – which you shrug off with a facetious suggestion about spending $90 on the report.

The fact is that you gave evidence to Congress claiming that Gallup had found “a large majority of the Arab world” who believed the September 11 attacks “were the work of the United States government itself and/or a Jewish conspiracy”. What you said is untrue, and Gallup has confirmed that. I trust you will now apologise to Congress for your false testimony. Finally, in the light of your most recent remarks about me personally, I will make clear now that your nationality and religion do not bother me in the slightest. What does concern me is your political agenda, and the deceitful way you go about promoting it.

[END]

Postscript: According to Norbert Mattes, editor of German quarterly journal INAMO: “At the beginning of October, 2002, an e-mail chat began between Whitaker and Carmon. But suddenly Carmon stopped. I spoke with Brian at the beginning of November, he said ‘I’m still waiting for an answer from Carmon. If he doesn’t answer within three weeks we will print the chat in the Guardian.’ So they did middle of January 2003.” [Source]

Selective Memri

Brian Whitaker investigates whether the ‘independent’ media institute that translates the Arabic newspapers is quite what it seems

For some time now, I have been receiving small gifts from a generous institute in the United States. The gifts are high-quality translations of articles from Arabic newspapers which the institute sends to me by email every few days, entirely free-of-charge.

The emails also go to politicians and academics, as well as to lots of other journalists. The stories they contain are usually interesting.

Whenever I get an email from the institute, several of my Guardian colleagues receive one too and regularly forward their copies to me – sometimes with a note suggesting that I might like to check out the story and write about it.

If the note happens to come from a more senior colleague, I’m left feeling that I really ought to write about it. One example last week was a couple of paragraphs translated by the institute, in which a former doctor in the Iraqi army claimed that Saddam Hussein had personally given orders to amputate the ears of military deserters.

The organisation that makes these translations and sends them out is the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), based in Washington but with recently-opened offices in London, Berlin and Jerusalem.

Its work is subsidised by US taxpayers because as an “independent, non-partisan, non-profit” organisation, it has tax-deductible status under American law.

Memri’s purpose, according to its website, is to bridge the language gap between the west – where few speak Arabic – and the Middle East, by “providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew media”.

Despite these high-minded statements, several things make me uneasy whenever I’m asked to look at a story circulated by Memri. First of all, it’s a rather mysterious organisation. Its website does not give the names of any people to contact, not even an office address.

The reason for this secrecy, according to a former employee, is that “they don’t want suicide bombers walking through the door on Monday morning” (Washington Times, June 20).

This strikes me as a somewhat over-the-top precaution for an institute that simply wants to break down east-west language barriers.

The second thing that makes me uneasy is that the stories selected by Memri for translation follow a familiar pattern: either they reflect badly on the character of Arabs or they in some way further the political agenda of Israel. I am not alone in this unease.

Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Washington Times: “Memri’s intent is to find the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminate them as widely as possible.”

Memri might, of course, argue that it is seeking to encourage moderation by highlighting the blatant examples of intolerance and extremism. But if so, one would expect it – for the sake of non-partisanship – t o publicise extremist articles in the Hebrew media too.

Although Memri claims that it does provide translations from Hebrew media, I can’t recall receiving any.

Evidence from Memri’s website also casts doubt on its non-partisan status. Besides supporting liberal democracy, civil society, and the free market, the institute also emphasises “the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel”.

That is what its website used to say, but the words about Zionism have now been deleted. The original page, however, can still be found in internet archives.

The reason for Memri’s air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.

Mr – or rather, Colonel – Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

Retrieving another now-deleted page from the archives of Memri’s website also throws up a list of its staff. Of the six people named, three – including Col Carmon – are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence.

Among the other three, one served in the Israeli army’s Northern Command Ordnance Corps, one has an academic background, and the sixth is a former stand-up comedian.

Col Carmon’s co-founder at Memri is Meyrav Wurmser, who is also director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, which bills itself as “America’s premier source of applied research on enduring policy challenges”.

The ubiquitous Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon’s defence policy board, recently joined Hudson’s board of trustees.

Ms Wurmser is the author of an academic paper entitled Can Israel Survive Post-Zionism? in which she argues that leftwing Israeli intellectuals pose “more than a passing threat” to the state of Israel, undermining its soul and reducing its will for self-defence.

In addition, Ms Wurmser is a highly qualified, internationally recognised, inspiring and knowledgeable speaker on the Middle East whose presence would make any “event, radio or television show a unique one” – according to Benador Associates, a public relations company which touts her services.

Nobody, so far as I know, disputes the general accuracy of Memri’s translations but there are other reasons to be concerned about its output.

The email it circulated last week about Saddam Hussein ordering people’s ears to be cut off was an extract from a longer article in the pan-Arab newspaper, al-Hayat, by Adil Awadh who claimed to have first-hand knowledge of it.

It was the sort of tale about Iraqi brutality that newspapers would happily reprint without checking, especially in the current atmosphere of war fever. It may well be true, but it needs to be treated with a little circumspection.

Mr Awadh is not exactly an independent figure. He is, or at least was, a member of the Iraqi National Accord, an exiled Iraqi opposition group backed by the US – and neither al-Hayat nor Memri mentioned this.

Also, Mr Awadh’s allegation first came to light some four years ago, when he had a strong personal reason for making it. According to a Washington Post report in 1998, the amputation claim formed part of his application for political asylum in the United States.

At the time, he was one of six Iraqis under arrest in the US as suspected terrorists or Iraqi intelligence agents, and he was trying to show that the Americans had made a mistake.

Earlier this year, Memri scored two significant propaganda successes against Saudi Arabia. The first was its translation of an article from al-Riyadh newspaper in which a columnist wrote that Jews use the blood of Christian or Muslim children in pastries for the Purim religious festival.

The writer, a university teacher, was apparently relying on an anti-semitic myth that dates back to the middle ages. What this demonstrated, more than anything, was the ignorance of many Arabs – even those highly educated – about Judaism and Israel, and their readiness to believe such ridiculous stories.

But Memri claimed al-Riyadh was a Saudi “government newspaper” – in fact it’s privately owned – implying that the article had some form of official approval.

Al-Riyadh’s editor said he had not seen the article before publication because he had been abroad. He apologised without hesitation and sacked his columnist, but by then the damage had been done.

Memri’s next success came a month later when Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to London wrote a poem entitled The Martyrs – about a young woman suicide bomber – which was published in al-Hayat newspaper.

Memri sent out translated extracts from the poem, which it described as “praising suicide bombers”. Whether that was the poem’s real message is a matter of interpretation. It could, perhaps more plausibly, be read as condemning the political ineffectiveness of Arab leaders, but Memri’s interpretation was reported, almost without question, by the western media.

These incidents involving Saudi Arabia should not be viewed in isolation. They are part of building a case against the kingdom and persuading the United States to treat it as an enemy, rather than an ally.

It’s a campaign that the Israeli government and American neo-conservatives have been pushing since early this year – one aspect of which was the bizarre anti-Saudi briefing at the Pentagon, hosted last month by Richard Perle.

To anyone who reads Arabic newspapers regularly, it should be obvious that the items highlighted by Memri are those that suit its agenda and are not representative of the newspapers’ content as a whole.

The danger is that many of the senators, congressmen and “opinion formers” who don’t read Arabic but receive Memri’s emails may get the idea that these extreme examples are not only truly representative but also reflect the policies of Arab governments.

Memri’s Col Carmon seems eager to encourage them in that belief. In Washington last April, in testimony to the House committee on international relations, he portrayed the Arab media as part of a wide-scale system of government-sponsored indoctrination.

“The controlled media of the Arab governments conveys hatred of the west, and in particular, of the United States,” he said. “Prior to September 11, one could frequently find articles which openly supported, or even called for, terrorist attacks against the United States …

“The United States is sometimes compared to Nazi Germany, President Bush to Hitler, Guantanamo to Auschwitz,” he said.

In the case of the al-Jazeera satellite channel, he added, “the overwhelming majority of guests and callers are typically anti-American and anti-semitic”.

Unfortunately, it is on the basis of such sweeping generalisations that much of American foreign policy is built these days.

As far as relations between the west and the Arab world are concerned, language is a barrier that perpetuates ignorance and can easily foster misunderstanding.

All it takes is a small but active group of Israelis to exploit that barrier for their own ends and start changing western perceptions of Arabs for the worse.

It is not difficult to see what Arabs might do to counter that. A group of Arab media companies could get together and publish translations of articles that more accurately reflect the content of their newspapers.

It would certainly not be beyond their means. But, as usual, they may prefer to sit back and grumble about the machinations of Israeli intelligence veterans.

FOLLOW-UP LINKS:

Media organisation rebuts accusations of selective journalism
Email debate: Yigal Carmon and Brian Whitaker

Gained in translation

Why the Middle East Media Research Institute is a source of English versions of Arabic texts that are designed to mislead and disinform.

By Mohammed El Oifi

THE Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri) was founded in 1998 by a former Israeli military intelligence officer, Colonel Yigal Carmon. It translates Arab and Iranian media into European languages, and according to its website “explores the Middle East through the region’s media. Memri bridges the language gap which exists between the West and the Middle East, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological , intellectual, social, cultural and religious trends in the Middle East” (1).

Memri says its purpose is to “inform the debate over United States policy in the Middle East. Memri is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, organisation with branch offices in Berlin, London, Jerusalem and Baghdad, and has a project active in Sweden. Memri research is translated into English, German, Hebrew, Italian, French, Spanish, and occasionally Turkish and Russian.” This service is offered free of charge to media, institutions and western political leaders, particularly members of the US Congress.

The Memri television monitor project also tracks the main Arab and Iranian television channels. It occasionally subtitles and distributes short, carefully selected programme extracts that it sends free of charge to western television stations or broadcasting regulators.

Everything depends on the choice of texts and sequences that Memri translates. It tends to present minority views in Arab media as being majority views. The non-Arabic speaker with access only to these translations might have the impression that Arab media is dominated by a group of fanatical anti-western and anti-semitic writers, opposed by only a few rare and brave journalists, those Memri calls “liberal or progressive”.

This explains why Arab, and occasionally European, writers have several times accused Memri of being a propaganda organ working for the Israeli government, Likud, and their pressure groups. Three of six founding members worked for Israeli intelligence (2).

Memri has had some successes. In 2001 it launched a mostly baseless campaign to denounce Palestinian school textbooks for inciting anti-semitism (3). In 2004 Memri and a French website called Proche-Orient.info (which later closed) emphasised the “excesses” (4) of the Hizbullah television station Al-Manar, which was then banned in France, leading to protests from Reporters Without Borders. It also campaigned against the Zayed Centre in the United Arab Emirates, which was also closed (5).

More importantly, Memri serves the Israeli strategy of hindering relations between the Arab nations and the West (6). On an Al-Jazeera programme Carmon countered these accusations by saying that Memri is pursuing a scientific objective: transmitting the views of the Arab media on Middle East events to a western audience (7). This should not be accepted without reservations.

Although the Israeli-Arab conflict is focused on the control of land in Palestine, it is inseparable from the symbolic struggle in which both sides attempt to win hearts and minds so as to legitimise their view of events. Power struggles only obey local logic up to a point, so outside support is decisive. It is particularly important for the Israelis since the war in Lebanon and the first intifada (1987-1993), both of which badly harmed Israel’s international image.

Memri’s damage-limitation exercise distorts the West’s image of Arabs and of Muslims by presenting them as hateful and fanatical.

The growth of Arab satellite television channels has emancipated public opinion, and Middle Eastern leaders have lost some control over the media. As a result Israelis have begun to take a direct interest in the Arab media and its content. This may explain why Memri was set up in February 1998, a year and a half after the launch of Al-Jazeera.

Carmon has strong roots in Israel. He is an Arab speaker, and has been counter-terrorism adviser to two prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin. He has strong support in Washington; he works with Meyrav Wurmser, formerly of Memri and now head of the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute, sympathetic to US neoconservatives. Memri also has the support of many donors, including one of the largest foundations of the US right, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

Memri has taken Arab liberals hostage by creating the strange category of “liberal or progressive Arab journalist”. To qualify, a journalist has to oppose all forms of armed resistance in the Arab world, particularly in Palestine and Iraq; denounce Hamas and Hizbullah; criticise Yasser Arafat and praise Abu Mazen; plead the cause of “realism” – the acceptance of the current balance of power, and therefore foreign domination; approve of US policy in the Middle East; encourage Arabs to be self-critical and renounce “conspiracy mentality”.

Aspiring candidates must also show proven hostility to nationalism and political Islam, and even contempt for Arab culture. Criticism must be specifically directed at religious leaders and, more broadly, at any society that supposedly fails keep pace with an enlightened Arab leader. They must praise individual freedoms but without insisting on political liberties, still less national sovereignty. When writing about political reform, they must pick out republican regimes, particularly Iraq prior to US occupation, and Syria or Egypt. Political reform in Saudi Arabia should not be mentioned, which is unsurprising given that most Memri-approved journalists write for a press that is financed by Saudi princes and businessmen (8).

Memri is frequently criticised for the quality, and sometimes even the integrity, of its translations. After the 7 July 2005 London bombings, an Islamist living in Britain, Hani al-Sebai, was invited to take part in an Al-Jazeera programme, More Than One Viewpoint. Sebai said of the victims “there is no term in Islamic jurisprudence called civilians. Dr Karmi is here sitting with us, and he’s very familiar with the jurisprudence. There are fighters and non-fighters. Islam is against the killing of innocents. The innocent man cannot be killed according to Islam.” The Memri translation read: “The term civilians does not exist in Islamic religious law. Dr Karmi is sitting here, and I am sitting here, and I’m familiar with religious law. There is no such term as civilians in the modern western sense. People are either of dar al-harb or not” (9). Note the introduction of the contested term dar al-harb, which is Arabic for house of war (denoting the part of the world populated by unbelievers), a term not used by the speaker. In a country at war on terror, the use of that term implies that anything goes. Memri also omitted the condemnation of the killing of innocents.

Halim Barakat, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC, also suffered from this approach. He claimed that an article he wrote for the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat, “The wild beast that Zionism created: Self-destruction”, was reproduced by Memri under the hate-inducing headline, “Jews have lost their humanity”. Barakat denies having used that phrase. “Every time I wrote Zionism, Memri replaced the word by Jew or Judaism. They want to give the impression that I’m not criticising Israeli policy and that what I’m saying is anti-semitic.” As soon as the translation was posted on the Memri website he received threats. He was told that he had no right to teach at a university (he has taught for more than 30 years) and that he should leave the US. Another Georgetown professor attacked him in an article based only on Memri translations, without checking the Arabic texts (10).

In June 2004 Memri triggered a campaign against a London visit by the well-known Islamist scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, commissioned a study of the “Islamic conspiracy dossier” to obtain an impartial view (11). His counter-dossier concluded that the campaign was part of an “apparent rising tide of Islamophobia” aiming to “close off any dialogue between London and mainstream representatives of one of the world’s great religions”.

The Livingstone commissioned report analysed all Qaradawi’s works, and discovered that nearly all the distortions came from “material produced by the Middle East Research Institute” which “was set up by a former colonel in Israel’s military intelligence service”. It concluded that Memri systematically distorted facts, not only relating to Qaradawi but to many other Muslim leaders, and the report was intended to set matters straight (12).

Memri is also guilty of basic factual errors. According to its “experts”, Abdel Karim Abu al-Nasr is a Saudi national, because he is a leader writer for a Saudi newspaper, whereas he is a prominent Lebanese journalist (13). In a long paper on Saudi Arabia, Memri wrote that Crown Prince Abdallah Ibn Abdel Aziz (now king) belonged to the Sudeiri branch of the royal family, which would surprise anyone who knows the country (14).

Memri’s efficiency results from close coordination with people actively involved in political propaganda campaigns. Arab journalists are given carrot-and-stick treatment; “liberal” or “progressive” journalists are invited to friendly research institutes in the US, visa formalities are simplified, and they are given access to the media and US leaders. Those whom Memri categorises as hatemongers are given a hard time; the New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman has referred to the “expertise” of Memri and its founder, and recommended that “the US state department should issue lists of the top 10 hatemongers, those who advocate acts of terror” (15).

However, it has yet to be proven that former or present members of Israeli intelligence services are the best architects of the bridge that needs to be built or rebuilt between the Arab world and the West.

FOOTNOTES

(1) Memri.org includes these subjects of study: “The jihad and terrorism studies project, US and the Middle East, reform in the Arab and Muslim world, the Arab-Israeli conflict, inter-Arab relations and the antisemitism documentation project”.

(2) Brian Whitaker, “Selective Memri“, Guardian, London 12 August 2002; he demonstrates how Memri changes any translation once it has been contested.

(3) See Lisa Morena, “A textbook case“, Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, July 2001.

(4) In October 2003 the Al-Manar satellite station broadcast an antisemitic series that included scenes of “ritual murder”.

(5) See a report by Memri on the closure of the Zayed Centre by Steven Stalinsky, “The Think Tank of the Arab League“, 11 September 2003.

(6) See Guy Bachor, “Israel’s strategy in its relations with Europe”, in Yediot Aharonot , Tel Aviv, 25 February 2004.

(7) See the Min Washington programme, “Memri and the Image of Arabs in the West” (in Arabic), 13 September 2002.

(8) Bilal al-Hassan, La culture de la capitulation, Riad El-Rayyes Books, Beirut, 2005, a good summary of al-Hassan’s beliefs, although unfair to some authors quoted.

(9) Special dispatch series #932.

(10) The Min Washington programme, op cit.

(11) Why the Mayor of London will maintain dialogues with all of London’s faiths and communities, A reply to the dossier against the Mayor’s meeting with Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi

(12) كين لفنغستون.. الحوار بين شرائح المجتمع البريطاني, Al Jazeera, 20 January 2005.

(13) Al-Watan, Saudi Arabia, 13 December 2004

(14) “Saudi Arabia: the Structure of Royal Oligarchy“, Memri, 12 September 2002. The Sudeiri include the recently deceased King Fahd, Prince Sultan, Prince Na’if and others who are opposed to Abdallah.

(15) Thomas Friedman, “Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide”, New York Times, 22 July 2005. See The Spiegel online, english edition for a reprint of the article.