MEMRI--the pinnacle of propaganda.....

MEMRI is ‘propaganda machine,’ expert says
By Lawrence Swaim, Staff Writer

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) provides daily English translations of film and print media stories originating in Arabic, Iranian and Turkish media.
It also furnishes original analysis of cultural, political and religious trends in the Middle East.

It sends its daily postings to every news outlet in the United States and Europe, in addition to politicians and cultural leaders.

And it’s free, which makes it a Godsend for journalists, editors and policy analysts.

But according to its critics, it is also a dangerous, highly sophisticated propaganda operation, disseminating hate and disinformation on an unprecedented worldwide basis.

"They use the same sort of propaganda techniques as the Nazis," Professor Norman G. Finkelstein, a well-known scholar on Israel/Palestine, told InFocus. "They take things out of context in order to do personal and political harm to people they don’t like."

Take the case of Professor Halim Barakat, a novelist and scholar associated with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

In 2002, he published an article on Zionism in London’s Al-Hayat Daily, but says that in certain instances, MEMRI selectively edited what he wrote.

"I know how to make a distinction between Judaism and Zionism, but they distorted the article," Barakat told InFocus. "They left out certain things and tried to make it look anti-Semitic."

Shortly afterward, Campus Watch, the brainchild of notorious Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, used the allegedly doctored translation in an effort to smear Georgetown University.

Finkelstein, an outspoken critic of Israeli policies and the U.S. pro-Israel lobby, also had a run-in with MEMRI.

In 2006, he gave a TV interview in Lebanon on the way the Nazi Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel.

Finkelstein later wrote on his Web site: "MEMRI recently posted what it alleged was an interview I did with Lebanese television on the Nazi Holocaust. The MEMRI posting was designed to prove that I was a Holocaust denier."

Far from being a Holocaust denier, Finkelstein’s own parents were Holocaust survivors, a fact he has often spoken about.

But MEMRI was able to create the opposite impression, as Finkelstein demonstrated on his Web site, by editing out large chunks of the actual interview.

When some comments by the moderator were included, it appeared that Finkelstein’s interview was about nitpicking the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust rather than about Israel/Palestine.

MEMRI’s obsessive interest in protecting Israel derives from the people and interests that founded, fund and manage the institute’s international operations.

It was founded in 1998 by Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in the Israel Defense Forces (Intelligence Branch) from 1968 until 1988, acting head of civil administration in the West Bank from 1977 to 1982; and Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, an extreme rightwing neoconservative now affiliated with the Hudson Institute.

Meyrav is married to David Wurmser, at one time an American Enterprise Institute "scholar" and then a State Department apparatchik under John Bolton.

Both participated in the collective writing of "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," a seminal 1996 neocon document that advocated an end to negotiations with the Palestinians and permanent war against the Arab world.

They also worked with Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle and other rightwing ideologues who promoted and embellished the fiction that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

MEMRI has offices in Jerusalem, Berlin, London, Washington and Tokyo, and in a 2006 Jerusalem Post interview, Carmon claimed to have one in Iraq.

It translates film and print into English, German, Hebrew, Italian, French, Spanish and Japanese.

Tax returns for 2004 indicate American funding of between two to three million dollars, much of it from conservative donors and foundations - but those who have followed its far-flung operations suspect much higher expenditures.

Besides Carmon, several MEMRI staffers are former Israeli intelligence specialists. Especially troubling are suspected links between MEMRI and the current Israeli intelligence establishment.

According to a 2005 article in Israel’s Ha’aretz, the Israeli Defense Forces plants fake stories in the Arab media, which it then translates and tries to retail to Israeli journalists. How much of MEMRI is simply an extension of such IDF operations?

The questions raised by the Ha’aretz story caused Proffesor Juan Cole to write, "How much of what we ‘know’ from ‘Arab sources’ about ‘Hizbullah terrorism’ was simply made up by this fantasy factory in Tel Aviv?"

British journalist Brian Whitaker, Middle East editor of the Guardian, dismisses MEMRI as "basically a propaganda machine."

Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, accuses them of "outright distortion," and former CIA case officer Vince Cannistraro has written that "they (MEMRI) are selective and act as propagandists for their political point of view, which is the extreme-right of Likud."

With characteristic bluntness. Norman Finkelstein has written: "MEMRI is a main arm of Israeli propaganda. Although widely used in the mainstream media as a source of information on the Arab world, it is as trustworthy as Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer was on the Jewish world." (Der Sturmer was a rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper, and Streicher a notoriously cruel Nazi.)

In an e-mail to InFocus, Cole characterized MEMRI as "a Right-Zionist propaganda organ, which usually does its propaganda unobtrusively, by being very selective in what it translates."

Indeed , MEMRI appears to view the Arab world as a malevolent, mind-numbing monsters’ ball, populated almost exclusively by fanatics, freaks and fundamentalists.

Every story that could possibly make Middle Eastern people look deranged, hateful or diabolical gets translated; anything that could make them look informed, talented or admirable is ignored.

MEMRI says it covers reformers in the Arabic-speaking world, but longtime observers point out that people who make Islam or Arab culture look attractive rarely get translated, regardless of their position.

Nor does MEMRI feature stories about Palestinian suffering, Israeli dissenters, moderate Islamists, Christians in Arab governments or the growing nonviolent movement against the apartheid wall in the Occupied Territories, especially around Bal’in.

Instead, it promotes highly-edited footage featuring people like Wafa Sultan.

It was MEMRI that translated the sound bites from her famous al-Jazeera debate with Dr. Ibrahim al-Kouly that ended up on YouTube, making her an instant rock star to those who promote an international clash of cultures.

It is said by TV viewers who watched the entire debate that al-Kouly was rather patient with Sultan despite her extreme opinions.

(Among other things, Sultan has declared herself an atheist.) But MEMRI never bothered to translate and promote the whole debate.

MEMRI President Yigal Carmon was contacted to ask why the entire Sultan debate wasn’t translated and circulated, at least in a print version.

"MEMRI couldn’t do the whole interview because of the limitations of our resources," Carmon told InFocus. "And it was just our best judgment of what was fit to translate." He said he thought there was an "almost" complete version in the archives.

InFocus asked Carmon why MEMRI didn’t post more stories about domestic events in Israel and the OTC.

"Eighty percent of such stories are already in English," Carmon said.

Then why not buy a few every week and send them out in order to give a more balanced picture of the Middle East, InFocus asked, "It probably wouldn’t be legal ," he responded.

That brought up the thorny issue of copyright, ownership and power.

Why, Carmon was asked, does MEMRI copyright all the stories it translates, when most stories are written by Arab authors?

"Of course we copyright," Carmon told InFocus. "Once we translate a story into another language, it becomes ours, because it’s our work."

To test this theory in an American context, InFocus contacted The New York Times.

"If you translate copy from the Times, it would still belong to us, because we originated it," said an employee of the Rights and Royalties Department who did not wish to be named.

When war and peace hangs on the translation of a single word or phrase, nuance is everything.

But can we trust the translator?

According its critics, until MEMRI starts translating Hebrew stories about the rightward drift of Israeli society, torture of Palestinians in Israeli jails, the forced exile of Ilan Pappe and Azmi Bishara, and the elevation of the neo-fascist Avigdor Lieberman to deputy prime minister of Israel, they aren’t really covering all Middle Eastern media.

"I think it’s a reliable assumption that anything MEMRI translates from the Middle East is going to be unreliable," Finkelstein said.

http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/15069/135/

That's funny, the Muslims always edit their calls to violence for western consumption. It's good to see somebody use the same tactic on them. But actions speak louder than words, and the actions of Muslims worldwide is what I worry about more.

I posted the article because I am a fan of Norman Finkelstein.

Doesn't surprise me, nor does propaganda. We have to weigh it all for ourselves. I figure a billion Muslims can do a lot more of it than a few million Israelis.

Are you saying the article is propaganda or the fact that MEMRI is a Mossad operation? Norman Finkelstein is such an effective scholar and intellectual, he has the ADL and Alan Dershowitz obsessing over the him. When Abe Foxman call you an anti-semite, you are headed in the right direction. The ADL and AIPAC are basically Israeli propaganda organs.

Yes, MEMRI is a propaganda machine. They search the Arab media for the worst possible stories, then translate those. Unfortunately, there is plenty of material there for them to exploit.

Israel could use even more propaganda considering the size and scope of their enemies. The Mossad is good, but hardly equals all the state security organizations of the Muslim world plus their non-state and freelance terror allies. Plus their sympathizers and those that still hate all Jews and use Zionism as a scapegoat.

Personally, I don't have a problem with Israel, it is a viable state. However, I do have a problem with Zionism(religious, political and labor). It is a racist ideology which is eerily similar to Nazism. It seems some of the most ardent frothing-at-the-mouth Zionists invoke the Holocaust as a justification for their various pogroms and extermination campaigns against the Palestinians.

Getting the rest of the local Muslim states to admit that much would put the mideast halfway to a solution.

Most people want peace, except the political class and elites, in both Israel and Palestine. With peace, a ton of people will find their existence utterly useless.

and unfunded

Quite a few Israelis got elected on platforms of buying peace with land, but things don't always work as planned. Often the peaceful little guy is the first to get mugged, and that has always been a rough neighborhood.

That doesn't work, you make a valid point. I am talking about laying it on the line, where the Israelis and Palestinians acknowledge that they have committed atrocities in the name of--laugh--God. I am proposing a single state solution for all parties involved and let the chips fall where they will, that is the only prayer they have for real peace and societal organization. Hell, they can even name it the country of Israel-Palestine or whatever. Palestine, as an Islamic theocracy is a ridiculous proposition, given the fact about 20% of the population is Christian and Druz. Israel, as a legitimate 'democracy' cannot exist indefinitely as a theocratic state as well, with all of it's cowdoody blood and marriage laws. That's my two cents....

It's a nice dream, but grudges are big in the ME. Maybe some sort of federalism might work, but nothing will work without the support of local Islamic countries. As far as I can tell most of the states have little desire for Israel to survive in any form, and thus have plenty of reason to keep the Palestinians unhappy.

Exactly...a dream...

I lay the blame solely at the feet of British and French Colonialism, then the same modus operandi was continued by the financial interests in this country. I guess war is the health of the State.

War Is the Health of the State by by Randolph Bourne

History is full of it. Advanced societies encroach on primitive ones. Sometimes they help them advance, sometimes they kill everyone and take advantage of the land or natural resources. Most of the time the outcome is somewhere in the middle.

That's true...

On a lighter note, if you ever need a good moving company, give these guys a call. As you can already see Art, I have a weird sense of humor.