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The effect of this is to devalue everything Memri translates - good and bad alike. Responsible news organisations can't rely on anything it says without going back and checking its translations against the original Arabic.

The curious thing about all this is that Memri's translations are usually accurate (though it is highly selective in what it chooses to translate and often removes things from their original context). When errors do occur, it's difficult to attribute them to incompetence or accidental lapses. As in the case of the children's TV programme, there appears to be a political motive.

Juan Cole, Professor of Modern Middle East History at the University of Michigan, argues MEMRI has a tendency to "cleverly cherry-pick the vast Arabic press, which serves 300 million people, for the most extreme and objectionable articles and editorials...On more than one occasion I have seen, say, a bigoted Arabic article translated by MEMRI and when I went to the source on the web, found that it was on the same op-ed page with other, moderate articles arguing for tolerance. These latter were not translated."[31] Former head of the CIA's counterintelligence unit, Vincent Cannistraro, said that MEMRI "are selective and act as propagandists for their political point of view, which is the extreme-right of Likud. They simply don't present the whole picture

Halim Barakat described MEMRI as a "a propaganda organization dedicated to representing Arabs and Muslims as anti-semites." Barakat claims an essay he wrote for the Al-Hayat Daily of London titled The Wild Beast that Zionism Created: Self-Destruction, was mistranslated by MEMRI and retitled as Jews Have Lost Their Humanity. Barakat further stated "Every time I wrote Zionism, MEMRI replaced the word by Jew or Judaism. They want to give the impression that I’m not criticizing Israeli policy, but that what I’m saying is anti-Semitic".[41][45][46] According to Barakat, he was subject to widespread condemnation from faculty and his office was "flooded with hatemail."[47][48] Fellow Georgetown faculty member Aviel Roshwald accused Barakat in an article he published of promoting a "demonization of Israel and of Jews".[49] Supported by Georgetown colleagues, Barakat denied the claim[50] which Roshwald had based on MEMRI's translation of Barakat's essay.[49]

Arabic under fire
A child on Hamas TV talked of annihilating the Jews ... or did she?
Brian Whitaker
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 May 2007 21.30 BST


Memri, the "research institute" which specialises in translating portions of the Arabic media into English, has issued a video clip from a children's programme on Hamas TV in which it claims that a Palestinian girl talked of becoming a suicide bomber and annihilating the Jews.

Memri - described by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as "invaluable" - supplies translations free of charge to journalists, politicians and others, particularly in the US.

Though Memri claims to be "independent" and maintains that it does not "advocate causes or take sides", it is run by Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence. Carmon's partner in setting up Memri was Meyrav Wurmser who in 1996 was one of the authors of the now-infamous "Clean Break" document which proposed reshaping Israel's "strategic environment" in the Middle East, starting with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

In the Hamas video clip issued by Memri, a Mickey Mouse lookalike asks a young girl what she will do "for the sake of al-Aqsa". Apparently trying to prompt an answer, the mouse makes a rifle-firing gesture and says "I'll shoot".

The child says: "I'm going to draw a picture."

Memri's translation ignores this remark and instead quotes the child (wrongly) as saying: "I'll shoot."

Pressed further by the mouse - "What are we going to do?" - the girl replies in Arabic: "Bidna nqawim." The normal translation of this would be "We're going to [or want to] resist" but Memri's translation puts a more aggressive spin on it: "We want to fight."

The mouse continues: "What then?"

According to Memri, the child replies: "We will annihilate the Jews."

The sound quality on the clip is not very good, but I have listened to it several times (as have a number of native Arabic speakers) and we can hear no word that might correspond to "annihilate".

What the girl seems to say is: "Bitokhoona al-yahood" - "The Jews will shoot us" or "The Jews are shooting us."

This is followed by further prompting - "We are going to defend al-Aqsa with our souls and blood, or are we not?"

Again, the girl's reply is not very clear, but it's either: "I'll become a martyr" or "We'll become martyrs."

In the context of the conversation, and in line with normal Arab-Islamic usage, martyrdom could simply mean being killed by the Israelis' shooting. However, Memri's translation of the sentence - "I will commit martyrdom" turns it into a deliberate act on the girl's part, and Colonel Carmon has since claimed that it refers to suicide bombers.

The overall effect of this is to change a conversation about resistance and sacrifice into a picture of unprovoked and seemingly motiveless aggression on the part of the Palestinians. But why hype the content in this way? Hamas's use of children's TV for propaganda purposes is clearly despicable, as the BBC, the Guardian and others have noted, without any need to exaggerate its content.

Among those misled by Memri's "translation" was Glenn Beck of CNN, who had planned to run it on his radio programme, until his producer told him to stop. Beck informed listeners this was because CNN's Arabic department had found "massive problems" with it.

Instead of broadcasting the tape, Beck then invited Carmon on to the programme and gave him a platform to denounce CNN's Arabic department, and in particular to accuse one of its staff, Octavia Nasr, of being ignorant about the language.

Carmon related a phone conversation he had had with Ms Nasr:

She said the sentence where it says [in Memri's translation] "We are going to ... we will annihilate the Jews", she said: "Well, our translators hear something else. They hear 'The Jews are shooting at us'."

I said to her: "You know, Octavia, the order of the words as you put it is upside down. You can't even get the order of the words right. Even someone who doesn't know Arabic would listen to the tape and would hear the word 'Jews' is at the end, and also it means it is something to be done to the Jews, not by the Jews."

And she insisted, no the word is in the beginning. I said: "Octavia, you just don't get it. It is at the end" ... She didn't know one from two, I mean.

Carmon's words succeeded in bamboozling Glenn "Israel shares my values" Beck, who told him: "This is amazing to me ... I appreciate all of your efforts. I appreciate what you do at Memri, it is important work."

It was indeed amazing, because in defending Memri's translation, Carmon took issue not only with CNN's Arabic department but also with all the Arabic grammar books. The word order in a typical Arabic sentence is not the same as in English: the verb comes first and so a sentence in Arabic which literally says "Are shooting at us the Jews" means "The Jews are shooting at us".

I have written about Memri's tweaking of translations before. One example was its manipulation of Osama bin Laden's speech on the eve of the last American presidential election (details here, at the end of the article). Another was an Egyptian newspaper's interview with the mufti of Jerusalem. Memri's translators changed the question: "How do you deal with the Jews who are besieging al-Aqsa and are scattered around it?" to "How do you feel about the Jews?" They then heavily edited the mufti's words to give an anti-semitic-sounding reply to the new question.

The curious thing about all this is that Memri's translations are usually accurate (though it is highly selective in what it chooses to translate and often removes things from their original context). When errors do occur, it's difficult to attribute them to incompetence or accidental lapses. As in the case of the children's TV programme, there appears to be a political motive.

The effect of this is to devalue everything Memri translates - good and bad alike. Responsible news organisations can't rely on anything it says without going back and checking its translations against the original Arabic.

rayznack wrote:There is no equivalent to a liberal counterpart to Haaretz, SPLC, etc., etc in the Muslim world. The only reason we know an Ohio based imam recently appeared on an Arabic satellite television channel calling for the blood of Jews is because of MEMRI.

Frankly, MEMRI is disliked because the Antisemites, conspiracy nutters and all around bigots can't comfortably stew in their hate with MEMRI doing the job of non-existent ME liberals in exposing what the haters say.

Perhaps it's merely a coincidence why we never get stories from these type of members about extremism on their side? Or am I to believe if American churches call for the killing of religious groups these members wouldn't pounce on a story like that?

Seth J. Frantzman wrote:A memorable television clip posted online in late July showed an Egyptian actor, Ayman Kandeel, assaulting television host Iman Mubarak. After he beat the slim woman, he said to her "you brought it on yourself." The terrible misdeed that the woman committed was pranking the ugly actor into thinking he was being interviewed by an Israeli station.

That clip from Al-Nahar TV was followed by another, showing actor Abdel Ghaffer striking one of the male interviewers and, after being informed it was a "candid camera" show, informing the victim "you brought someone who looks like a Jew... I hate the Jews to death." The clip was translated and posted online by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, which was founded in 1998. It is not entirely clear how much exposure the original Egyptian program has or how famous the actors are. The clip nevertheless tells us a great deal about Egyptian society.

That a man feels free to slap a woman and send her flying across the stage and then says "you brought it upon yourself," tells us much about how a society views women. That another actor feels comfortable, after administering a beating, in telling the victim that he "looks like a Jew," provides an insight into the true view of Jews in Egypt. These are, after all, actors – relatively secular people who usually make up the more liberal progressive vanguard of a country. If this is the progressive view of Israel than one does not want to know what goes on in the rural villages.

In an article originally published at canthink.co.il and later translated by Haaretz, Dr. Assaf David of the Truman Institute for Peace wrote a wide-ranging critique of the work of MEMRI, arguing that its work presents a "one-dimensional choice of anti-Semitic articles, which fits squarely and conveniently with Western interpretations of political Islam."

His evidence deals primarily with MEMRI's analysis of Jordan. "While its coverage of Israeli affairs is far from balanced, anti-Semitic articles are not common." He goes on to show that MEMRI selectively chooses articles which illustrate Islamic fundamentalism, while not sufficiently noting that the "Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood's daily had published, from time to time, articles calling for the upholding of international agreements, including the peace treaty with Israel."

ARGUABLY, IN a perfect world, it would be best to have at our fingertips translations of every article that appears in the foreign press – from Russia, China and the neighboring Arab states. MEMRI obviously sets out to show the more interesting, shocking, things that take place in neighboring countries. This is not relegated to anti-Israel statements. One video showed an overweight chef hosting a friendly cooking show who was constantly being abused by Shi'ite callers and who finally told them that had Saddam Hussein lived he would have dealt with them.

Assaf David and others who complain about MEMRI make a mistake in their reasoning. They assert that to show the anti- Semitic articles and TV segments that issue forth from Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere feeds Western stereotypes of Islam. They once again want us to view the Islamic world through a rosy lens and provide excuses for it that no other part of the world gets.

Take David's analysis that "anti-Semitic articles are not common." Let's say "not common" means that there is not more than one anti-Semitic article a month in a major newspaper. Now let's say we applied that to Germany, France or the US. If, just once a month, the New York Times published an op-ed or cartoon that was deeply anti-Semitic, would that not point to a disturbing acceptance of hatred in American public life. One doesn't need incitement everyday to reflect a problem in society. Just a low level of incitement in the mainstream media points to widespread acceptance.

LET'S RETURN to Ayman Kandeel. If, only once a month, a man beat up a woman on an interview show, would that be too much? Let's say, just once a month, that a man slapped a man for "looking like a Jew" on a major television station. Would that be too much? And let's point the camera at our own society. How often, in Israel, should a racist article appear in a major newspaper for it to be considered a societal problem. Just because things are not "common" doesn't make them acceptable.

David claims that what MEMRI does is "tantamount to an Arab newspaper choosing to translate only a particularly nasty anti-Arab editorial... or an op-ed by Isaac Shapiro and Yossi Elitzur, co-authors of the appalling The King's Torah." This is a great example of the difference. The King's Torah was not only roundly condemned by most segments of Israeli society, but its authors were even investigated for "incitement." In even one case of all the hate-speech that MEMRI translates were the speakers prosecuted in their home countries, or roundly condemned across the political spectrum? Far from it. Kandeel was patted on the back and given a round of applause for being a "good Egyptian."

The argument that, by showing a Western audience what takes place, even uncommonly, throughout the Arab world, increases Western intolerance for political Islam is particularly deceitful. The logic that follows is that the West must be brainwashed, through selective quoting of "peaceful" articles in order to quell it into a quiet acceptance of hatred and fascism. The scholars and peace-journalist activists who support this theory argue that the West should only be shown the articles that, published "from time to time," support peace.

The reality is that you can't make people intolerant just by showing them a translated reality. Surely the press in the American south in the 1950s only rarely published articles that were racist. But that doesn't mean that by providing those articles a wide audience in the north, people received a selective interpretation of the acceptance of racism.

Where MEMRI does make a mistake is in not providing viewers with a clear indication of how much exposure the translated article or show has. If the show is the equivalent of a public access local station in the US, then it probably is not only not representative, but doesn't matter. If it is on a major channel and is watched by millions then something more disturbing is happening.

THE LITMUS test should be what percentage of a culture finds the content problematic. If Kandeel is shown beating a woman because she is Israeli and 80 percent of Egyptians find that acceptable, while The King's Torah is rejected by 80% of the Israeli public, we have a good idea of where each society stands.

Transparency should always be celebrated and those who seek to brush unpleasant facts under the carpet should be condemned. When I was president of my fraternity the guidelines for defining what constituted hazing was "would you mind if the pledges' [potential members] parents were in the room?" That is a good rendition of proper transparency guidelines.

OF COURSE, even with translations, there will be those who find a way to defend what is taking place.

When the vile abominations of the radicals are brought to light, as with Mahmoud Ahmadinejed, an apologist is always waiting to say it is "mis-translated," as if there is more than one way to say "the Holocaust is a myth."

Israeli-Arab author Sayed Kashua relates a recent story of Harvard students visiting his house and hearing his father support the actions of Syria's Assad. The students didn't dare question this narrative. That is because Western university students are often educated to "understand" the other, and when the other expresses support for a little mass killing, from time to time, it must be understood.

After the Kandeel video was posted online, Lisa Goldman, a +972 writer, defended his actions on Facebook. "If the Egyptian actor had really been invited onto an Israeli show under false pretenses then he would have had the right to be angry. If his audience believed he willingly accepted an invitation to be interviewed on Israeli TV he would be in big trouble in Egypt with his peers and possible state security. His career could have been destroyed." What does it say about a country that merely being interviewed by "Jews" can end someone's career and why would anyone on the left support such a "right to be angry?"

That said, Assaf David's rejoinder that we should read the more open-minded polemics of our cousins in the Muslim Brotherhood comes with good intentions. But peace and trust require not only verification, as Ronald Reagan quipped, it requires true understanding of the other – not just romantic notions. Otherwise it is the type of peace Neville Chamberlain brought back, rather than the one signed at Westphalia.