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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.

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

Brit Hume of Fox News said, "These people tell you what's going on in pulpits and in the state-controlled TV. If you have indoctrination, it's important to know about it." [57]

One of MEMRI's strongest supporters is Jay Nordlinger, the managing editor of National Review, who wrote in 2002:

Wading or clicking through MEMRI's materials can be a depressing act, but it is also illusion-dispelling, and therefore constructive. This one institute is worth a hundred reality-twisting Middle Eastern Studies departments in the U.S. Furthermore, listening to Arabs — reading what they say in their newspapers, hearing what they say on television — is a way of taking them seriously: a way of not condescending to them, of admitting that they have useful things to tell us, one way or the other. Years ago, Solzhenitsyn exhorted, "Live not by lies." We might say, in these new circumstances, "Live not by ignorance about lies, either." Anyone still has the right to avert his eyes, of course. But no one can say that that is not a choice.[58]

According to Nordlinger, one of MEMRI's early notable successes was its exposure of Muhammad al-Gamei'a. Al-Gamei'a had served as head of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York and as Al-Azhar University's representative to the United States and frequently participated in interreligious services. However, upon returning to Egypt in October 2001, Al-Gamei'a gave an interview to a prominent Islamic website in which he stated, among other things, that:

* After September 11, Arabs in America could not go to hospitals, because Jewish doctors were making them sick;

* Americans knew that the Jews — not radical Arabs — were responsible for the attacks, but were afraid to speak up about it, for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.

* "[the Jews] are riding on the back of the world powers. These people always seek out the superpower of the generation and develop coexistence with it. Before this, they rode on the back of England and on the back of the French empire. After that, they rode on the back of Germany. But [Adolf] Hitler annihilated them because they betrayed him and violated their contract with him."

* "on the news in the U.S. it was said that four thousand Jews did not come to work at the World Trade Center on the day of the incident, and that the police arrested a group of Jews rejoicing in the streets at the time of the incident...the Jews who control the media acted to hush it up so that the American people would not know. If it became known to the American people, they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did!"[58][59][60][61][62]

One beneficial side effect of the focus on the Middle East is that we now have available much more information on the discourse of the Arab world. The most powerful medium for this is (naturally) a Washington-based think-tank, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), started in 1998 by the former Israeli intelligence officer and Arabist Yigal Carmon. MEMRI aimed to bring the previously largely enclosed and unknown Arab talk about the west to western eyes and ears: it is a sobering experience to read on the internet MEMRI's vast store of translations from many media, and to note how much of what is written is conspiratorial, vicious and unyieldingly hateful. MEMRI and Carmon have been accused of selecting the worst of a diverse media: however, the sheer range of what is available weakens that criticism, as does support for the initiative by Arab liberals. The Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, for example, wrote in the spring 2002 issue of Dissent that Arab intellectuals have allowed a mixture of victimhood and revenge to take hold of popular culture, with few if any dissenting voices.[55]

Other praise came from Thomas L. Friedman, political opinion columnist for the New York Times, who credited MEMRI with helping to "shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears."[56]

shafique wrote:How about tackling the very real examples of mistranslations and misrepresentations?

MEMRI argues that they are quoting the government-controlled press and not obscure or extremist publications, a fact their critics acknowledge, according to Marc Perelman."When we quote Al-Ahram in Egypt, it is as if we were quoting The New York Times. We know there are people questioning our work, probably those who have difficulties seeing the truth. But no one can show anything wrong about our translations."[32]

How about tackling the very real examples of mistranslations and misrepresentations?

Responsible news organisations can't rely on anything it says without going back and checking its translations against the original Arabic.

Sorry, is that a 'no I won't tackle the deliberate mistranslations and misleading quotes you have highlighted in the posts above'?

event horizon wrote:Please show Memri misleads quotes anymore than any of the liberal rags you call mainstream media today.

You imagine that 'liberal rags' are as guilty of misleading quotes as the Memri examples above. Is THAT your only defence? Innuendo?

Memri misleads as per the real examples given.

Uh, no. I'm asking you to show with facts that Memri misleads to any greater extent than any news organizations to put the charges against Memri in context.

If Memri is no more in error than anyone else, then whey should they receive more scrutiny?

Unless you believe the stories in 'liberal rags' which are as bad as Memri, you are actually arguing that we SHOULD be skeptical of Memri's spin because of the intentional misrepresentations etc. Think about it.

The facts show that Memri is nothing more than a propaganda machine.

For example Vincent Cannistraro