(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
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[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Israel's selective memri
Anyone who has spent any length of time reading the war blogs will most certainly have come across an outfit calling itself MEMRI. It doesn't take too much googling to see that much of the anti-Muslim, anti-Arab bigotry in the war blogs is fueled by MEMRI "news releases".
The Weekly Standard summed up the depth of gratitude that the War Party feels to MEMRI in a gushing article published back in July:
IF THERE WERE JUSTICE in the universe, the Middle East Media Research Institute would already have been awarded some kind of special-achievement Pulitzer Prize. MEMRI has pioneered the careful translation, and dissemination to European and American audiences, of print and broadcast news sources in the Arab world. The group's work now pops up everywhere; here in the States, hardly a week goes by when some major daily or cable news show doesn't make use (generally without attribution) of a MEMRI translation.
Absolutely. Where is the justice?
And the cumulative effect of such translations is--or ought to be, at least--roughly analogous to the body blow struck against European philo-communism by the first Western publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novels in the 1960s. Here, really for the first time, non-Arabic speaking Westerners are being given a direct, first-person look into a previously unseen gulag. Only this time there is no barbed wire, the prisoners all serve by choice, and the anti-Semitism is no longer ancillary but central, basic, and paramount. It turns out that the Islamic Middle East, just as the Israelis have been begging us for years to figure out, has got itself trapped in a deep, deep swamp of near-psychotic Jew hatred.
As a side note, coining a similitude between an organisation such as MEMRI and with Solzhenitsyn is bizarre. Solzhenitsyn's prescription for humanity - making spirituality supreme over modernisation and development - is about as far removed from the warblogger ethos as one can get. Solzhenitsyn rejects the idea that the judge of a society is its level of modernisation, instead believing that "the strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life". It's a long way from the warblogger's simple formula of measuring the Islamic world by its level of westernisation and acceptance of western materialism.
Anyway, back to MEMRI. The first point to know about them is that they are a tax-exempt organisation - in other words they are subsidised by American taxpayers. Money well spent - if you consider, as the Online Journalism Review described MEMRI, spreading "hate speech, baseless conspiracy theories, and vicious calumny in a blatant effort to discredit Arabs and stir up malice towards Muslims" to be a good way to spend money.
That would be sinister enough - yet, there is a more. A lot more. Brian Whitaker explores who is really behind MEMRI, and the results are, well, not really surprising.
MEMRI is run by members or former members of Israeli intelligence services.
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.
This is the very same Colonel Yigal Carmon who went from being interviewed as an expert on "terror" in 1996 to testifying to US House of Representatives on state of the Arab media. Quite the transformation.
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.
