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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (23451)	4/4/2002 3:00:41 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Havent seent this posted....an analysis of MEMRI by the On-line Journalism Review. Of course, I dont know if the OJR has a bias ;-). ojr.org An excerpt.... MEMRI's success depends on doing a simple job well, and using a push medium to get it out. The news selections - made at the group's Jerusalem office - are not a substantially different species from the news provided by World Press Review, but e-mail and fax distribution puts these stories into rapid circulation, and helps ensure this version of Arab media gets prominence. It's a service that organizations more sympathetic to the Arabs seem unwilling or unable to provide. 'We don't have any money,' says Andrew Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. 'We don't have the resources to put out translations. Have you ever seen our magazine? Our magazine is a gem by itself, and that's what we do.' To be fair, MEMRI's picture of an extreme, militant and delusional Arabic press allows for a few shadings. One recent article notes the efforts of Kuwaiti professor Ahmad Al-Baghdadi to critique Arab Muslims as 'the masters of terrorism towards their citizens.' Another cites a rhetorically deft dismantling of current anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by Saudi columnist Hamad Abd Al-Aziz Al-'Isa. But there are enough stories about extremist kindergartens and calls for jihad to attract criticism from the growing Arab and Islamic lobbies. 'They tend to translate non-representative stories,' says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, 'and members of the pro-Israel lobby then use them to club Muslims.' That MEMRI has a bias against Arab societies can hardly be disputed. Although chairman Yigal Carmon occasionally argues for restraint in Israel's dealings with the Palestinians, he has been fixated on both the failure of the peace process and extremist Arab media for many years. Co-director Wurmser argues at length for blood-and-iron approaches to Israeli nationalism. MEMRI writers stay focused on the Middle Eastern culture of incitement when writing for other publications. What is not clear is why this is necessarily an unfair representation of the Arabic media. 'They look for the absolute worst, most inflammatory rhetoric they can find in the Arabic press,' says CAIR's Hooper. 'It's kind of like if we translated Franklin Graham's remarks [condemning Islam as a 'wicked' religion], and then went to the Arabic press and said 'See, this is what they're saying in America.'' Well, since Franklin Graham is the son of a prominent U.S. religious leader, and his views are neither unique nor even particularly unusual, it would be quite fair to do just that. 'Not if you say it's representative,' says Hooper. 'I don't think those remarks by Franklin Graham represent a large number of Americans.' But that's the catch. Just how unrepresentative are the comments the Middle East Media Research Institute highlights? Anybody who has spent any time in the Middle East, or even stayed alert to Arab politics, knows that MEMRI doesn't need to travel very far to cherry-pick offensive comments. Indeed, after listening to enough college professors who believe Jews blew up the World Trade Center, priests who say the Holocaust never happened, business executives who tell you McDonalds donates all its Saturday profits to suppressing the Palestinians, burghers who contend that the CIA assassinated Bashir Gemayel, and college students who argue that a rabbinical cabal is suppressing the message of Pat Buchanan, you begin to recognize MEMRI's picks not as extreme outliers but as very common Middle Eastern sentiments, the very air of political discourse in the Arab world. MEMRI is enjoying some success. (Steve Stalinksy, the organization's executive director, now brags at National Review Online that awareness of extremism in the Egyptian media has begun to penetrate Capitol Hill). But that success is also a measure of the failure of moderate pro-Arab thinkers to get ahead of this story, to debate, or even acknowledge the existence of, the abundant lunacies that hold sway in the Arabic media. To listen to the many followers of Edward Said's increasingly irrelevant Orientalist critique, you'd think the problem is American misperceptions about Middle Eastern culture. CAIR's Ibrahim, for his part, doesn't confront the issue but simply counterattacks, using the tried and true 'I know you are but what am I' tactic. Meanwhile, it's left to the Arabs' enemies to explain for an American audience why so many people seem to believe that Jews blew up Egyptair 990 and that the U.S. is dropping poisoned food packets on Afghanistan. The Web and particularly the kinds of mailing-list approaches that work well for instant news are vital tools for getting a broader picture of opinion in the Middle East. So far, the champions of Arabic and Islamic thought have markedly failed to use those tools. The picture of Arab media presented by MEMRI is a slanted, ridiculous cartoon. But it is not an entirely inaccurate picture. It's also a vital service at a time when Americans are starved for other viewpoints. And at the moment, it's one of the only shows in town.