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

To: slacker711 who wrote (23467)	4/4/2002 3:24:45 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Do these two paragraphs go together? "common sentiments" or "slanted, ridiculous cartoon", which is it? 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. 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. This does confirm that MEMRI is accurate in what it prints, selects major media outlets, and chooses what it finds interesting to print, most of which is the commonly aired conspiracy theories of the Arab world. If America finds it newsworthy that such loony conspiracies are "common sentiments" in Arab political discourse, that speaks well to American judgement imo. I'm not sure how the "champions of Islamic thought" are supposed to answer this, except to point out that they are not all lunatics. MEMRI after all, also prints letters it finds unusual and intelligent; the champions could translate their own picks. But the main point, that these nutcase theories appear in every major paper at least once a week, is hard to dispute.