WASHINGTON, 21 December — "When it comes to ‘Arab bashing,’ the American press has reached its zenith," a British journalist recently told Arab News. The virus now appears to have crossed the Atlantic. On Tuesday, the Guardian newspaper ran a 3,000-word story on radical Arab writers in the Arab press.
Their source? The here-to-for-obscure Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, a Washington-based and pro-Israel nonprofit organization that translates the Arab press into English.
The problem is that MEMRI’s sole function is to analyze anti-American and anti-Jewish writing. And, with few translation sources available to them, the American press — which didn’t give a hoot about the Arab press before Sept. 11 — are now eager to show their knowledge, and quote the Arab press.
Critics charge that MEMRI offers a selective perspective of the Arabic-speaking world.
They say the organization purposefully chooses the most audacious articles and editorial in order to push their rightist political agenda.
"It’s all part of the same campaign to try to discredit the Arabs and disrupt relations between the US and the Arab world, and disrupt the peace talks in the Middle East," said Khalil Jahshan, vice president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, ADC.
"Over the past few years, several institutions that are associated with right-wing Israeli radical politics have emerged on the American scene to support Israeli Likudist policies and undermine American rapprochement with its Arab allies, particularly with the Palestinians," said Jahshan. "These institutions focus on exposing what they perceive as anti-American sentiment on the Arab side that would raise concerns in Washington. Other institutions focus on the issue of lack of democracy in the Arab world, others focus on educational school curriculum in Palestine — these are specialized institutions that focuses only these issues, which their lobbyists often use in Congress."
"They are selective and act as propagandists for their political point of view, which is the extreme-right of Likud," said Vince Cannistraro, former head of the CIA’s counterintelligence unit. "They simply don’t present the whole picture."
"The translations, called dispatches, are circulated approximately four times per week via fax and e-mail," writes the Jewish weekly, the Forward. "They can be classified into two main categories: Outrageous anti-American, anti-Semitic diatribes on the one hand, and self-critical articles about the Arab world on the other."
MEMRI has offices in Washington, Jerusalem and London, and operates on a $1.2 million budget, raised exclusively from private donors which the organization declined to name. Since Sept. 11, the organization went from 50 subscribers to 12,000, and its staff has doubled from 9 to 17. Flush with success, the organization now plans to open offices in France and Germany.
Understanding who MEMRI’s co-founder and president is — is a big piece of the puzzle. Yigal Carmon, 55, was a former top official with Aman, the Israeli military intelligence service, and served as a counter-terrorism adviser to former Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir.
According to Forward, after the Labor party came to power in the 1992 elections, Carmon became a much-quoted opponent of the Oslo peace accords, which he called a "historic disaster."
The other co-founder of MEMRI, is American scholar Meyrav Wurmser, who has expressed views similar to Carmon, and advocates the revival of the nationalist values defended by revisionist Jewish leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
Arab critics admit the Arabs have no one to blame but themselves, because MEMRI insists they quote from the Arab government-controlled press and not obscure or extremist publications.
"What adds ammunition to their campaign, it is that there are a lot of careless writers in the Arab world who cross the line in their criticism of Israel," says ADC’s Jahshan.
Thomas Friedman and Richard Cohen, two of America’s most widely quoted columnists, have referred to MEMRI as "invaluable." And their respective newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, rely on it heavily.
So why haven’t the Arabs countered this?
"If we established an group here in the US to show the hatred published against the Arabs, we would be accused of anti-Semitism," said Jahshan.
