Watching present members of Congress presiding over hearing on the Middle East one could be mistaken for believing that they all were fluent in Arabic for they quote at length transcripts from Arabic television stations and Arab editorial pages.

But, alas, members of Congress do not know Arabic (I think only one of them knows some Arabic), America’s Middle East “experts” in government do not even know Arabic, but they all subscribe to MEMRI.

MEMRI is the acronym for Middle East Media Research Institute. MEMRI has establish a following among American journalists writing on the Middle East and “experts” on the region in American think-tanks because they know get to pretend the know what is being written in the Arabic press and said in the Arabic media. All of this individual lack the ability to read an Arabic newspaper, that’s where MEMRI comes in.

There are two things people need to know about MEMRI (and for that matter the even more inaccurate Palestinians Media Watch)

1) Although its translations are sometimes accurate in meaning, they are often dubious. Notice I said meaning, so even those times MEMRI gives you a general idea what the speaker/writer has said/written not the exact translation. I know Arabic and have review MEMRI translations. Often the meaning of a pundit is lost or the words are initially altered in an attempt to smear Arabs and Muslims. For instance, in a famous episode featuring a Palestinian school girl, MEMRI attributed to the girl that statement “We will annihilate the Jews” when she, in fact, said “The Jews will shoot at us.” Instead of MEMRI being discredited, it was the innocent Palestinian girl who was attacked on American right-wing media.

Further, Professor Halim Barakat of Georgetown University cited MEMRI’s translations of his own articles as an example of such distortions: “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.” There are numerous other examples, see Translation Inaccuracy

2) MEMRI positions itself as the window to Arab and, to a lesser extent, Persian media. If only. MEMRI does not attempt to translate Arabic media in a plenary manner (there ready are professional organizations that do that) instead it is dedicated to finding the most extreme thing said by some obscure cleric on some obscure Arab television station (there are about 300 Arab satellite channel) and portray it as representative of Arab opinion in order to impugn Arabs and Muslim. Conversely, MEMRI engages in extensive translations of pro-Bush pro-Iraq War Arabs. So what we get with MEMRI is Bin Ladin and Bin Bush, which is no more than 5% of Arab public opinion.

University of California, Riverside Professor Laila Lalami describes MEMRI as follows: “There are three general observations that can be made about MEMRI’s work. One is that it consistently picks the most violent, hateful rubbish it can find, translates it and distributes it in e-mail newsletters to media and members of Congress in Washington. The second is that MEMRI does not translate comparable articles published in Israel, although the country is not only a part of the Middle East but an active party to some of its most searing conflicts. For instance, when the right-wing Israeli politician Effi Eitam referred to Israel’s Palestinian citizens as a “cancer,” MEMRI did not pick up this story.

The third is that this organization is now the main source of media articles on the region of Islam, a far greater and far more diverse whole than the individual countries it lists.”

So, why? Why does MEMRI engage in such translations?

It’s because MEMRI is a right-wing Zionist institution run by a former Israeli intelligence officer that is bent on smearing Arabs and Muslims in the belief that it is good for Israel. Carmon is the Israeli intel man. The co-founder is a Meyrav Wurmer is an extreme Zionist who resides at the neo-conservative think tank (those who are paid to think by the producers of tanks, as Neomi Klein observed), she is also Israeli and her husband, David Wurmer, is a Middle East adviser to Vice-President and part-time puppy beater Dick Cheney.

I want a more thorough critic of MEMRI and continue to follow their fabrications, see MEMRI Watch