CURRENTS
Middle East: Lifting a Veil on the Arab Press
When Sheik Muhammad Al-Gamei’a, the director of a prominent mosque in New York City, addressed a multifaith assembly shortly after September 11, he spoke in English about peace and tolerance. But when he moved back to Cairo in late September, the sheik changed his tune. In an interview with an Arabic Web site, Al-Gamei’a claimed that Jewish doctors in America poison Muslim children and that “Zionists” perpetrated the September 11 attack.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that translates Arabic- and Farsi-language media, posted the interview on its Web site, www.memri.org. The New York Times hired two independent translators to verify the MEMRI account and then ran a story about the two-faced sheik.
As the Middle East has moved to center stage, U.S. journalists have turned to the institute for translations of Arab news sources. Some reporters see it as a veil-lifting tool. “These people tell you what’s going on in pulpits and in the state-controlled TV,” says Brit Hume of Fox News. “If you have indoctrination, it’s important to know about it.” Others use MEMRI to highlight more tempered sentiments in the Arab world. When Tom Friedman of The New York Times wrote about Arab moderates on June 2, he quoted a MEMRI translation of an Arab diplomat’s call for reform that had been published in the Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. “What would happen if every Arab country had, since 1948, turned its attention to building itself up from within,” asked the diplomat, “without making Palestine its main issue?”
Yigal Carmon — a retired Israeli military-intelligence colonel — started MEMRI in February 1998. The idea, he says, is “to have people in the West read an Arab editorial the way they read it in The New York Times, with their morning coffee. There is nothing like primary sources to give the true picture of any country.” The service is free through MEMRI’s Web site, which draws about 82,000 unique visitors a month, according to Steven Stalinsky, the institute’s executive director; the institute has about 20,000 “subscribers” — also free — who get the translations faxed or e-mailed to them. MEMRI has branch offices in Berlin, London, Jerusalem, and Moscow. Some twenty staff members monitor Arab media, translating editorials, TV broadcasts, school textbooks, and sermons into English, German, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, and Russian.
The privately funded institute raised $106,000 in 1998 from foundations and individual donors and more than $500,000 in 2000, according to its Form 990. The names of individual donors are not listed on the form, and Carmon says he “didn’t get permission from all the donors to give their names.”
Not everyone applauds MEMRI’s contribution. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, agrees with Carmon that there is hate speech and incitement in the Arab press. Zogby claims, however, that MEMRI distorts the Middle East debate because, he says, there is just as much intolerance voiced in the Israeli media. “It’s a two-sided monster,” Zogby says. “Is there incitement in the Israeli press? Yes, there is. Are there disgraceful articles that treat Arabs in racist ways that should raise concern in the West? Yes, there are. Are those articles known? No, they aren’t. MEMRI made it a one-sided issue.”
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