Dear MEMRI

Dear MEMRI,

I understand that you have filed a lawsuit against Professor Juan Cole for making "several statements about MEMRI which go beyond what could be considered legitimate criticism, and which in fact qualify as slander and libel."  Two of your complaints - about Professor Cole's statements concerning your financing and your political affiliations - are uninteresting to me, or -  most likely - to anyone else, including a court.  But the heart of your complaint seems to be this: 

"You also write that MEMRI is an "anti-Arab propaganda machine" that "cherry-picks the vast Arabic press." If you have any level of familiarity with MEMRI, you should be aware of our Reform Project, which is one of the most important of MEMRI's projects, and which receives much of our energy and resources. The Reform Project (www.memri.org/reform.html) is devoted solely to finding and amplifying the progressive voices in the Arab world. It is especially disappointing that these charges do not come from an overzealous journalist, but from a member of the academic community, from whom one should be able to expect at least the minimum amount of research and corroboration."

I note that in your letter of complaint you do not actually address the criticism that your sevice "cherry picks the vast Arab press," instead diverting attention to your Reform Project.   I can understand why you choose not to contest Professor Cole's point.   Indeed, it is the near-unanimous consensus of all Arabic-speaking experts on the Middle East that your service does exactly what Professor Cole alleges.  If your lawsuit actually goes to court, I strongly doubt that you would be able to find a single Arabic-speaking expert (other than those already sympathetic to your political viewpoint) willing to testify otherwise. 

To be blunt, Professor Cole is right.  MEMRI routinely selects articles which show the worst of Arab discourse, even where this represents only a minority of actually expressed opinion, while almost never acknowledging the actual distribution of opinion.  As for the Reform Project, it tends to select statements by pro-American reformers who concentrate on criticizing other Arabs, again with little regard for the real debates going on among Arabs.  Your selective translations therefore offer a doubly warped perspective on the Arab debates:  first, over-emphasizing the presence of radical and noxious voices;  and second, over-emphasizing the importance of a small and marginal group of Arabs who share your own prejudices.   What you leave out is almost the entire Arab political debate which really matters to Arabs:  a lively debate on satellite stations such as al Jazeera and al Arabiya and in the elite Arab press about reform, international relations, political Islam, democracy, and Arab culture which English-speaking readers would greatly benefit from knowing about.   

While examples abound, allow me to focus on the specific instance of your complaint:  Cole's attack on your translation of Osama bin Laden's pre-election speech.  To be honest, I thought that Cole went rather easy on you.  I described your release of your "variant" translation - complete with heavy publicity in the National Review, the New York Post, and Fox News - as a display of "disgusting partisanship" which I dearly hope will forever cost you whatever reputation for integrity and objectivity you once held.

I infer from your decision to take action against Professor Cole that this has indeed been the case, that your reputation has taken a serious beating, and that this lawsuit represents an ill-advised attempt to stop the bleeding.  I actually quite hope that the lawsuit, by shining the light again on your remarkable partisan intervention, re-opens the wound and ensures the outcome you hope to prevent.   

Anyway, here's what I wrote at the time:

"MEMRI is cherry-picking a couple of statements on fringe websites to support its own, highly partisan, interpretation. Actually, to be totally clear, they are relying on ONE statement on ONE radical website, which could have been posted by ANYBODY. This is not an authoritative interpretation, nor one which has been accepted anywhere in mainstream Arab or Islamist debates which I have yet seen. This is what MEMRI always does: not mis-translate, but choose selectively among a wide range of sources to find those which support their agenda - and leave non-Arabic speakers with a highly distorted picture of reality."

The 'variant' on which you rested your politically motivated intervention relied on an odd reading of the word 'wilayet' at the end of bin Laden's statement.  Where virtually everybody - not only Americans relying on the English translation but also Arabs in the mainstream media and in the jihadist chat rooms - interpreted bin Laden as warning America that it must change its policies or face another attack, you decided to translate 'wilayet' as "U.S. state" and to read this as a very different threat:  that any American state which voted for Kerry would be granted a seperate peace, while any American state voting for Bush would be under threat.  This reading served the Bush election campaign very well, by reinforcing the odd belief that bin Laden wanted to see Bush lose and that a vote for Kerry was therefore a vote for bin Laden.

On the 'wilayet' controversy, I noted that "MEMRI's argument entirely on bin Laden's use of the word 'wilayet' instead of 'dawla' to refer to 'state.' While MEMRI is correct that in normal usage, wilayet would refer to a sub-unit (such as an American state), its dictionary definition is, in fact, 'sovereign power, sovereign, sovereignty, rule, government' (Hans Wehr dictionary)."   I also pointed out the context of the wider argument of bin Laden's speech.  It was also worth noting that you not once but repeatedly referred to "ay-wilayet" in your publications, which is bafflingly wrong:  the correct Arabic would have been "al-wilayet", which calls your Arabic competence into question; and at any rate bin Laden did not use a definite article in his speech (it was "kul wilayet").  Later, I pointed out that the use of 'wilayet' to refer to the second Bush administration's term had become widespread in the Arab media.   I concluded that your reading was "possible, but highly implausible."   

But here's the problem:  even if your translation was marginally plausible, you never once acknowledged that your highly charged translation was controversial, contested, or a minority view.  Instead, you hyped it through partisan channels in a clear attempt to influence the election, without the slightest regard for standards of objectivity or intellectual honesty.

How did you support this variant reading, at odds with how almost all actually existing Arabs had interpreted it?  By reference to a single post on a single jihadist chat room, al Qala'a.  Well, on that website, the very next day, a poster on al Qala'a wrote an extended treatise entitled "America fell into Shaykh Bin Laden's trap."  You didn't translate that one.  And, indeed, on al Qala'a, al Islahi, and other jihadist chat rooms the overwhelming response to Bush's re-election was joyous:  again, a point which your readers might have needed to know.

In the whole wilayet controversy, therefore, you have fully lived up to your bad reputation:  you presented your highly controversial variant translation in the most partisan way possible, based on a very thin foundation of evidence, without ever acknowledging that weakness or - in the weeks since - responding to your critics or to the increasingly powerful evidence in the other direction.   You similarly refused to translate commentaries on the very same sites which did not support your views, which gave your readers a highly warped perspective on the state of Arab argument.

In short, if you do decide to take Professor Cole to court over the allegation that you cherry-pick the Arab media to offer a highly warped perspective of Arab discourse, expect to lose.  The trial would be  exceedingly helpful to the general good of discrediting you by shining light on your translation and selection practices.   

Cheerfully yours,
the aardvark
[email protected]

PS if you want to see other example of attacks upon your intellectual integrity, please select "MEMRI" from the categories bar to the right.   

FOR REFERENCE:  lots of people in the blog world are commenting on this.   I'll add more as I notice them.
Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber
American Amnesia
Atrios
Brad DeLong
Armed Liberal at Winds of Change
The Agonist

Comments

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Cole's definitely got my vote on this one. I don't particularly care for his opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I think he often uses his genuine expertise in Iraqi affairs to pretend to a false expertise on Israel, but MEMRI's attempt to intimidate him by threatening legal action is despicable.

[Esmail Hadjihabib]

Dear Mr. Yigal Carmon,
My name is Esmail Hadjihabib and I am an American with Iranian ancestry. I came to this country 30 years ago. I did so to obtain an education and did not go back due to radical behaviors of the people of the Middle East. I am politically active with moderate views.

It has come to my attention that you are planing a law suit against professor Juan Cole. I like you to reconsider your position. I have great admiration for his work and believe he is on the right path for helping all people of the Mideast and America.

I, like Mr. Cole, have come to the conclusion that many American supporters of Israel believe all discussions about Israel should only come from her supporters. This politically motivated belief is not what makes this country great. I like to remind you that people who have adopted this as their country of choice, believe strongly that all points of view are important and no one group of people should have a monopoly on the distribution of information. This censorship will leads to dictatorship and eventual destruction of this great experience called democracy. I therefore urge all my friends to actively participate in this camping against your desire to control information.

I thank you for reading this letter and urge you to reconsider your position. Those of us who believe strongly in democracy will staunchly defend Mr. Cole's right to express his view.

[Geo]

Dear the aardvark,

I'm pretty sure, from a rereading of Dr. Cole's post, that a lawsuit has been threatened against him, but not actually filed.

Because you ever-so-slightly misrepresented the truth in a trivial way, even though all of your central points are intelligent and valid, we here at MEMRI plan to sue you unless you remove all of your statements!

Thank you for your time.

[the aardvark]

"Threatened to sue", not "filed a lawsuit" - my mistake, as several emailers and others have pointed out. Sorry.

[praktike]

Nice work. As I think I said before, I think the most egregious part of the MEMRI translation you talk about is their insertion of "US," which clearly was not there at all.

[reader]

I suggest you check Martin Kramer's latest Sandstorm entry. He not only fact checks and debunks Cole's lies about MEMRI, he also reveals that two years ago Juan Cole threatened Kramer and Daniel Pipes with a frivolous lawsuit of his own. Isn't this a little hypocritical?

[John]

I've been quoting MEMRI at my site, Crossroads Arabia. Sometimes they get it right; sometimes they slip in the extraneous adjective that changes reality. Their translations are, on the whole, good. But when they err, the errors always seem to go in an anti-Arab/anti-Muslim way. That certainly gives pause to wonder.

[As`ad AbuKhalil]

Really good abuaardvark. I agree that Juan Cole was too easy on them.

[Martin Kramer]

I invite all of you over to Sandstorm, to read about how Juan Cole threatened myself and Daniel Pipes with a frivolous lawsuit over web content. I am amused to see him posing now as a champion of (and martyr for) freedom of expression on the web. I don't think I ever got a letter quite like the one he sent me (and it wasn't even my website...)

http://www.martinkramer.org/pages/899529/index.htm

[Gary Sauer-Thompson]

Abu,
I've come a bit late to this. I'm with Cole on this.

As Adorno wrote, critique is essential to all democracy. It is essential in terms of freedom to criticize and in the checks and balances within the federal separation of powers, where each work by subjecting the others of critique.

Critique is both the lifeblood of democracy and a sign of political maturity as it signifies a citizen thinking and speaking for him/herself.

What we see here with MEMRI and the threat of SLAPPS is a dampening down of critique and and a desire to bring it to a halt.

[Diana]

This lawsuit will get about as far as Richard's Perle's threatened lawsuit against Sy Hersh, which was not filed by the time the statute of limitations for libel expired. Time to institute another "lawsuit watch" like those guys at Slate did for that idiot Perle, we can count down the weeks until it's clear MEMRI doesn't mean what it says.

But then those guys never do, do they?

[Kirk]

Mr. Kramer,

How nice to finally get a chance to interact with you.

I find it quite a stretch to compare the Juan Cole-MEMRI flap with Campus Watch. He apparently erred in the funding figures (which are still unavailable), and accused MEMRI of cherry-picking the Arab media. Should the funding error merit a SLAPP warning? Do you believe that MEMRI maintains a balance in its presentation of Arab media? If so, where is the fulcrum in their cartoon section?

Furthermore, how can you claim to have no connection with Campus Watch? You're the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, located with Campus Watch and Daniel Pipes' other projects at the Middle East Forum. Perhaps I'm unfair in pairing your projects with Pipes', but your online presence suggests collaboration with him.

Then again, you might very well disregard these comments since I graduated from the infamous Univ. of Chicago's Near Eastern studies dep't that you deride in "Ivory Towers," which chastises academics for failing to predict 9/11. Campus Watch's chronicle of anti-semitism at the University of Chicago was a list of wholly unverified "reports" from students.

[the aardvark]

Gosh, while I've been off eating turkey, the Juan Cole/MEMRI episode seems to have taken a detour. Martin Kramer published that email sent by Cole to Kramer and Daniel Pipes after the launch of Campus Watch in which Cole threatened legal action, and everyone has exploded into a big bundle of Thanksgiving frenzy!

So what do I think? Well, first off, I seem to be one of the very few people around on decent terms with both Kramer and Cole, and I'd like to keep it that way! And let's be honest... when Martin Kramer and Juan Cole start calling each other names, it just makes me think of that great line from the Buffy musical: "Dawn's in trouble? Must be Tuesday."

I don't actually have much of an opinion on the lawsuit questions. Some of the sideline lawyering and semantic exercises seem pretty silly to me - the MEMRI letter speaks for itself. Nor do I have anything particularly innovative to say about the whole mess. MEMRI shouldn't have threatened Cole, Cole shouldn't have threatened Campus Watch. Enough with the legal threats. Threats bad.

Especially when they distract everyone from the real point: it's all about MEMRI and whether or not they cherry-pick; I agree with Cole that they do. The closest analogy for me would be Fox threatening to sue someone who accuses them of having a conservative bias.

What provoked this post was MEMRI's brazen denial that they engage in selective translations. I argue that they do, and further maintain that this renders it an unreliable and largely pernicious source on the Middle East. This post gave a fairly detailed explanation, with evidence, of how I think MEMRI behaved badly in the wilayet affair (hopefully, the obscure double-trackback guy who selectively quoted me in defense of MEMRI's selective quotations is capable of understanding the role which "evidence" plays in evaluating arguments). There are lots of other examples which I've given before, and will continue to give, of this cherry-picking.

So Kramer's intervention might muddy the waters for some people about Cole, but hopefully won't distract from what I see as the core issue: that on the matter of MEMRI's reliablity, Cole was right.

[Brian Ulrich]

"Well, first off, I seem to be one of the very few people around on decent terms with both Kramer and Cole, and I'd like to keep it that way!"

Would this make you the Bill Clinton of the Middle Easternist blogosphere?

[Jay]

For the record: Carmon should immediately retract his litigation threat. It's an outrageous attempt to muzzle free speech.

It would be decent if Cole apologized for threatening to sue Martin Kramer, but let's not hold our breath.

The real issue here is MEMRI's reliability and credibility and whether Cole's "cherrypicking" charge invalidates MEMRI. My gut tells me that MEMRI probably does cherrypick, emphasis on the word "probably" because I do not read Arabic.

But doesn't this conveniently ignore the fact that all of these newspapers are either government-controlled, or at the very least, severely censored. Is Cole of Abu A. seriously saying that the Arab world isn't infected by paranoia about Jews?

Arabs and Arab states have legitimate criticisms of Israel and Israelis--but that is a different issue than the one at hand. I haven't read MEMRI in a while, but I know that state controlled television in Lebanon and Egypt puts on soap-operas that repeat the blood libel. Why is it so impossible for Cole or Abu A. to admit that there is a huge civilizational problem in the Arab world that goes well beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli government actions? This blind spot belies Cole's stance as a disinterested purveyor of truth. He's a propagandist.

My suggestion is that Cole get a life, the first step of which would be to start a competing translation service, which doesn't "cherrypick" articles from the Arabic press, but which reflects them fairly, from his point of view.

Again, I'm not holding my breath. I think that Cole and his ilk prefer to languish in a pool of self-pity, blaming the evil Zionists for their plight.

[the aardvark]

Jay -
Starting a reliable, non-biased translation service is easier said than done. It takes time and money, which academics don't really have for the most part. I think it's a great idea, and one which has been bandied about a lot, but until someone steps forward with funding it isn't going to happen. I hope it does.

Is there hatred of Israel and Jews in the Arab media? Of course. But it's just as big a mistake to pretend that this is the only thing in the Arab media as it is to deny that it's there at all. That's my problem with MEMRI - not that they point to ugly stuff, which really is there, but that they focus on this to the exclusion of other vitally important trends.

And here's something which is pretty interesting, and important: the anti-Semitic crap is far more likely to be found in the state media - like the Egyptian and Syrian you mention - than in the more independent, transnational media like al Jazeera or al Arabiya (TV) or al Hayat and al Sharq al Awsat (press). And that's where the real action is, and the momentum.

As for me, I just blog about things that interest me or are relevant to my research, and try not to spend too much time on something which is, remember, just an uncompensated hobby. I don't claim to be a comprehensive window into the Middle Eastern media. There are plenty of people - you know who they are - who devote their time to lambasting Arabs and Muslims. I prefer to spend my limited time on other things.

The snipe at Cole is just silly. Get a life? He *has* a life, as a professor.. which, believe it or not, is a full time job; as the editor of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, far and away the premiere academic journal in the field; and now as the president-elect of MESA. So life-wise, he's doing just fine. I have my own disagreements with Cole's work, which might not be as obvious as my disagreements with, say, Martin Kramer. But I respect his effort and his expertise, and find it pretty funny how easily those are dismissed by his critics.

[Jamal]

I'll second Abu Aardvark's remarks about how difficult it is to start such a translation service, because I actually did try. We had mock-ups, we applied for 501(c)3 status, bandied the idea about among a few interested parties in academia and on the Hill, even got one small funding pledge beyond the thousand bucks or so of our own money we spent. Besides for finding that such an undertaking really does take a lot of money that isn't easy to come by (unless you can find a rich Gulfie uncle who will immediately lay you open to accusations of being controlled by the rich Sheikh), we also discovered that the unfortunate reality of us already having jobs and lives made it darn near impossible - at least at this stage in our families and careers - to do it. Every 3 months or so we'd pick up the pieces and try to essentially start from scratch again only to run out of time and steam again. It ain't easy, you can really only do something like this if (1) you've got a lot of money which the folks at MEMRI clearly do, and (2) you can more or less dedicate yourself full time to it as Yigal Carmon certainly appears to do.

[Jay]

AA: I'll respond point by point.

until someone steps forward with funding it isn't going to happen. I hope it does.

No, until someone does some active fundraising it won't happen.

Is there hatred of Israel and Jews in the Arab media? Of course. But it's just as big a mistake to pretend that this is the only thing in the Arab media as it is to deny that it's there at all. That's my problem with MEMRI - not that they point to ugly stuff, which really is there, but that they focus on this to the exclusion of other vitally important trends.

What a complete and total piece of equivocation. Would you say the same thing if one racist television show appeared on PBS? It was only one racist show....why concentrate on that one racist show when there is so much good programming on PBS?

You know perfectly well you wouldn't. You'd scream bloody murder.

Why is this different?

A good example would be the Ramadan broadcast in Egypt of "Knight without a Horse". During frikking Ramadan...and this wasn't the first time something like that ran in an Arab country: Lebanon did something of the sort. Are you suggesting that this kind of garbage is rare? Nope, because you then go on to say:

And here's something which is pretty interesting, and important: the anti-Semitic crap is far more likely to be found in the state media - like the Egyptian and Syrian you mention - than in the more independent, transnational media like al Jazeera or al Arabiya (TV) or al Hayat and al Sharq al Awsat (press). And that's where the real action is, and the momentum.

OK.... now you are saying that this anti-Semitic "crap" really does exist, while criticizing MEMRI for pointing it out?

Long may the momentum away from the state-controlled poison-purveyors last, but how many generations of cultural fumigation will it take before the anti-Semitism, which has been inculcated by the state-controlled media, is leached out of the Arab people?

It sounds to me, AA, that what you spend your time on is denial of the truth, and in transmitting a prettified version of reality to your students.

[GregPotemkin]

Greetings and/or salaam Abu Aardvark,

I just came across your blog, and I must say that I am very impressed.

On a side note, I would point out that some of memri’s attempts to portray Arabs and Muslims in a negative fashion are downright funny. This particular link http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=371 was designed to make the case that Arab/Muslims don’t care about their children and/or are so different from us good westerners because they actually glory in the death of their own children.

Of course, all but the utterly brain-dead and/or brainwashed would realize that we good westerners also glorify the deaths of our martyr/heroes who give their lives for our country. But apparently, much of Memri’s purpose is to keep up a steady barrage of translation, tapes and transcripts designed to re-enforce the goofy “thought” processes of those brain-dead and brainwashed people who provide the core support for the Zionists based on their hatred for or complete inability to identify with the A-rabs.

Someone recently posted a link to this transcript http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=371
And then it was used to start a thread on a web-board which I occasionally use here.

http://www.shiachat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=44966

I thought that it was actually kind of interesting to read the reactions from both the thoughtful people as well as the brain-dead and brainwashed who were targetted by memri.

Anyhow,

I enjoy your blog, and keep up the good work.

Greg Potemkin

p.s. - I am of the opinion that Memri produces this stuff primarily for the purpose of allowing it to be used by the Zionist supporting press, which inserts the spin. On the occasion of this thread posting on shiachat.com, it was far less successful, since the spin-meister was not nearly as talented, and his audience was not primed for silly argument.

[the aardvark]

Jay -
Since I've never said that anti-Semitic crap doesn't exist in the Arab media, I'm not contradicting myself. What I've said, many times, is that this is only one part of a much more complex reality. If MEMRI showed us five interesting examinations of the problem of Arab reform, a few articles angrily arguing with each other over the real meaningo of jihad, a bunch of essays sharply disagreeing over whether or not Iraqi or Palestinian elections should be held, and one anti-Israeli rant, I would not attack them for translating the anti-Israeli rant. That's part of the picture. But if the anti-Israeli rant is the only thing which they translate, then they are cherry-picking.