MEMRI’s Doctored Mickey Mouse-Hamas Story and How It Suckered the MSM

by Richard Silverstein on May 16, 2007 · 6 comments

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Tagged as: comment-is-free, hamas, islamophobia, muslim

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W Dean May 16, 2007 at 7:16 AM: I’ve been blogging about this too and posted a full transcript of the show here: http://www.factsontheground.co.uk/?p=120

What really annoyed me about it is that guy from MEMRI going on the Glen Beck show, saying he stood by his translation and then claiming that there were no arabic speakers willing to debate him about the translation. That’s complete BS!

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amir May 16, 2007 at 8:35 AM: First of all I agree with you that MEMRI is agenda driven and their translations should be checked. They provide avery valuable service and even your source for this post Brian Whittaker said “The curious thing about all this is that Memri’s translations are usually accurate “. According to Glen Beck the clip went to CNNs Arab desk, their Israel desk it was aproved in Atlanta, New York and Washington and back to Los Angeles before it was approved. So basically they did exactly what you said they should do. Yigal Carmon stands by the translation and challenged anyone to debate him. Why W Dean thinks that’s BS I have no idea.

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Richard Silverstein May 16, 2007 at 10:47 AM: CNN’s Arab desk rejected the story and CNN allowed that disgusting anti-Arab propagandist, Glenn Beck, to run the story anyway. Yigal Carmon is not a native Arab speaker nor I’m certain does he have any among his staff or volunteers. Whittaker featured CNN’s Arab desk editor debunking his translation. Whittaker confirmed MEMRI’s mistranslation using native Arabic speakers. What more debate does anyone need?

You left out something important that Whittaker added. MEMRI never translates material that would tend to cast Arabs in a positive light or Israelis in a negative light. So the problem isn’t only in the translations which vary widely in quality. It is in the choice of material and the deliberate lack of context provided in many stories it does cover, such as this one.

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W Dean May 16, 2007 at 11:54 AM: Amir,

From watching, Glenn Back, I got the impression that what he was actually saying was that it was passed around between various departments of MEMRI [ed. I think you mean 'CNN']. And they’re obviously not going to mention it’s a faulty translation. However, at least three independent reliable sources have now confirmed that MEMRI’s translation is wrong. And that’s why it’s BS!

Also, as Richard has already mentioned MEMRI ‘cherry pick’ their translations and use only extremists and never provided any kind of context for it.

So If you imagine someone picking up the worst bilge you could hear from Kahanist wingnuts translating it to Arabic and then claiming that it represents Judaism in total then you got what MEMRI are doing to Arab culture.

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