MEMRI Loss

MEMRI Loss

Written by Kurt Nimmo

Saturday, 23 June 2007

As we have known for some time now, MEMRI, short for the Middle East Media Research Institute, specializes in disinformation by distorting translations of film and print media stories originating in Arabic, Iranian and Turkish media. In essence, what MEMRI does is change the context of news stories by way of mistranslation and excision. Call it MEMRI loss, the deliberate mangling of media. MEMRI did this to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by turning a speech he delivered in 2005 into a racist and genocidal screed. MEMRI accomplished this through mistranslation. Not a day passes now we do not witness corporate media claims Ahmadinejad wants to wipe Israel off the map. In fact, Ahmadinejad said the “regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.” He did not say Israel must be wiped off the map. But this engineered lie is repeated constantly by the corporate media and to such a degree it is now accepted as fact.

Earlier this week, as Israeli PM Olmert met with Bush, we once again heard this MEMRI spawned lie. Olmert “said he wanted to discuss with Mr. Bush the threat to Israel from Iran, whose president has said Israel must be ‘wiped off the map.’” the Associated Press reports. “Mr. Bush replied that he views Iran’s statements as a ’serious threat’ to Israel and that ‘all options are on the table’ to make sure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon.” In other words, Olmert used the MEMRI lie as the cornerstone for his argument that Iran must be attacked and Bush agreed. It wasn’t long ago the neocons made up similar lies about Saddam Hussein, lies that have so far resulted in the murder of more than 750,000 Iraqis.

For those of us who know something about history, these neocon lies may be accurately compared with the lies and disinformation used by the Nazis to ultimately invade countries and slaughter millions of people. MEMRI, according to Norman G. Finkelstein, employs “the same sort of propaganda techniques as the Nazis. They take things out of context in order to do personal and political harm to people they don’t like,” or people Likudniks and neocons want the United States military to mass murder.

Finkelstein had a close encounter with MEMRI in 2006, when “he gave a TV interview in Lebanon on the way the Nazi Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel,” according to Lawrence Swaim, writing for InFocus, the largest Muslim newspaper in California. “MEMRI recently posted what it alleged was an interview I did with Lebanese television on the Nazi Holocaust. The MEMRI posting was designed to prove that I was a Holocaust denier,” Finkelstein told the newspaper. “Far from being a Holocaust denier, Finkelstein’s own parents were Holocaust survivors, a fact he has often spoken about,” Swaim adds. “But MEMRI was able to create the opposite impression, as Finkelstein demonstrated on his Web site, by editing out large chunks of the actual interview.”

“MEMRI is a main arm of Israeli propaganda,” explains Finkelstein. “Although widely used in the mainstream media as a source of information on the Arab world, it is as trustworthy as Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer was on the Jewish world.” Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, accuses MEMRI of “outright distortion,” while former CIA case officer Vince Cannistraro has written that “they (MEMRI) are selective and act as propagandists for their political point of view, which is the extreme-right of Likud,” in other words, the people associated with MEMRI—David Wurmser, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle and other neocons—are racist reactionaries, no different than the above mentioned Julius Streicher (instead of hating Jews, the neocons hate Arabs and Muslims).

(As an aside, a few pranksters connected to the former Marxist gone neocon David Horowitz’s FrontPage operation, funded by the CIA operative Richard Mellon Scaife, have spent time modifying photos of Streicher in Photoshop, dropping your humble blogger’s head on Streicher’s body, apparently as a reaction to my criticism of Israel and the “extreme-right of Likud” neocons, thus demonstrating not only the silliness but the vicious tenacity of people who cannot stand to hear criticism of their beloved apartheid state, even in the blogosphere.)

“According its critics, until MEMRI starts translating Hebrew stories about the rightward drift of Israeli society, torture of Palestinians in Israeli jails, the forced exile of Ilan Pappe and Azmi Bishara, and the elevation of the neo-fascist Avigdor Lieberman to deputy prime minister of Israel, they aren’t really covering all Middle Eastern media,” Swaim concludes.

Of course, these topics are strictly forbidden, not only for a Mossad operation pretending to be a media translation service, but for the rest of us as well. For instance, in Canada, a news website, the Peace, Earth and Justice News, may soon be convicted of disseminating hate by the Canadian Human Rights Commission at the behest of the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith for posting an article written by your humble blogger on this very subject, as well as for daring to post articles penned by a handful of others accused of “hate crimes” for criticizing Israel.

Come the North American Union, all of us may be sharing a Canadian jail cell or one in Israel, in much the same way Ernest Zündel is locked in a German prison for the crime of bucking the Zionist orthodoxy. As we know, or some of us do—most Americans believe Israel is a democracy—prison cells in Israel, for non-Israelis, often translates into a death sentence. Others are murdered outright—for instance Rachel Corrie, American member of the International Solidarity Movement, crushed to death by an IOF bulldozer for the crime of demonstrating against the demolition of the home of Samir Nasrallah, a Palestinian pharmacist.

Finally, it appears an appreciable number of mostly clueless Americans are stupid enough to fall victim to MEMRI’s lies, as millions of them sincerely believe Ahmadinejad wants to wipe Israel off the map. Of course, they know nothing of MEMRI, or that it is an Israeli intelligence operation run by Yigal Carmon, who “served” in the IOF’s intelligence branch, or that it was co-founded by one Meyrav Wurmser, wife of “Clean Break” author David Wurmser, a dual citizen questioned by the FBI for allegedly passing state secrets on to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It should be noted that Meyrav Wurmser wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Revisionist Zionism, the racist and murderous political philosophy behind the Herut and Likud parties in Israel, thus demonstrating Meyrav’s racism and hatred is a generational affair.

Naturally, when the depleted uranium tipped bunker busters and cruise missiles begin taking out grandmothers and babies in Iran, MEMRI, the mass murdering Likudniks and neocons will be to blame.

However, instead of justice, the perps will likely move on to teach a new generation of psychopaths at Georgetown University or retire to palatial estates on land ethnically cleansed of Palestinians.