Tuesday, May 20, 2003
ARAB PARANOIA?
Decide for Yourself
A few days ago, a friend of mine who keeps up with MEMRI, The Middle East Media Research Institute, sent me a link to a report there about the Zayed Centre, which is basically a permanent think-tank for the Arab League. I thought about blogging this at the time, but the report is long and, in most of its bulk lacks great "punch." It did report that the Zayed Centre has hosted such luminaries as Jimmy Carter, Kurt Waldheim and Jacques Chirac. Like many of the articles translated by MEMRI, it establishes pretty clearly that this quasi-official organ of the Arab League has sponsored some fairly overt anti-Semetic and paranoid stuff, such as the usual rants about Jews controlling the world, planning and carrying out the 911 attacks, etc.
Well, the Zayed Centre has struck back! Check this link for an image of the press release they've issued today. In it, the Zayed Centre claims that the MEMRI report labelled the Zayed Centre "the stray black stone in the Islamic galaxy" and called the individuals mentioned above "donkeys and idiots." No such language exists in MEMRI's report.
Doesn't this sound like the same kind of thing that Saddam's "information minister" used to do -- tell bald-faced, outright lies? I'm honestly mystified by the childish, ham-fisted way that these people handle polemical dialogue. It's as if the concept that someone might check to see if the language they claim to quote was actually used by MEMRI is utterly foreign to them. Is it a mind-set that, as some sort of "authorities," they won't be subject to any kind of doubt? Or do they expect their audience to know that they're probably lying, anyway? I honestly don't get it.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:47 PM
