Positive Liberty

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) promises to “bridge the language gap” between the newspapers of the Middle East and the English-language world. The results are often disturbing, and conservatives like to point to MEMRI as proof of the benightedness of the Muslim world.

I would like to make a different argument. I find that while MEMRI often provides a valuable service, it just as often imposes a new language gap, with a new set of questions that cannot be solved through reference to its articles alone.

Consider the following two stories.

This article from Iran claims that the United States Armed forces set up the web site www.rape.com, which allegedly contains pictures of American soldiers raping Iraqi women. Apparently the army has posted these pictures to “celebrate.”

Now this is a blatant lie, as anyone with an Internet connection can immediately verify. Rape.com is a website offering information, counseling, and support for rape victims in the United States. The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network runs the site, and searching rape.com for “Iraq” yields no hits at all.

Now let’s look at another story. From Egypt, this article claims that the Jews are behind every single act of international terrorism. And the evidence?

“…after every terror operation they perpetrate, they leave a sign, clue, or traces meant to show that the perpetrators are Arab Muslims.”

QED: Because Muslims appear to be guilty, Jews must be the real perpetrators, an argument I can’t really see as convincing to anyone. The same article also recycles the absurd claim that 4,000 Jews were warned in advance about September 11. The Anti-Defamation League has documented many similar stories, most of which strike a similarly paranoid tone. Are we really to believe that not a single one of the 4000 Jews working in the World Trade Center bothered to tip off the U.S. government? Even a second’s thought reveals how feeble this argument is.

Both of the above stories are entirely bigoted, entirely false, and altogether pernicious. Yet presenting them as MEMRI has done, without commentary or analysis, does more to obscure than to enlighten.

First, we should note that both articles came from official, state-run presses, and that critical, independent journalism is forbidden in both countries. This is the typical state of affairs in the Middle East, and MEMRI’s typical news article is thus the product of a propaganda machine. Given these facts, we must ask ourselves: Do these stories reflect genuine public opinion? Or are they just the opinions that the Egyptian and Iranian governments want people to have? During the bad old days of the Soviet Union, did anyone think that the typical Russian got all of his opinions from Pravda? No–Somehow, most Westerners were sure that the Russians didn’t believe the Soviet news system either.

Nor should we trust opinion polls that show such stories to be popular in the Muslim world. That Middle Eastern newspapers print this drivel, and that people there claim to believe it, tells us virtually nothing about what people really believe: Much like journalism, opinion polls are notoriously inaccurate in an authoritarian country. In a police state, individuals will say only what is expected of them, holding close to the government line for fear of discovery and punishment. I understand that both Egypt and Iran regularly torture dissidents.

To make matters worse, these stories tell us even less about what people in the Middle East would prefer to think, were they given the chance to develop their own opinions in an environment of freedom of expression and conscience. Even if many Egyptians sincerely believed the nonsense printed in their newspapers–and this is the worst-case scenario–might these same people not change their minds, if they had other opinions and ideas to choose from?

Here is where MEMRI, useful as it is, seems at its weakest. While MEMRI may bridge the language gap, it does so in only one direction, funneling to the West all those state-manufactured opinions that are most certain to infuriate us. It’s true that more liberal voices do exist, and that MEMRI provides these as well, but the state-run media clearly dominates MEMRI’s work, just as it dominates in the Middle East itself. Because MEMRI works in only one direction, and because it offers no possibility for exchange among individuals of different perspectives, the site serves largely to reify the state-manufactured opinions that it translates, while doing little to work for greater freedom.

The result is polarization: Simpler folk over here often take these Pravdaesque stories to be expressions of an authentic public opinion. Comparatively few people, I think, seem to recognize that as with Soviet Union, a public opinion that is authentic in both form and expression has little chance to develop in the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East. That liberal voices manage to get through at all speaks volumes in itself about what’s really going on.

How much more could MEMRI’s staff accomplish if, say, they devoted some of their time to translating English-language commentary into Arabic? What if they translated both sides of our public debates? Suppose they also transmitted the ideas of Western anti-war writers, to give the Muslim world intellecutal ammunition for opposing the U.S. war in Iraq without the idiotic conspiracy theories that now dominate their media? Why, that could be the start of real intellectual freedom, with multiple points of view, from multiple cultures and ideological perspectives, all competing for attention. Take that, state-run media.

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