Middle East Media Research Institute
The Middle East Media Research Institute (Abbreviation: MEMRI ) is an organization for the observation of Islamic media in the Middle East. As an independent claims to non-governmental organization MEMRI was founded in 1998 in the United States with headquarters in Washington, DC founded by the American Jewish Meyrav Wurmser and Yigal Carmon the Israeli. Meyrav Wurmser is a neoconservative adviser right of Israeli and American politicians and Yigal Carmon is a former officer in the Israeli secret service.
MEMRI maintains a media center in Jerusalem as well as offices in Baghdad and Tokyo.
Work and goals
MEMRI created English and to a lesser extent, German translations and analyzes of texts and videos from Arabic and Persian-language media, which are available free on your own website. MEMRI maps cartoons from Arab and Iranian newspapers, and interprets them. The work focuses on the region of the Near and Middle East. The organization "is not the aim of ensuring the media landscapes between Cairo and Tehran representative " follow according to his own account, it was concentrating "on opinions and comments that are published in relevant media of the region on key issues ."
MEMRI wanted this document, among other things " radical nationalist, anti-Semitic and Islamist " positions. On the other hand, there are the "moderate, liberal and progressive forces " whose voices keeps within the Arab- and Persian-language media landscape MEMRI for significant. Decidedly one wants to confront stereotypes about " Islam " or the societies of the region and provide Arab reformers in the Western public a greater voice.
According to MEMRI benefit from the services of this non-governmental organization, especially the military of the United States, the White House, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Justice, etc. and more than 500 academic institutions worldwide.
MediaTransparency stated that MEMRI has received high monetary donations conservative American think tanks such as the Randolph Foundation ..
Other projects
About a mailing list that MEMRI sent three times a week for free translations and analyzes of Arab and Iranian media. It is often to documents and publications that would otherwise only indirectly find no echo in the Western public or in the Western media reports or input would be even completely ignored.
MEMRI also operates the Arab TV Monitoring Project, which deals with the most important Arab and Iranian state television programs and the variety of satellite channels in the region decreased in recent years on the air. Subtitled recordings are available for journalists and other multipliers also in broadcast (but also in the content of reworked ) quality.
Criticism
Critics doubt MEMRIs neutrality and sometimes its competence.
The journalist Brian Whitaker published in 2002 in the British " Guardian " published an article in which he administers the Institute Relations of the senior staff to the Israeli military and right-wing U.S. think tanks. He also accuses MEMRI anti-Arab bias and a commitment to Zionism. Although the translations of MEMRI especially from Arabic and Persian were correct, however, the text and media selection is one-sided and quotes were taken into falsifying contexts. Whitaker points to the backgrounds of the MEMRI founder Yigal Carmon, who occupied a high place in Israeli military intelligence and Meyrav Wurmser, a leading employee of right-wing American and Israeli think tanks such as the Hudson Institute and the Ariel Center for Policy Research.
MEMRI dismissed the accusations: The selection of texts is representative, Whitaker could not even Arabic and quote a Islamists against MEMRI; even the Palestinian Authority have already published translations from MEMRI on their homepage.
Various observers criticize the selection of translated and distributed by the Institute texts as not representative. These are extreme, hateful, inflammatory articles in the rule. MEMRI would with this selection (conscious) to give the impression that the media landscape of the " observed " region consists only of such articles. The Moroccan- American author Leila Lalami points out that similar products of Israeli media or statements of Israeli politicians would almost never translated and distributed by the Institute, such as when the right-wing Israeli politicians and multiple Minister Effi Eitam Palestinians called a "cancer ".
The precision and accuracy of MEMRI translations is called into question. Errors in translations have the tendency to make statements still " controversial ".