Thanks for the MEMRI : An institute, and its website, bring the Arab world to light - .org

After the 9/11 attacks, the West realized that it knew little about the Arab world -- in fact, dangerously little. Why do they hate us so, and did this come out of the blue? It seemed imperative to learn more about the Arabs -- to learn, for example, what they were saying to one another, in their media, in their schools, and in their mosques. The Arab world had always been dark this way; it needed to come into the light.

And this is where www.memri.org proved "invaluable," as everyone has said. It is more than a website, of course; it is an institute, specifically the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI. What it does, mainly, is provide translations of Arab newspaper articles, television shows, political statements, sermons, textbooks, and so on. MEMRI invites one and all to "Explore the Middle East Through Its Own Media" -- which is what many people, including journalists, began to do last fall. Plenty of journalists leaned heavily on MEMRI's translations, citing "the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute." In fact, "invaluable" was written so often before MEMRI's name that one could have been forgiven for thinking the word was part of the name. MEMRI served as an antidote to darkness, as a way not to be ignorant.

Consider the case of Sheikh Muhammad al-Gamei'a, as "mainstream" a Muslim as one could have hoped for. He was head of the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque on New York's Upper East Side, the very symbol of Muslim splendor in America. Al-Gamei'a was the kind who participated in interreligious services and offered soothing words about peace, healing, and brotherhood. This is the sort of role he played -- speaking in English -- immediately after September 11.

But then he went home to Egypt and, on October 4, gave an eye-opening interview to a prominent Islamic website. The sheikh told his audience that, after September 11, Arabs in America could not go to hospitals, because Jewish doctors were making them sick; that Americans were firing on mosques and murdering Arabs in the street, with impunity; that Americans knew that the Jews -- not radical Arabs -- were responsible for the attacks, but were afraid to speak up about it, for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.

After expounding on secret Jewish control, al-Gamei'a turned to Hitler -- as Arab opinion-makers tend to do (a fact documented sickeningly and undeniably by MEMRI). Said the sheikh: "Now [the Jews] are riding on the back of the world powers. These people always seek out the superpower of the generation and develop coexistence with it. Before this, they rode on the back of England and on the back of the French empire. After that, they rode on the back of Germany. But Hitler annihilated them because they betrayed him and violated their contract with him."

Al-Gamei'a then explained that "on the news in the U.S. it was said that four thousand Jews did not come to work at the World Trade Center on the day of the incident, and that the police arrested a group of Jews rejoicing in the streets at the time of the incident." But "this news item was hushed up immediately after it was broadcast," because "the Jews who control the media acted to hush it up so that the American people would not know. If it became known to the American people, they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did!"

Under ordinary circumstances, the sheikh's words -- so unlike those he had uttered, in English, while Muslim leader in New York -- would have gone unnoticed in the West. But circumstances had changed, and journalists were attuned to MEMRI, meaning that the usual double game - - sweetness and reason in English, lies and hate in Arabic -- could not be played, in the dark. The al-Gamei'a story made it all the way to the top, which is to say, into the New York Times. The newspaper duly had "two independent translators" confirm the MEMRI translation -- the institute's work has never been found to be anything but honest, accurate, and meticulous. And the sheikh was exposed.

Why do ordinary Arabs believe such awful things about us? rings the question. And the answer -- or at least part of the answer -- is that they hear them from their authorities, incessantly.

The stream of materials kept coming from MEMRI, many of them startling conventional U.S. journalists, in part because a great deal of them came from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two nations always counted among the "moderates." Those acquainted with the Middle East were unsurprised, but everyone else -- who took the question seriously -- was somewhat awed. The anti-Israeli feeling could have been expected; but the anti- Americanism was, if anything, more breathtaking. Still more breathtaking was the anti-Semitism: not garden-variety anti-Semitism, and not present-day European anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism on the Nazi level. A veteran Middle East scholar once confided to me that the Muslim world is full of Mein Kampfs, big and little. Some are full- length books, some are essays, editorials, pamphlets, all declaring intentions, all divulging convictions, all remarkably candid. They have only to be read.