This video takes a critical look at the MEMRI TV ‘news service’ upon which all faux-journalists so heavily rely e.g. Tom Freidman of the NYT…As’ad Abukhalil has also over the years done a beautiful job of demolishing the ideological preconceptions which determine MEMRI TV coverage…These faux-journalists can’t speak the languages and then draw much of their source material from a cherry-picked and highly distorted picture, which has been fabricated to further and give credence to the Israeli right and neocon agenda and its depiction on the Mid East, its peoples, culture and politics…
It still amazes me that there remain masses of journalists and pundits out there who claim to be Mid East experts, but can’t speak a word of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu or whatever…In what other region is such a thing possible?
Imagine a journalist covering British or American politics who couldn’t speak a word of English and then relied upon a Saudi news service which selectively translated unfavorable segments of the British or American press…There would surely be outcry in the West and amongst journalists…The dearth of MEMRI coverage portraying Israeli violence, racism and bigotry says it all, and unambiguously points to where the ‘new service’s’ allegiances lie…Is not Israel after all, a part of the Middle East?
There should certainly be coverage of the propagation of racist and illiberal sentiments in the Arab and Middle Eastern press, but it’s also blindingly obvious that there needs to be even-handedness…this is one of the most rudimentary precepts of journalism…In fact, (as anyone who actually reads Farsi, Arabic or Urdu can tell you) there is unremitting critique and questioning of such views e.g. there were literally hundreds of pages dedicated to rebuking Ahamdinejad’s ignorant statements vis-a-vis the Holocaust which smacked of anti-Semitism in the Farsi-language press, and these receive scant if any airtime because their don’t concur with MEMRI TV and its backers monolithic and unnuanced image of the Middle East and Islamic world, their eminent ‘ideological enabler’, which justifies Israel’s and the US’s flouting of international law and acceptable norms of behavior and conduct as well as unilateral military aggression.
On another level, such liberal and critical voices aren’t sufficiently ‘sensationalist’…they’re incongruent with the masked, keffiyeh wearing ‘cold-blooded’ killers and al-Qaedaesque cliches Bush and Cheney keep prattling on about. In other words, they don’t make ‘good tv‘ and so don’t deserve to see the light of day…Racist distortions and fear are what sells! Just ask Fox News…
