MEMRI is the acronym for the Middle East Media Research Institute, where I spent a bit of time when I was last in Jerusalem. (They also have a headquarters in Washington, D. C.)
They translate pretty much everything that’s put online in the Arab world (ergo requiring a big stable of translators and computers), and MEMRI puts the videos online to let the let the world know what’s going on in the Middle East. They translate stuff from social media, government bulletins, sermons from mosques, schoolbooks, school plays—anything that can give insight into the Zeitgeist in the Arab world. The Arabic, Urdi, Farsi, Turkish, Pashto, and so on are translated into Hebrew and English, and the material they translate is put up at this site. MEMRI also translates some Russian and Chinese articles into both English and Hebrew. (Malgorzata translates many of MEMRI’s English-language articles into Polish, and of those now number 5,022!)
MEMRI’s subscribers include many governments and intelligences services in the West, as well as colleges and universities.
When I asked Yigal why mosques would even want to film sermons full of hatred and condemnation of Jews, he replied that for some reason imams and others can’t resist being on social media.
Before we get to the WSJ article on MRMRI, I’ll retell an anecdote involving its Jerusalem head and co-founder, Yigal Carmon, who previously served for two decades in the IDF, attaining the rank of Colonel, and, well, there’s more from his Wikipedia bio:
From 1977 to 1981, [Carmon] served as an adviser on Arab affairs to the Civil Administration in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When Menachem Milson was appointed to serve as head of the Civil Administration, Carmon was appointed his deputy. Carmon was appointed acting head of the Civil Administration 26 September 1982 after Milson’s 22 September resignation. He served in that position until Shlomo Ilya became the Administration’s head 29 November.
In 1988, Carmon was appointed adviser on counterterrorism for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Following the fall of the Shamir government in 1992, he served for a year as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s counterterrorism adviser before resigning in 1993 due to his opposition to the Oslo Accords. From 1991 to 1992 he was also a part of the Israeli delegation to peace negotiations with Syria in Washington.
He founded MEMRI in 1998, so it’s just had its 25th anniversary.
All this is to say that Yigal knows whereof he speaks, and he’s served both left-wing (Rabin) and right-wing (Shamir) Israeli governments (Carmon’s own allegiance is on the Left), knows many Arab leaders, and when he says something about the political or military climate in the Middle East, he’s worth paying attention to. (By the way, MEMRI has almost never had any mistranslations of the Arabic, despite embarrassed speakers saying that their words weren’t properly translated.)
And that brings us to my anecdote, which is mine. Here it comes:
Yigal is an email friend of Malgorzata, and she put me in touch with him before I went to Israel last September. The second day I was in Jerusalem, I visited MEMRI, and Yigal took me to lunch, along with a reporter named Benjamin Weinthal (name given with permission). During that lunch, Yigal said offhandedly, “You know, I think there will be a war between Hamas and Israel in September or October.” I was stunned, but the reporter wasn’t taken aback and in fact was the first journalist to report Yigal’s prediction. I said “How do you know this?” Apparently the buzz that MEMRI got from the Arab world had given him a hint. Yigal added that there might be a terrorist attack, and if, say five or fewer IDF soldiers were killed, there probably wouldn’t be a war. But if it were ten or more, he added, Israel would probably go to war.
Of course at that time Yigal had no idea that the attack would be on Israeli civilians, not IDF soldiers, and far more than ten would die.
Later, Yigal gave us a “security tour” of the Jerusalem area, pointing out spots of interest in the Arab/Israeli conflict. When I returned to America, I sent his wife (who also gave me several tours of Jerusalem) a copy of my two trade books as a token of gratitude. They were sent to the MEMRI offices.
On October 6, I informed him that I mailed the books, and wrote this email (I’ve bolded the interesting bits):
From: Jerry Coyne Sent: Friday, October 6, 2023 1:32 PMTo: Yigal Carmon
Hi Yigal,I am sending two of my books, as per your wife’s request, to MEMRI, so if the package below comes, please sign for it. They are autographed.Hope all is well in Israel. Where is that war you predicted?best,Jerry
From: Yigal Carmon
To: Jerry Coyne
Fri 10/6/2023 12:43 PM
Thank you , Jerry. We will read at least significant parts of them.Give me some 3 weeks more – as I predicted. I said Sept. or October….
As you can see, that exchange was on October 6. The very next morning when I woke up, I learned that all hell had broken loose. Hamas had attacked Israel, killing 1200 people, almost all civilians. Yigal was right, but the toll wasn’t 10 or 100, but 1200. A war, according to Yigal’s prognostication, was then inevitable. Yigal’s prediction had been previously published in MEMRI, but apparently the Israeli government paid no attention.
And so it happened, and Yigal’s prediction was mentioned in the new WSJ op-ed below, which gives background and details about MEMRI. But remember, YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST! Click to read, though I can’t find the article archived. I’ll give a few excerpts (indented):
From the article:
Yigal Carmon is one of the few Israelis who can claim to have predicted this war. His Aug. 31 article “Signs of Possible War in September-October” cited provocations by Hezbollah, escalating violence in the West Bank and threats from Hamas as evidence of regional coordination for something big. “Israel will likely be compelled to undertake a large-scale response,” he wrote, “even at the cost of an all-out war.”
Some details were off, but Mr. Carmon says anyone paying attention would have seen the writing on the wall. “They said it all. They said everything,” Mr. Carmon, a former Israeli intelligence officer and counterterrorism adviser to two prime ministers, says in a phone interview from Jerusalem. As president and a co-founder of Memri, the Middle East Media Research Institute, he had publicized Hamas’s videos advertising its drills for an invasion of Israel, as well as its claims that total war was coming.
But Hamas is always threatening war, and most of the time it comes to naught. “If they publish it many times, then you can ignore it?” he asks in response to the point. “I say just the opposite. If they publish it many times, it suggests they mean it and you cannot ignore it. You must take it seriously.”
Unfortunately, the tendency of sophisticated observers is to play down what terrorists say they believe. In a phone interview from Washington, Steve Stalinsky, Memri’s executive director, points out that in all the coverage of the war, “we have heard almost nothing about the Hamas ideology. Yeah, sure, sometimes you hear about the Hamas Covenant”—the group’s charter, which spells out its genocidal intentions—“but that’s it, and no one even prints it.”
Memri prints it, and publishes video compilations of Hamas leaders stating their movement’s goal: to build an Islamic caliphate stretching from Palestine across the region and the world. That sounds more like international jihad than Palestinian nationalism.
. . .Headquartered in Washington, Memri monitors and translates TV broadcasts, newspapers, sermons, social-media posts, textbooks and official statements in Arabic, Farsi and several other languages. The work may be drudgery, but it yields a steady stream of articles and viral video clips that condemn the region’s tyrants, terrorists and two-faced intellectuals with their own words.
Memri also documents Gazans’ indoctrination from childhood into a religious ideology that puts them on a war footing. “Their textbooks are our life,” Mr. Carmon says, “but no one paid attention.” Instead, Israeli leaders were convinced that Qatari money and past beatings would deter Hamas.
It’s MEMRI, for instance, that has brought to the attention of me and many others the Jew hatred taught to Arabic schoolchildren, making us realize that in its most virulent form it’s here to stay for at least another generation.
Here’s another reason why Western governments should be reading MEMRI:
. . .Mr. Carmon directs me to a recent article in which he writes, “Any Arab who hears American officials say that Qatar is America’s ally would burst into laughter—those clueless Americans, who don’t even know that Qatar is spitting in their face with wild anti-U.S. incitement 24/7 . . . because they only watch the deceptive Al-Jazeera TV in English.” On the Arabic-language channel, he says, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera “is the megaphone of Hamas like it was the megaphone of al Qaeda. Every speech, every statement—everything is aired several times until everybody gets it.”
The article faults the Biden administration for “pleading with Qatar” instead of threatening it: “Just one comment by the U.S. administration that it is considering relocating Al Udeid Air Base from Qatar (without which Qatar will cease to exist within a week) to the UAE will set the Qataris running to bring all the American hostages back home.” Instead, while hostage negotiations stall, the U.S. has quietly agreed to extend its presence at the Qatari base for another decade, according to a Jan. 2 CNN report. Mr. Carmon seems mystified by U.S. weakness. “Since when do experienced American officials conduct negotiations without power pressure on the side?”
If intelligence officials in the West aren’t reading MEMRI on a regular basis, they’re making a mistake. As you see, even the Biden administration has been gulled by the Middle East, and this happens pretty regularly. (Anthony Blinken is an especially notable victim, and he passes his gullibility on to Biden. Only someone completely oblivious to what’s happening in the Middle East would now be speaking of a “two state solution” as a way to settle this war.)
Although the WSJ article isn’t archived, perhaps a judicious inquiry will yield you a copy.
I’ve been watching MEMRI for more than 15 years, it is fantastic b/c there is a HUGE gap between what we THINK is going on in the M.E./Arab world and the reality. I’ve also watched (live) TV when I was in Lebanon, particularly MEMRI’s star text, Al Manar (the lighthouse), Hizballah’s station.
What we see on MEMRI isn’t the wildest or even that insane – it is pretty representative.
I’ve linked to it in several of my articles also.
Separately, I think there’s a 50/50 chance for a big war in Sth Lebanon soon. I was an options trader as a career once so I NEVER make predictions. Esp not on Middle East politics. But watch the space south of the Litani River.
D.A.
NYC
Astonishing story and documented!
Absolutely!
I ran into MEMRI at some point and had added it to my list of web sites, but it hasn’t been on my must read list. Now it will be. Thank you.
MEMRI has not been on my radar before now. Shame on me. It will be from now on.
Disregard of MEMRI by the US diplomacracy probably reflects MEMRI’s two cardinal offenses: (1) it has been proven correct by events, over and over again; and (2) Yigal Carmon, knowing well what the PLO really intended, opposed the Oslo accords in ’93.
The Oslo “peace-process” came to receive hallowed status, like “Godliness” once upon a time or “Diversity” today. By now, peace-processing resembles the operation of a food-processor, reducing any data from the real world into Béchamel sauce. The Israeli public has mostly caught on to this, which is why Meretz (to which I used to
contribute some money) has declined from 12 to 0 seats in the Knesset.
Many of us were taken in by the PLO’s doublespeak and by our own hopes in the 1990s. I must say that Commentary’s criticisms of the Oslo process, which I didn’t consider as seriously as I should have then, were confirmed more and more by the PA statements in Arabic (translated by MEMRI) and various of its policies, such as pay-for-slay. It is more difficult to understand neglect of MEMRI’s warnings by the Netanyahu government. Maybe the Smotrich/Ben-Gvir group has outsized influence, or has somehow hypnotized other officials in Jerusalem.
An archived copy of the WSJ article is here:
https://archive.is/00cDr
Thanks Peter! Very helpful reading and background.
Great work bringing people’s attention to MEMRI Prof JC, it’s an invaluable organisation. A pity that some wilfully ignorant Westerners label it ‘Islamophobic’ and are happy to criticize it, but love watching Al Jazeera – clinging to their ‘useful idiot’ status for dear life.
I did not know MEMRI, thanks a lot. Could someone explain why without Al Udeid Air Base Qatar would cease to exist within a week ? Thanks for your attention.