Michael Gove.

Michael Gove has an interesting snippet in The Times:

LISTENING to Any Questions the other
day, I was intrigued to hear one of the panellists refer to a
fascinating website run by the Middle East Media Research Institute
(MEMRI), an organisation that translates news reports and speeches from
the Arab world. MEMRI has provided a valuable insight into developments
in Arab politics and religion, including illuminating translations of
sermons, whose reliability no one has seriously contested.

But on Friday night’s show George Galloway kept interrupting his
fellow-panellist to point out that people working for MEMRI were
Israelis. A section of the audience laughed and applauded, as though
this exposed MEMRI’s work as unworthy of further attention.

There is a word for the belief that you should judge something
more harshly when you discover that it is produced by Jewish people.
It’s simple anti-Semitism. I’m sure George will want to denounce it the
next time he hears it.

Yes, I’m sure Gorgeous George will want to denounce it.

5 responses

  1. Either Gove or Galloway have missed the point: it’s not that the directors of MEMRI are Israelis, it’s that both of them were fairly senior officers in Israeli military intelligence.

  2. If Gove only heard of MEMRI for the first time last week, he’s demonstrably too ignorant to be a political columnist… He’s also guilty of something that’s more usually found among antisemites – conflating ‘Israelis’ with ‘Jewish people’.
    This doesn’t detract from Galloway’s idiocy: as Alex says, MEMRI’s problem is not inherently that its directors are from Israel.

  3. If you cant shout the message, then shoot the messenger…trouble is the truth will always out.

  4. Rob Read Avatar
    Rob Read

    So IS the output of the MEMRI institute accurate, compared to the less than accurate BBC say?

  5. MEMRI is considered accurate.
    That is to say that no leftist critic has ever been able to show that it deliberately lied in translation. MEMRI makes this very hard by frequently including not only the translation but also the original.
    The leftist critic is therefore forced to deploy a weaker critical narrative. It is to say that MEMRI is “selective” and promotes a certain view of the Arab media that is at odds with the truth.
    This is a bit like saying that Searchlight always quotes only bad fascists and that if it was more balanced it would quote the nicer fascists too.
    In both cases, that isn’t the point.

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