I don’t know much about MEMRI, and I don’t know who David Tell is except that he writes about MEMRI’s activities in a way that strikes me as illuminating:
IF THERE WERE JUSTICE in the universe, the Middle East Media Research Institute would already have been awarded some kind of special-achievement Pulitzer Prize. MEMRI has pioneered the careful translation, and dissemination to European and American audiences, of print and broadcast news sources in the Arab world. The group’s work now pops up everywhere; here in the States, hardly a week goes by when some major daily or cable news show doesn’t make use (generally without attribution) of a MEMRI translation. And the cumulative effect of such translations is–or ought to be, at least–roughly analogous to the body blow struck against European philo-communism by the first Western publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novels in the 1960s. Here, really for the first time, non-Arabic speaking Westerners are being given a direct, first-person look into a previously unseen gulag. Only this time there is no barbed wire, the prisoners all serve by choice, and the anti-Semitism is no longer ancillary but central, basic, and paramount. It turns out that the Islamic Middle East, just as the Israelis have been begging us for years to figure out, has got itself trapped in a deep, deep swamp of near-psychotic Jew hatred.
I got the link to this from Instapundit (Thursday), and what Glenn Reynolds was interested in was what followed, which is a report of a video exchange involving a small Muslim girl who is being brought up as a nice respectable anti-Semite. So if that’s the sort of detail you’re looking for, follow the link and enjoy. Me, I love to look at the big picture, and Tell’s introductory paragraph above says a lot about that to me. Any short but well-done compare-and-contrast job on the similarities and differences between the Cold War and the present confrontation between the West and Islam gets my complete attention whenever I encounter it.
