Thursday, May 10, 2007
Both Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI have issued releases involving the now infamous Hamas Micky Mouse clone, Farfur. Production values have come a long way in the past few years. Remember Tarabisho?
Use of an iconic American children's character prompted wide-spread media interest for once, even if some of it, such as in this CNN report, simply gave fodder for the usual MSM middle of the road moral equivalence idiocy.
A PMW email today qvelled that as a result of all the attention -- and it listed much of it -- Hamas had agreed to take Farfur off the air. (The report doesn't seem to be online at this time.)
As it turns out, reports of Farfur's demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated.
No one gets between Hamas and child indoctrination to martyrdom and Islamic supremacism, after all.
But a minor controversy surrounding MEMRI's translation has clouded the issue, and that's unfortunate. Here's video of Glenn Beck talking with the head of MEMRI about it. Frankly, I had already looked into the translation issue, and I'll have to be honest, that video of Beck smacks of more than a little obfuscation if you must know. Just because all those bureaus had cleared the video doesn't necessarily mean they looked into detail at the translation.
You see, I had already asked my friend, Arabic instructor and native (I believe) Arabic speaker, Franck Salameh, for his take on the video. Just for the record, from what I know of Franck's politics, he makes me look like a raving liberal. With his permission, here's the reply I got:
1- structures and semantics: "Yatukkhuna l-Yahuud" is syntactically MSA [Modern Standard Arabic -- "literary Arabic" -S] but semantically Palestinian vernacular par excellence; the verb "yatukh" (to kill) is used almost exclusively by Palestinians to connote the MSA "Yaqtul" (to kill). In any case, whichever way the sentence is translated, the verb "yatukh" means "to kill", NOT "to annihilate". Now, in terms of diction, you can use this one sentence "Yatukhkhuuna l-Yahuud" and mean both "the Jews are killing us" and "they are killing the Jews." But, more important than that is the context: the vermin is definitely inciting hatred and violence against the Jews; s/he exudes this sort venom not only semantically but also in terms of intonation and voice pitch; I'm sure a forensic linguist would spot that out without much effort. We mustn't get hung up on this one sentence; the larger picture is much more frightening than "the Jews are killing us" or "they are killing the Jews." The "beauty" of the Palestinians' "Principles of Hatred" is that they are being normalized and internalized by way of a seemingly anodyne Disney knock off.
2- the show not only promotes "Muslim supremacy" but also "MSA imperialism". It addresses young viewers in (and coaxes them to use) MSA rather than their spoken dialects. This not only infuses the young with the language of Koran, but probably also creates a barrier between toddlers and pre-schoolers (who naturally speak their parents' language, i.e. the dialects, NOT MSA), and their parents whom I suspect are largely illiterate in the rigors of MSA and, consequently, unable to challenge the venom spewed in it on the airwaves (because they lack understanding of its language and are unable to limit their children's exposure to it.)
I hope i haven't complicated things further.
I love MEMRI, they do hugely important work we all can rely on (and I love Glenn Beck), but I think they weren't careful enough with this one. Even if they get something wrong, the facts are easy enough to check and it's a service just to bring the material out. In all the thousands of translations they do, it's no shame to be off once in awhile, but that was the most effective line in the piece -- heck, it's the one I chose for the screenshot on my post -- and that calls for extra care in my opinion. There's plenty of outrageous stuff out there (and in the rest of the Farfur piece as Franck points out) without ever having to reach for anything and risk confusing the issue with tangents. I hate to spend even this much time on it, but I feel an obligation to my readers to be as honest in what I put up here as possible. It may sound corny, but if I'm angry and outraged, I want you to know that those are honest emotions based on honest facts and interpretations.
Again, does it change anything about Hamas's genocide rat? Not at all.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/7117
Here's a link to a video on YouTube called Jihad: The Children's Club from 1998.
This "club" video predates the Hamas Rat video that's been getting lots of attention.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAHHjfUxERY
It's 10 minutes long but worthwhile.
Thanks for posting this.
You should ask your friend about the other parts of the video too, like when the girl says she wants to draw a picture "beddi arsem soora" and MEMRI in their transcript claim she said she wants to "shoot". Or when she said she will become a martyr not "commit martyrdom" like MEMRI claimed.
It is actually much simpler than the way Mr. Salameh analyzed it. Yes it is true in standard Arabic the word "yatokhoona" can mean "they shoot", but the girl was neither speaking standard Arabic, nor did she say "yatokhoona", she actually said "betokhoona," which is not standard Arabic at all.
So, it must be made clear that under no reasonable doubt, can anyone argue that the word "Jews" in that sentence was the object of the verb "shoot" (or as your friend believes here "kill" is more appropriate).
What you have done here is remarkable. You are only the 2nd blogger I know who published a note about MEMRI's mistranslation.
Thank you very much.
I agree with that last poster: thanks for writing about this. It's something that's been bothering me ever since I heard it. Let the Arabs lie, we are the ones who are supposed to be telling the truth. And MEMRI is already much maligned, and the last thing we need is flagrant errors like this for its enemies to point to. I mean, the slightest hole in the translation will have a truck driven through it.