MEMRI: Inquiry and Analysis Series - No. 146 August 26, 2003

[QuietStorm]

The demise of Saddam Hussein's regime and the control it exerted over the media has unleashed an outburst of feelings of freedom reflected in a large number of dailies and weeklies which, for the first time in Iraq's modern history, are free, uncensored, and often highly imaginative. While some of the dailies are associated with the many burgeoning political parties and political movements which themselves are unprecedented in terms of their number and orientations, there are other dailies and weeklies which introduce themselves as politically independent. Unaccustomed to journalistic freedom, many publications are reined only by the limits of the imagination of their correspondents.

Some of the news and commentaries regarding Israel in general, and former Iraqi Jews in particular, are shaped by imagination gone wild. For the vast majority of Iraqis, however, this free press is a change for the better after almost thirty years of sycophantic deification of Saddam Hussein in government-controlled media. The Iraqis were told by Paul Bremer, the Civil Administrator of Iraq, that they can print anything as long as it doesn't incite violence. <1>

Much, but not all, of the material in this report is drawn from the daily dispatches from MEMRI'S Baghdad office which cover news and editorials from different Iraqi newspapers.

snip

Former Iraqi Jews

Approximately 150,000 Jews lived in Iraq through the first half of the 20th century. The creation of Israel in 1948 resulted in the promulgation of a number of pieces of legislation by the Iraqi parliament restricting the travel, employment, and commercial activities of the Jewish community, and provoked many of them to search for a safe haven.

snip

More than half a century after the immigration of Iraqi Jews, mainly to Israel, Arab studies continue to ignore the reasons that these people left what had been their homeland for almost 3,000 years. A recent study on the Jewish communities in the Arab world, published by the Jenin Center for Strategic Studies, attributes the break-up of the Arab Jewish communities to "the Zionist propaganda and its criminal practices… and not because of government or popular pressures." <2>

long article...

http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=IA14603

And the war of historical accounts and denials continues rather than an integration of the two. unfortuately one account discounts the other. Or attempts to discredit it entirely.

[Rhiannon12866]

1. Thank you. This is excellent

I am bookmarking this one, it's that informative.:-)

As for the Iraqi newspapers, this is wonderful news. It is the first good news to come out of the ``new'' Iraq and I am pleased for the Iraqi people.:-)

[QuietStorm]

2. Rhiannon

MEMRI has been reported as a front organization to continue the dissemination of Israeli propaganda and anti-muslim reporting in Iraq. I do not say all the information is inaccurate, but you should be aware of the quality of the source and it's biased agenda. Here are two articles. You can draw your own conclusions.

The Guardian on MEMRI

snip

The reason for Memri's air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.

Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

Retrieving another now-deleted page from the archives of Memri's website also throws up a list of its staff. Of the six people named, three - including Col Carmon - are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence.

Among the other three, one served in the Israeli army's Northern Command Ordnance Corps, one has an academic background, and the sixth is a former stand-up comedian.

Col Carmon's co-founder at Memri is Meyrav Wurmser, who is also director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, which bills itself as "America's premier source of applied research on enduring policy challenges".

The ubiquitous Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's defence policy board, recently joined Hudson's board of trustees.

Ms Wurmser is the author of an academic paper entitled Can Israel Survive Post-Zionism? in which she argues that leftwing Israeli intellectuals pose "more than a passing threat" to the state of Israel, undermining its soul and reducing its will for self-defence.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,773258,00.html

HERE IS A CRITICISM OF THE GUARDIAN's CRITIQUE OF MEMRI

http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/critiques/The_Guardians_Selective_Memri.asp

[Rhiannon12866]

3. Thank you, QuietStorm, I had no idea. This is NOT good

And I have spent considerable time posting in I/P. I admit to not having read all the articles, yet. I bookmarked it for future reference. The one that impressed me was the one on the new freedoms enjoyed by Iraqi newspapers. This was the first instance of ``freedom'' that I had heard to come out of occupied Iraq.

Thank you for explaining this and the additional links. I imagine that many who post in Editorial won't know this, either, so it is good that you told the entire story. The fact that ``The Prince of Darkness'' is involved does not enhance anyone's credibility.

I was thinking that you received so few replies because no one understood what the content was by the title. I still believe this is true, but will kick it, anyway. Your explanation and critiques are more enlightening than the original articles!:-)

Perhaps you should consider posting this in I/P. Not much gets by anyone there. I have spent a lot of time there during the past several months and still consider myself a neophyte there, compared to many others.:shrug: