When Terrorists Talk, They Listen - WSJ
(snip)
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.
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.”
(snip)
Take the trendy calls for a cease-fire, which is the key to a Hamas victory. Memri’s translations have furnished supporters of Israel with a knockdown reply: What good is a cease-fire when Hamas pledges to repeat its Oct. 7 massacre “again and again”? That quote is from Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas politburo member, in an Oct. 24 appearance on Lebanese television. We know about it because Memri was watching. “We will do this again and again,” Mr. Hamad says in Arabic. “The Al Aqsa Flood”—Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 operation—“is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.”
(snip)
An Oct. 19 clip has Hamas leader Khaled Mashal shrugging off the suffering Hamas has brought on Gazan civilians. “Nations are not easily liberated,” he says. “The Algerian people sacrificed six million martyrs.” Hamas would gladly follow that example. Most recently, Memri has Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh declaring on Jan. 9, in a speech aired on Al Jazeera: “We should hold on to the victory that took place on Oct. 7 and build upon it.” To the West, Mr. Haniyeh demands an end to the war and even gestures at a two-state solution, but to the Arab masses he says “the time has come for the jihad of the swords.” To these videos, Memri adds only captioned translations, so that viewers draw conclusions for themselves.
(snip)
Most of Memri’s American translations are of imams and scholars who are obscure to the larger public. But one that shook the White House was of Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which styles itself a mainstream, well-connected Muslim advocacy group. Mr. Awad was caught celebrating the Oct. 7 attack as an act of Gazan liberation and “self-defense.” President Biden had to remove CAIR as a partner in the White House’s Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.
More..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-terrorists-talk-they-listen-oct-7-attack-israel-memri-arabic-translation-3af6e0f3?st=zhcavel3v9sbu18&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
