Lounsbury e-mails a response to that outspoken column on Arab double-standards by Iraqi exile, Khalid al-Maaly:
Well, there is certainly the very Mediterranean and Arab precept that "family business stays in the family." Try talking, as an outsider, to Greek Cypriots for example about the nasty role of their corrupt Church.... Al-Maaly travels in Lefty "academic" literary circles, so I would suspect he runs into this kind of mealy-mouthed two-facedness even more, as Arab intellectuals / academics are every bit as bad as Western ones. I don't really find it in the business communities, speaking as someone who speaks the language. Two-facedness exists, but it strikes me as an overplayed theme by the critics.
Back to the subect of MEMRI, this reader dismisses the claim that the organisation cherry-picks obscure or unrepresentative media outlets:
Among the latest dozen or so video entries on MEMRI site are: Al-Jazeera (4), Iranian TV (5), Lebanese TV (3), Al-Majd (Saudi Arabia) and Dubai TV (http://memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S6).
I don't see how these and other channels, watched by millions in the Middle East and beyond, can be described as 'marginal'. I also doubt that MEMRI deliberately ignores what doesn't fit into 'the worst discourse': has Lounsbury seen any pro-Israel programmes on Al-Manar or anti-nukes debates on Iranian TV? Gogol comes to mind: "Why pick on the mirror, if you don't like what you see?
This, too, from another reader:
'Aqoul is basically a site whose purpose is to prove that the people of the ME are lot like Americans and Brits, they just dress differently. That's bullshit.
Regarding anti-Semitism in the official Arab media, MEMRI once ran an interview that Norman Finkelstein gave to a major Lebanese channel. I'm sorry, I forget exactly which one, but it was the big one, not the Hizbollah one. The interview was preceded by an introduction about the Holocaust that was, shall we say, awful neutral about whether the Holocaust had ever happened. Just asking some reasonable questions, you know. Mel Gibson's father would have approved.
