[wvns] A double standard on freedom
A double standard on academic freedom in the Middle East
Dr. George Bisharat*
Two hundred thousand Palestinian children began school
in the Gaza Strip this month without a full complement
of textbooks. Why? Because Israel, which maintains a
stranglehold over this small strip of land along the
Mediterranean even after withdrawing its settlers from
there in 2005, considers paper, ink and binding
materials not to be "fundamental humanitarian needs."
Israel, attempting to throttle the democratically
elected Hamas government, generally permits only food,
medicine and fuel to enter Gaza, and allows virtually
no Palestinian exports to leave. Lately, it held up
delivery of materials needed for printing textbooks.
As a result, Gaza students began the year facing a 30
percent shortage of texts.
No full-page advertisements in major American
newspapers have publicized Israel's violations of
Palestinian children's right to an education. No
editors, syndicated columnists or presidents of major
universities in this country have denounced this
callous measure. Our politicians have demanded no
remedial action. Instead, they continue, verbally and
materially, to support Israel in its near-total
blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians, kids and all.
Israel's trampling of Palestinian students' right to
education - the key to a lifetime of opportunity - has
rarely evoked official protest from American leaders.
The Israeli army has closed Palestinian universities
for years at a time. Israeli military authorities have
barred Palestinian occupational therapy students from
traveling from Gaza to the West Bank to obtain vital
clinical training.
Hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks can
turn a routine trip to a local school into a harrowing
ordeal. Israeli gunfire has even killed Palestinian
schoolchildren sitting in their classrooms. None of
these offenses has merited so much as a congressional
resolution, let alone more serious efforts to curb
Israeli behavior, such as government-imposed
sanctions.
In response to this policy double standard - complete
indulgence of Israel on the one hand, and indifference
to violations of Palestinian rights on the other hand
- a movement has emerged for a citizens' boycott of
Israel. Churches, unions and professional associations
in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa
have urged a variety of nonviolent measures to compel
Israel's compliance with international law.
American Presbyterians have studied divesting church
funds from firms that profit from continuing Israeli
occupation of Palestinian lands. Unison, the United
Kingdom's 1.3 million-member union of public servants,
voted in June to boycott Israeli goods. In May, a
British union of professors opened a yearlong debate
over a possible boycott of Israeli academic
institutions.
The latter action provoked particularly indignant
protest by Israel's U.S. supporters as an offense
against "academic freedom." Yet many Israeli academic
institutions either benefit from or participate in
Israeli government actions that violate Palestinian
rights.
Tel Aviv University sits in part over land belonging
to Sheikh Muwannis, a Palestinian village whose
residents were expelled by Jewish militias or fled in
fear in March 1948. These and other Palestinian
refugees have been denied their right to return to
their homes or to receive compensation for their
seized properties.
Hebrew University in Jerusalem uses more than 800
acres of land illegally expropriated from Palestinian
private owners in the West Bank after the 1967 war.
Bar-Ilan University has established a branch in an
illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
The threatened boycott would target Israeli
institutions, not individuals. Thus, formal research
and other agreements with Israeli universities would
be suspended. But invitations to Israeli professors to
join conferences or to publish in foreign journals
would continue.
Nonetheless, it is likely that the boycott would
impose limitations on freedom for some Israeli
academics. Is this fair?
Boycotts are always somewhat blunt tools, and they
inevitably impose costs on some who are undeserving of
them. That was true of the boycott of apartheid South
Africa, which applied to all academics - as well as
athletes, businesspeople, artists and others. At the
time, the international community weighed the cost to
academic freedom against the advancement of justice
and equal rights for black South Africans, and the
choice was clear.
Two hundred thousand Palestinian schoolchildren are
wondering how the world will respond faced with a
similar choice today.
* Professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in
San Francisco, CA.
===
A child on Hamas TV talked of annihilating the Jews ... or did she?
Arabic under fire
Brian Whitaker
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brian_whitaker/2007/05/arabic_under_fire.html
Memri, the "research institute" which specialises in translating
portions of the Arabic media into English, has issued a video clip
from a children's programme on Hamas TV in which it claims that a
Palestinian girl talked of becoming a suicide bomber and annihilating
the Jews.
Memri - described by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as
"invaluable" - supplies translations free of charge to journalists,
politicians and others, particularly in the US.
Though Memri claims to be "independent" and maintains that it does not
"advocate causes or take sides", it is run by Yigal Carmon, a former
colonel in Israeli military intelligence. Carmon's partner in setting
up Memri was Meyrav Wurmser who in 1996 was one of the authors of the
now-infamous "Clean Break" document which proposed reshaping Israel's
"strategic environment" in the Middle East, starting with the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
In the Hamas video clip issued by Memri, a Mickey Mouse lookalike asks
a young girl what she will do "for the sake of al-Aqsa". Apparently
trying to prompt an answer, the mouse makes a rifle-firing gesture and
says "I'll shoot".
The child says: "I'm going to draw a picture."
Memri's translation ignores this remark and instead quotes the child
(wrongly) as saying: "I'll shoot."
Pressed further by the mouse - "What are we going to do?" - the girl
replies in Arabic: "Bidna nqawim." The normal translation of this
would be "We're going to [or want to] resist" but Memri's translation
puts a more aggressive spin on it: "We want to fight."
The mouse continues: "What then?"
According to Memri, the child replies: "We will annihilate the Jews."
The sound quality on the clip is not very good, but I have listened to
it several times (as have a number of native Arabic speakers) and we
can hear no word that might correspond to "annihilate".
What the girl seems to say is: "Bitokhoona al-yahood" - "The Jews will
shoot us" or "The Jews are shooting us."
This is followed by further prompting - "We are going to defend
al-Aqsa with our souls and blood, or are we not?"
Again, the girl's reply is not very clear, but it's either: "I'll
become a martyr" or "We'll become martyrs."
In the context of the conversation, and in line with normal
Arab-Islamic usage, martyrdom could simply mean being killed by the
Israelis' shooting. However, Memri's translation of the sentence - "I
will commit martyrdom" turns it into a deliberate act on the girl's
part, and Colonel Carmon has since claimed that it refers to suicide
bombers.
The overall effect of this is to change a conversation about
resistance and sacrifice into a picture of unprovoked and seemingly
motiveless aggression on the part of the Palestinians. But why hype
the content in this way? Hamas's use of children's TV for propaganda
purposes is clearly despicable, as the BBC, the Guardian and others
have noted, without any need to exaggerate its content.
Among those misled by Memri's "translation" was Glenn Beck of CNN, who
had planned to run it on his radio programme, until his producer told
him to stop. Beck informed listeners this was because CNN's Arabic
department had found "massive problems" with it.
Instead of broadcasting the tape, Beck then invited Carmon on to the
programme and gave him a platform to denounce CNN's Arabic department,
and in particular to accuse one of its staff, Octavia Nasr, of being
ignorant about the language.
Carmon related a phone conversation he had had with Ms Nasr:
She said the sentence where it says [in Memri's translation] "We are
going to ... we will annihilate the Jews", she said: "Well, our
translators hear something else. They hear 'The Jews are shooting at us'."
I said to her: "You know, Octavia, the order of the words as you put
it is upside down. You can't even get the order of the words right.
Even someone who doesn't know Arabic would listen to the tape and
would hear the word 'Jews' is at the end, and also it means it is
something to be done to the Jews, not by the Jews."
And she insisted, no the word is in the beginning. I said: "Octavia,
you just don't get it. It is at the end" ... She didn't know one from
two, I mean.
Carmon's words succeeded in bamboozling Glenn "Israel shares my
values" Beck, who told him: "This is amazing to me ... I appreciate
all of your efforts. I appreciate what you do at Memri, it is
important work."
It was indeed amazing, because in defending Memri's translation,
Carmon took issue not only with CNN's Arabic department but also with
all the Arabic grammar books. The word order in a typical Arabic
sentence is not the same as in English: the verb comes first and so a
sentence in Arabic which literally says "Are shooting at us the Jews"
means "The Jews are shooting at us".
I have written about Memri's tweaking of translations before. One
example was its manipulation of Osama bin Laden's speech on the eve of
the last American presidential election (details here, at the end of
the article). Another was an Egyptian newspaper's interview with the
mufti of Jerusalem. Memri's translators changed the question: "How do
you deal with the Jews who are besieging al-Aqsa and are scattered
around it?" to "How do you feel about the Jews?" They then heavily
edited the mufti's words to give an anti-semitic-sounding reply to the
new question.
The curious thing about all this is that Memri's translations are
usually accurate (though it is highly selective in what it chooses to
translate and often removes things from their original context). When
errors do occur, it's difficult to attribute them to incompetence or
accidental lapses. As in the case of the children's TV programme,
there appears to be a political motive.
The effect of this is to devalue everything Memri translates - good
and bad alike. Responsible news organisations can't rely on anything
it says without going back and checking its translations against the
original Arabic.
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