According to a recent article in Newsweek, most of the Press in the Middle East is free to the extent that they can print whatever they want about Israel. If they try to print the truth about their own country’s leaders, they get shut down. The point being, if the press keeps the masses pissed at Israel, the powers that be will stay in power.
A quick comment or two. I owe Sam Stone et al a well-formed comment in GD presently, but presently socializing calls and purient intrests override my desire to respond cogently.
However, I can add this rapidly, without researching.
(a) MEMRI is a rather biased source. I direct you to this analysis which I rather agree with. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/reviews/1017788174.php
The characterization of the org’s selection of articles matches my own impressions of my reading, although I will confess with limited time I largely rely on the big papers like al-Hyaat, ar-Riyaadh, and ash-Sharq al-Awsaat --and Egypt’s al-Ahram when I read Arab media. MEMRI looks for the very worst and translates it. However, their translations are usually solid, to my eyes. In this case I went to the al-Akhbar’s website but could not locate the article in question (in Arabic). Arab lang. search engines still pretty much suck so…
Let me characterize Egyptian newspapers --I feel I can as I am good "friends’ with a number of editors there.
There is pretty large degree of freedom for matters which do not touch Mubarek et al directly. There is relatively little ex-ante de jure censorship but quite a bit of of ex ante de facto censorship. Fear of the censor. Ugly articles in re Jews and Israel are indeed distressingly common, above all when the heat is one, like now.
Frankly from my personal experience I am unclear as to actual anti-Jewish sentiment in the population. Anti-Israel, well, is mixed. Until 2001 there was some degree of admiration on the street, outside of Islamist circles. However, since intefada II things have gone downhill.
In re the press and freedom and Israel, while there is a degree of sublimation in re frustration with current powers in re Israel, I do believe it is easy to exagerate this. Unfortunately this is a complex topic, and I must go if I am to meet my rendez-vous.
Of course, when one can find something like this in a U.S. paper, I guess we shouldn’t be too terribly shocked to find the material from the OP in an Arab paper.
I’m wondering if someone can provide a site to the actual article, rather than an article explaining about what was said. I’m sure there are some folks who can read Arabic and can tell us if this article (in it’s original form) is being summarized accurately.
Why is it that these anti-Semites are always recycling the same tales? I mean, geez, this guy even does that old “blood libel” theme that was already passe hundreds of years ago. WATCH OUT–they’re coming to eat your children mwahahaha. :eek:
Whatch out with your use of that word philosophocles people around here seem to get touchy about it…
As for Hitler and the Egyptians…Fuck’em. Hitler neve rhad a chance to hurt my family cause we were Russian, and over here before he did his thing. We just needed to worry about Russian pogroms 
Bah! This’ll all shake out, and then it won’t be so “in” to be anti-Jew/anti-Semitic/anti-Israeli.
Sam
Daoloth I wish you’d put: *“said some idiot” *after your heading.
You nearly had me shocked.
Amazing how so many people can look at history and say it didn’t happen. They say someting about ‘several phototograpghs taht were doctored’. Several??? What about the video fom then? And why don’t they simply ask Germany if it happened? Of course they’ll find that small group of Germans that said it didn’t happen.
And what’s really sad is this is what is probably being taught to the young in that area, and they’ll believe it.
Forget not that Egypt has a rather long standing Hitler cult. The years of conflict with Israel gave feed to a score of dimwitted crackpots running around and saying amongst other things that old H was a friend of the cause of Islam, which obviously goes to reason as he persecuted the Jews AND tried to ‘liberate’ North Africa from the colonials. Any revisionism and/or strange holocaust related propaganda coming out of Egypt should be seen out of the vantage point that there are political points to be scored with the rather ill informed illiterates that rather senselessly admire old Adolf this way.
Sparc
The Big Cheese I hate to be a nitpick (eh, no I don’t, why would I be here otherwise…) ANYWAY 
I think that video technology was a few years away in the future back in 1945. If it was video it’d be one point to the revisionists…obviously doctored.
Er… Triumph of the Will… Oh, heck, Thomas Alva Edison’s Frankenstein?
Snow White. In color and talking by 1929.
Moving pictures and newsreels were definately in the picture by '45. Video Camera were not, true, but there is video of it.
My kids and I saw some of those fake videos at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, in March. Incredible how they made them look crude to match the technology available at the time.
We were especially impressed at the hundreds/thousands of “extras” who lost so much weight for their roles and allowed themselves to be twisted into such inhuman positions. You could almost believe they were dead.
E-Sabbath Debunk me if you like, but don’t be stupid! Do you know the difference between vireo and film? Do you know Leni?
I know both!
That is: the difference and the author of named works personally.
…answer please?
What the fuck it could have to do with Hitler, Egypt or the Holocaust beats me.
…answer please?
Or is this just a pathetic attempt at 15 minutes of fame?
Sparc
If you didn’t get it… my previous post was made in tongue and cheek. Second part if the post was directed at the absolute idiocy of brining in ‘Triumph of Will’.
Crude video was developed in the thirties. In use during WWII. Very poor resolution/scanning rate. (It used a scanning disk with holes punched in it at intervals – so the scanning area was bigger at the top than the bottom. )
As for the article itself, it’s worth considering the source. MEMRI, despite their self-identification as a “non-partisan” organisation, clearly favours the Israeli position in the conflict, and they are notorious for providing creative “translations” of Arab news sources to promote an obviously biased view. A recent example of this is their twisted semi-translation of a speech of Arafat’s, by which they try to imply that Arafat is affiliated with al-Qaeda:
Pretty cheap, and I would be suspicious of anything that an organization that would stoop that far offers as news.
Obviously, there is anti-semitic thought in the Arab world, but I’d like to see a less suspect source’s confirmation of the editorial in the OP.
Well, Anahita, I tried to find the article on the al-Akhbar website (the Arabic site that is) but could not. I’m afraid I am unable to characterize the article.
In re MEMRI: as Larry notes, they are a clearly biased source. I wouldn’t say they mistranslate --perhaps they do, I don’t need to rely on them so I only read things when someone asks me to x-ref-- but their translations are always … well the worst possible spin one could give to the original Arabic.
That does not mean that they are wrong per se, but it does tend to indicate to me that their translators are engaged in a clear agenda. Their capacity for such a large run of translations on a consistent basis (from per the linked article I provided, translators based in Jerusalem) on such a low budget is striking. Very striking.
But the larger point, that the Arab world allows far too much shameful rot to be printed in re Jews and Israel stands. Now, the really nasty stuff normally appears in 2nd and 3rd tier papers – al-Akhbar is certainly not the top paper in Egypt, I’d say it’s 2nd tier, but that still implies too much ugliness.
At the same time, as I have noted, there are other currents which could be nurtured given the chance.
Thanks, Collounsbury, it’s always nice to have a first source when reading this sort of thing.
There is a similar phenomenon in Iranian press. When you move down to the second and third tier papers, you can get really extremist ideas that shock even Iranians in Iran.
Er. I was just citing a WWII era movie, in re: Triumph of the Will. I’m aware that “video” was very primitive at the time, but there were man-portable film cameras, or where did newsreels come from?
I wasn’t sure if you were being strange and unreasonably unaware that movies did exist before 1977, or being overpicky about the term “video” being used to define “moving images” (as in, any spoken word or musical recording can be considered “audio”) and not “video” versus “film”. Yes. I have run into otherwise normal people who think that way. So I picked a famous movie of the era, about the same… rough subject. So you were nitpicking the difference between frames per second film preserved as a series of pictures, versus digitalized video storage. Got you. It may be an american slang usage, as in school, we had A/V (Audio / Video) rooms, clubs, and equipment, dating far before the introduction of the betamax, mostly with gear to project filmstrips.
I do not know the talented lady, though I am impressed you do, and am vaugely curious to know how she is these days.
So. Nothing to do with Egypt. Everything to do with the veracity of moving pictures documenting the concentration camps. Tangent.