[lbo-talk] the right-wing take on OBL's video: red states in crosshairs

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Tue Nov 2 04:19:28 PST 2004


On Mon, 1 Nov 2004 MEMRI's interpretation of OBL's speech was quoted:


> <http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41211>

To which Juan Cole has this rejoinder:

http://www.juancole.com/2004_11_01_juancole_archive.html#109938356137329197

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Bin Laden's Audio: Threat to States?

A complete English transcript of the Bin Laden audiotape released last

week has now been posted by al-Jazeera.

The Arabic text, for those who can use it, has also been posted.

A re-interpretation of the speech, put in motion by the

neoconservative organ, MEMRI, has been flying around the web,

suggesting that Bin Laden is threatening individual American states if

they vote for Bush.

At the end of his message, Bin Laden said this:

In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in

the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida. No. Your security is in

your own hands. And every state [wilayah] that doesn't play with

our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.

MEMRI is claiming that the word used for "state" in this sentence

means state as in Rhode Island and New Jersey.

But while they are right to draw attention to the oddness of the

diction, their conclusion is impossible.

Bin Laden says that such a "state" should not trifle with Muslims'

security. He cannot possibly mean that he thinks Rhode Island is in a

position to do so. Nor can he be referring to which way a state votes,

since he begins by saying that the security of Americans is not in the

hands of Bush or Kerry. He has already dismissed them as equivalent

and irrelevant, in and of themselves.

Moreover, the way he uses "wilayah" is strange if he meant a Rhode

Island kind of state. He should have said "ayy wilayah min

al-wilayaat," "any state among the states" or some such diction.

Since MEMRI's conclusion is impossible given what else Bin Laden says,

then we must revisit their philological point. It is true that in

modern standard Arabic, wilayah means "state" or "province" and that

al-Wilayaat al-Muttahaddah is the phrase used to translate "United

States." A state in the sense of government or international Power

would more likely nowadays be "dawlah" or "hukumah."

But there are two possible explanations for Bin Laden's diction here.

The first is that he regularly uses archaicisms. He has steeped

himself in ancient, Koranic Arabic and the sayings of the Prophet, and

he and his fellow cultists in Qandahar had developed a peculiar

subculture that rejected much of modernity. The Taliban state

characterized itself as an Emirate (imarah) ruled by an Amir in the

sense of a caliph or Amir al-Mu'minin ("Commander of the Faithful").

In the contemporary Gulf, in contrast, an "amir" is a prince. The amir

(emir) of Kuwait is not claiming to be a caliph! Bin Laden and Mulla

Omar went back to the classical meaning of amir.

In classical Arabic, a ruler is a wali, who then rules over a wilayah

or walayah. Wilayah can have connotations even in modern Arabic (see

Hans Wehr) of sovereignty and it can mean "government." Bin Laden is

attempting to revive ways of thinking he maintains were common among

the first generation of Muslims, and to slough off centuries of

accretions.

So the first possibility is simply that Bin Laden is using a

fundamentalist archaicism. It would be like a Christian fundamentalist

wedded to the King James Bible who insisted on using the word

"charity" to mean a form of selfless love, with the Greek word caritas

in mind, rather than in its contemporary meaning of "philanthropy."

The other possibility is that Bin Laden has lived most of the past 25

years in Persian, Pushtu and Urdu-speaking environments and that he

occasionally lapses into non-standard usages. In Hindi-Urdu, I noticed

that one meaning of vilayat is "the metropole." At least in past

generations, people going from British India to the UK said they were

going to "vilayat." More important, there is some evidence for

fundamentalist Muslims using the word "wilayah" or "walayah" to mean

"country." The Pakistani radical group Hizb al-Tahrir locates itself

in "Walayah Pakistan", i.e., the country of Pakistan.

I think archaicism is a more likely explanation than what linguists

call "interference" from other languages for Bin Laden's diction here.

But I am quite sure for the reasons of logic given above that he means

"government" by the word, not state as in province, in this speech.

MEMRI was founded by a retired Israeli colonel from military

intelligence, and co-run by Meyrav Wurmser, wife of David Wurmser.

David Wurmser is close to the Likud Party in Israel and served in

Douglas Feith's "Office of Special Plans" in the Pentagon, where he

helped manufacture the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction

and was linked to al-Qaeda. David Wurmser, who wants to get up

American wars against both Iran and Syria, then moved over to Vice

President Dick Cheney's rump national security team.

MEMRI is funded to the tune of $60 million a year by someone, and is a

sophisticated anti-Arab propaganda machine. The organization cleverly

cherry-picks the vast Arabic press, which serves 300 million people,

for the most extreme and objectionable articles and editorials. It

carefully does not translate the moderate articles. I have looked at

newspapers that ran both tolerant and extremist opinion pieces on the

same day, and checked MEMRI, to find that only the extremist one

showed up. It would sort of be as though al-Jazeera published

translations of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush

Limbaugh, and Jerry Falwell on Islam and the Middle East, but never

published opinion piences on the subject by William Beeman or Dick

Bulliet.

MEMRI is enormously popular with strong Jewish nationalists in the

United States, who often subscribe to it by email, and are being given

an unbalanced view of the region as a result. In some instances the

translations are not very good, but the main objection is the

selectiveness of the material. MEMRI is one of a number of public

relations campaigns essentially on behalf of the far rightwing Likud

Party in Israel that tries to shape American perceptions of Muslims

and the Middle East in a negative direction. Think tanks like the

"Hudson Institute" are another (it is run by . . . Meyrav Wurmser).

The Benador talent agency, which books a lot of talking heads on US

television, is another. (Google it).

It would be just as easy to set up a translation service that zeroed

in on racist and "Greater Israel" statements in the Hebrew Israeli

press and made the articles available in English, while ignoring more

liberal newspapers like Haaretz. If most educated Americans heard the

raving against "ha-aravim" (the Arabs) that goes on among West Bank

settlers, they'd be completely taken aback by the bigotted terms of

reference. Much of such Likudnik discourse is not different in kind

from what one hears from the Ku Klux Klan about minorities in this

country.

Anyway, I am not suggesting that the MEMRI report was an attempt on

behalf of the Likud Party to intervene in the US election. I suspect

they just didn't think through the issue and depended on a surface

reference to modern standard Arabic.

Ramona Smith at the Philadelphia Daily News has a good survey of

reaction to the MEMRI interpretation, which is generally as critical

as I am:

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/breaking_news/10075425.htm?1c



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