Arabic Broadcasts Fan Flames Of Hatred By Rod Dreher The New York Post Sunday, October 22, 2000 HERE'S a recent example of televangelism, Gaza-style, courtesy of the Palestinian Authority's TV service, which broadcast these words in Arabic nine days ago. "Oh brother believers, the criminals, the terrorists - are the Jews . . . They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: ‘Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands . . .'" The preacher, Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabiya, former acting rector of the Islamic University of Gaza, was just getting started. "Oh, you who believe, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies, for they are allies of one another. Who from among you takes them as allies will indeed be one of them," the sheik continued. And if you are a Jew, or like unto them? "Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country," he railed. "Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them - and those who stand by them." You would think such an extraordinary speech put out on a government-owned station, a call to arms demanding mass murder of Jews, Christians and Americans, would have been widely reported in the West. You would be wrong. A Nexis search finds a mention of the sermon tucked into an Associated Press dispatch and in a story in The Guardian in England. Those who check in regularly with the Web site of the Middle East Media Research Institute (www. memri.org) could have read an English translation of the sermon's text the very next day, thereby getting important news ignored by Western journalists. MEMRI is a small, nonprofit organization with offices in Jerusalem and Washington, dedicated to monitoring the Arabic-language media in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and translating important dispatches into English. Yigal Carmon, a retired top Israeli army counterintelligence officer and fluent Arabic speaker, heads the Jerusalem bureau. He says it's important for Americans to know what is being reported and discussed among the Arabs in their own media. "There is a huge difference between the words and images conveyed by the Arabs to the West and what they say to their own people," says Carmon, 54, speaking by phone from Jerusalem. "When you get only what they say to Westerners, it's simply not the whole truth. Sometimes ‘not all the truth' is worse than a lie." Mideast scholar Daniel Pipes agrees, saying ignorance of the way the Arab world thinks and talks in its popular media aids and abets Americans' tendency to project their own values onto foreign cultures. "People are mystified by the failure of Camp David, why Yasser Arafat didn't take this extraordinarily generous offer by the Israelis," says Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum. "Looking at the Arabic press, you see why. The Palestinians were not interested in what Israel was offering. They thought it wholly inadequate." What's in the Arab media these days that goes unmentioned in our own? "Right now, there's a sense of excitement that Israel's on the run, that Israel's weak," says Pipes. "That's pervasive in the Arabic press, but unreported in the Western press." Carmon says many Western media outlets reporting on the region do not have Arabic-speaking correspondents, relying on locally based Arab stringers. He suggests that these stringers are unlikely to report information, however newsworthy, that could hurt the Palestinian cause. Given the limits and prejudices of the American media, there is a real need for the kind of work MEMRI does - particularly in this extremely dangerous time. The fledgling organization keeps its hard-working staff of eight going on donations alone. "We need to be 80, not eight," Carmon says. "Every time these governments are going to do something, they prepare their people through the media. We have the capabilities to monitor media all over the Islamic world, but we don't have the financial resources." Pity. The service to the truth MEMRI provides is invaluable. E-mail: dreher@nypost.com