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November 02, 2004
How many votes were "lost in translation"?
NOTE: This post is hurried, and I apologize for its length. I tried to shorten it by putting the lion's share of the text below. I hope I'm not alone in my outrage over what appears to gross media censorship of Osama bin Laden's speech. Here's the "official" CNN text we were given last week: You, the American people, I talk to you today about the best way to avoid another catastrophe and about war, its reasons and its consequences. And now, three days later, we get the full text of Osama bin Laden's speech. In the interest of space and ease, you can read it below. (From Tim Blair, via Michael Totten, guest blogging at InstaPundit.) NOTE: Additions are in RED: Simple question: Why wasn't the full text released in the American media before today? CNN describes its text as "a transcript of his remarks as translated by CNN senior editor for Arab affairs Octavia Nasr." Who is Octavia Nasr, and why did she omit more than half of the text of the speech? What happened to the following, many, crucial paragraphs between the paragraph ending with "three times the necessary" and final paragraph about "your security"? And it's no secret to you that the thinkers and perceptive ones from among the Americans warned Bush before the war and told him: "All that you want for securing America and removing the weapons of mass destruction - assuming they exist - is available to you, and the nations of the world are with you in the inspections, and it is in the interest of America that it not be thrust into an unjustified war with an unknown outcome."And where the hell was all of this stuff which suddenty appears right after the paragraph ending with "killing our women and children" and up to the paragraph first mentioning Muhammad Atta? And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance. If Al Jazeera's translation is correct, Osama is spouting vintage Michael Moore, Moveon.org stuff. MEMES, even? How dare CNN be so brazen as to omit what amounts to the guts of the bin Laden speech? Surely, such words and topics aren't that hard to "translate"? Isn't it more likely that someone, somewhere, might not have wanted anything to appear which might translate into votes? MORE: Octavia Nasr is CNN's "senior editor for Arab affairs." Hmmmm...... My mother always told me to say nice things about people, so I'll say that Ms. Nasr is better at editing than translating. But I can't help notice that Ms. Nasr can be very punctilious where it comes to spotting translation errors by the United States government..... Following is the full English transcript of Usama bin Ladin's speech in a videotape sent to Aljazeera. In the interests of authenticity, the content of the transcript, which appeared as subtitles at the foot of the screen, has been left unedited.The above is Al Jazeera's full text of Osama bin Laden's speech. (From Tim Blair, via Michael Totten, guest blogging at InstaPundit.) posted by Eric on 11.02.04 at 10:10 AM |
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