On the surface it appears that the latest Bin Laden video has had little effect on the presidential contest. But I’ve noticed a swelling chorus on rightwing sites pointing to a purported re-translation of a key passage on the tape that supposedly has the al-Qaeda head specifically threatening to attack any American state that votes for Bush.
Here’s the translation of Bin Laden’s conclusion, from the Washington Post:
“I tell you in all truth that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qa’ida. No, your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn’t play with our security, has automatically guaranteed its own security.” [my emphasis]
And here it is from MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, a translation service with a distinctly rightwing tilt: “Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.” Note the insertion of the adjective “U.S.”
MEMRI says, “The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to ‘each U.S. state,’ designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words ‘ay wilaya’ (which means ‘each U.S. state’) to mean a ‘country’ or ‘nation’ other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system.”
Really?!
I think instead what we’re seeing here may be an attempt to plant a meme in time to influence the election towards Bush. Certainly a lot of right-wing sites like Powerline, The Truth Laid Bear, The Volokh Conspiracy, and the New York Post have picked up on the MEMRI story. If enough people hear that bin Laden is threatening to punish states that vote for Bush, their likeliest reaction will be to rally round the President. Americans don’t like to be pushed around.
But this is based on the slenderest of reeds, as the blogger Abu Aardvark points out:
MEMRI’s argument entirely on bin Laden’s use of the word ‘wilayet’ instead of ‘dawla’ to refer to ‘state.’ While MEMRI is correct that in normal usage, wilayet would refer to a sub-unit (such as an American state), its dictionary definition is, in fact, ‘sovereign power, sovereign, sovereignty, rule, government’ (Hans Wehr dictionary). You decide. And Bin Laden’s reference to not attacking Sweden suggests that sovereign states are his reference point, not American states.
He also says “no Arab commentators or newspapers seem to have drawn the same conclusions as MEMRI’s linguistic geniuses. In an al Jazeera roundup of ‘different interpretations of the bin Laden message’ this morning, for example, nobody raises this interpretation….This is what MEMRI always does: not mis-translate, but choose selectively among a wide range of sources to find those which support their agenda – and leave non-Arabic speakers with a highly distorted picture of reality. This is a classic case. Don’t be fooled.”