Morley Less

Here’s how far the media is going to avoid mentioning bin Laden’s direct threat to American voters.

Jefferson Morley (whom we’ve on occasion praised) today does a roundup on international opinion regarding the bin Laden tape. He links to the strikingly incomplete and, now we learn, mistranslated al Jazeera transcript of the bin Laden message. Not that Morley is unaware of the charge that al Jazeera has misconstrued bin Laden to threaten states in general, when he is threatening individual American "states."

Later in the article Morley links to, and quotes from, Yigal Carmon’s account on Memri, in which the first two sentences read: "The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera [1] 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’) [2] 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."

Amazingly, Morley characterizes Carmon’s article to mean only that "bin Laden [ is] mounting a diplomatic offensive to make his ever-present threat of terrorism more effective."