MEMRI TV

Confirmed 423,175

About

MEMRI TV is a news channel by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) which translates Middle Eastern media into English. Online,^[1] the channel has gained much notoriety for its absurd translations of news programs, many of which have spawned photoshops of screenshots showing false or edited subtitles.

Origin

In 1998, the non-profit organization MEMRI was co-founded in Washington D.C. by Yigal Carmon and Meyrav Wurmser for the purpose of distributing English translations of Middle Eastern media.On July 1st, 2004, MEMRI launched the MEMRI TV^[2] Monitoring Project to track and translate Arab and Iranian TV channels to "bridge the language gap between the Middle East and the West."^[3] On December 18th, 2011, YouTuber Blazing Catfur uploaded a compilation video titled "MEMRI's Greatest Hits Volume 1," containing clips of Muslim clerics expressing their hatred for Jewish people (shown below).

Spread

On July 10th, 2016, the MEMRI TV YouTube channel was launched, featuring videos from Middle Eastern media subtitled with English translations. On August 7th, the channel uploaded a video of a young girl wearing a niqab singing an ISIS song while beheading a doll (shown below).

On September 10th, 2016, an anonymous 4chan user submitted a screenshot of a Shia cleric on MEMRI TV with the closed caption "He is even worse than a Jew, he is – may Allah forgive me for uttering this word – an Albanian" to the /int/ board (shown below).

On February 21st, 2017, Redditor Memestar_is_my_daddy submitted a post speculating that MEMRI TV memes were "a very stable investment" to /r/MemeEconomy.^[5] On March 2nd, Twitter user @SalmonDelicious^[7] posted several MEMRI TV screenshots, referring to the channel as "the highest tier of shitposting." On March 4th, a MEMRI TV thread was launched on 4chan's /tv/ board, which received over 85 replies prior to being archived (shown below).^[4]

On March 23rd, Redditor jeets posted a photoshop of the Iranian cleric screenshot, replacing "Albanian" with "someone who prefers Fallout 3 over New Vegas" to /r/meirl.^[8] Within two months, the post gained over 8,400 points (92% upvoted) and 540 comments.