Wednesday, March 17, 2010

BBC does its best to confuse Iranians

Everyone's favourite best-selling Australian writer of near indecipherable prose was "commissioned" by the BBC – translation: begged by the author – to write a piece on "Iran's political troubles". Now considering that it's nearly impossible to work out what Antony Loewenstein's on about in English, it's hard to imagine the piece translated into Farsi making any sense at all. The finely crafted language mangling starts with the very first sentence:



The face of murdered Iranian woman Neda Agha Soltan by a sniper’s bullet echoed around the world. Murdered in June 2009 during the upheaval after the disputed presidential election that saw a new term for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the vast majority of iconic images seen outside the Islamic Republic were shot by citizens on mobile phones or digital cameras. They were raw, brutal, confused and powerful. Their aim was to document events and let historians and journalists find order in the chaos.



On the internet mediocrity is no hindrance.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Dan Lewis said...

I wonder whether Antony Loewenstein is in fact a computer program, which produces random gibberish, mostly about Israel.

It would only take three or four lines of code...

6:58 AM  
Anonymous Chistery said...

Just because you haven't heard a face echoing around the world doesn't mean it's never happened.

9:27 AM  
Anonymous Dan Lewis said...

Chistery,

The story to which you refer was tragic. What's really appalling is that it received little coverage, as do most atrocities in the Middle East. Whereas, had Israel messed up the girl's hairdo, you'd never hear the end of it.

Beck's only point, as far as I can tell, is that Loewenstein is an idiot. A point well proven, again and again.

6:20 PM  

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