Yigal Carmon (Hebrew יגאל כרמון) (born 1946) is the president and cofounder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization which monitors and translates Arabic and Persian publications; radio and TV broadcasts; and religious sermons into many languages and circulates them over the Internet. Carmon was a colonel at Aman, the Israeli military intelligence service, and later counter-terrorism advisor to Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir. Biography Yigal Carmon was born in Romania in 1946 and immigrated to Israel with his family at age four. He grew up in Hadera. In high school, he began to study Arabic, and eventually achieved native-level fluency. At age 18, he had his conscription to the Israel Defense Forces deferred so he could study as part of the Atuda program. After earning a degree in Orientalism from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he joined the IDF in 1968 and served in the Intelligence Corps until 1988, reaching the rank of Colonel. From 1977 to 1981, he served as an adviser on Arab affairs to the Civil Administration in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When Menachem Milson was appointed to serve as head of the Civil Administration, Carmon was appointed his deputy. After Milson resigned in September 1982, Carmon served as acting head of the Civil Administration until Shlomo Ilya was appointed to the position in 1983. In 1988, Carmon was appointed adviser on counterterrorism for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Following the fall of the Shamir government in 1992, he served for a year as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's counterterrorism adviser before resigning in 1993 due to his opposition to the Oslo Accords. From 1991 to 1992 he was also a part of the Israeli delegation to peace negotiations with Syria in Washington. In 1998, Carmon founded MEMRI. Carmon has also testified before the US Congress and European parliaments. Views On reporting "difficult realities" According to Ruthie Blum, writing in the Jerusalem Post, Carmon and MEMRI's translations of material appearing in the Arabic and Persian media, "have been received with a combination of angst and ambivalence on the part of the press and politicians who don't like what they're seeing." Carmon relates that his experience of portraying difficult realities in the Arab-Muslim world: "In 1994-5, before MEMRI was formally established, I taped TV broadcasts of [ Palestinian Authority chairman] Arafat calling for jihad. The reaction to that tape was: 'Kill