On 12/6/04 12:38 PM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Oh, probably Raphael Patai's _The Arab Mind_ (1973)...

Yup, that's it.

Interesting piece on the book here:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/05/30/misreading_the_ar
ab_mind?mode=PF

And Seymour Hersch referred to it in his pieces on Abu Ghraib:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist
Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he
claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had
they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial,
however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them
from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that
was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation
became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months
before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited
was ³The Arab Mind,² a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published
in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among
other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book
includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a
taboo vested with shame and repression. ³The segregation of the sexes, the
veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and
restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a
prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,² Patai wrote. Homosexual
activity, ³or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other
expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private
affairs and remain in private.² The Patai book, an academic told me, was
³the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.² In their discussions, he said,
two themes emerged‹³one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the
biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.²

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in
the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It
was thought that some prisoners would do anything‹including spying on their
associates‹to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and
friends. The government consultant said, ³I was told that the purpose of the
photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert
back in the population.² The idea was that they would be motivated by fear
of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the
consultant said. If so, it wasn¹t effective; the insurgency continued to
grow.



Alison Croggon

Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
Blogs: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com