[Marxism] 'The Arab Mind'- Guide to Killing Them While Converting Them

["Tony Abdo" <gojack10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

July 18, 2004
SOURCE OF STEREOTYPES
Washington misled by a biased 'bible' on culture
By MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI

THE Bush administration says it wants to win the hearts and minds of the
Iraqi people. But it is relying on a poor and biased guide.

Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh recently reported in the New Yorker
magazine that the "bible" of a powerful pro-war group of conservatives in
Washington is a 1973 book called The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai. This book
says that "Arabs only understand force," and that the "biggest weakness of
Arabs is shame and humiliation."

According to the London Guardian, the influence of the book is not limited
to armchair warriors in Washington. The Arab Mind is "probably the single
most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the U.S. military" and is
"even used as a textbook for officers at the JFK special warfare school in
Fort Bragg," the Guardian reported. Hersh alleges that the book was a kind
of manual for the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

But it's impossible to "win the minds" of the large and diverse group of
people who make up Iraq when you believe that almost all of them think with
only one mind. The Arab Mind has no place in U.S. military schools or policy
circles. Serious scholars have long discredited the book because of its
fundamentally racist character.

Published a generation ago, The Arab Mind follows a genre of books popular
in the 19th century that believed that race defines human behavior. These
books reduced the histories, politics and cultures of huge groups of people
into simple instinct or an unchanging personality. Academia rightly
repudiated this approach long ago.

Imagine if our officials were basing government policies on a book that told
them that the African mind has an "aversion to work that involves dirtying
one's hands," or that the Jewish mind has an "all-encompassing preoccupation
with sex." Substitute the word "Arab" for "African" and "Jewish" in these
two examples, however, and you have the wisdom found in this noxious text
used by the military. (In fact, Patai, the author of The Arab Mind, wrote an
equally fatuous book The Jewish Mind, in 1977.)

So why have the military and influential pro-war pundits taken this book to
heart?

The answer is twofold.

First, no other group is so easily maligned and stereotyped as Arabs and
Muslims are today. What would be seen as racist caricature for any other
group is far too often considered as actual insight into Arab behavior or
Muslim belief. To a degree, the explosion of such representations is an
unfortunate consequence of war, but such attitudes have existed for a long
time in the United States. When was the last time you watched a normal
Arab-American family on a TV sitcom? (The answer: never.)

But the second and more significant answer lies in the fact that we simply
rely too much on culture (as we did with race) to explain away everything
that we refuse to understand. By obsessively focusing on culture, we avoid
talking about history, economics and politics. Culture is an always-prepared
and easy answer, because "they" just aren't like "us."

Consider how al-Qaida fanatics use the same pretext for their immoral terror
that is found in books like The Arab Mind, namely that "they" (Americans,
this time) only understand force and humiliation, and are obsessed with sex.

Instead of elucidating the challenges of sharing our world, these types of
cultural explanations reduce entire populations into eternal essences and
promote the idea that we live in an era of clashing civilizations.

This is not only wrong, it is dangerous. Extremists of all sorts love the
clash-of-civilizations idea because it justifies their brutality. It leads
to the belief that murderous violence is the only thing "they" understand.

This apocalyptic logic only alienates people and must be broken. We can
start with cultivating real knowledge of Iraq and not relying on crude and
stereotypical ideas. This criticism isn't only for the military, either. The
now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority never had a real grasp on Iraq.
Of the 1,600 Americans employed by the CPA, only 16 spokeArabic.

The irony is that real knowledge will illustrate how all people want the
same things from life, even if they express them in different languages.
Interviews of Iraqis today reveal that their desires are much the same as
Americans. They long for jobs, education, general services, security and the
ability to control their own destiny.

These are universal values. But you won't learn that from a text of
stereotypes at Fort Bragg.

Bayoumi is a professor in the English department at Brooklyn College, City
University of New York, and co-editor of "The Edward Said Reader."

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