From Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker article:
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 “The Arab Mind,” 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. “The 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,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or 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.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
full: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact
===
Anthropology News, November 2000, pp. 13-14
The AAA and the CIA? by David Price
With little notice by anthropologists, there has been increasing documentation of the extent to which American intelligence agencies monitored and influenced the development of American social sciences throughout the Cold War. One of the ways these agencies accomplished this was through covert contact with professional associations -- either as silent observers at professional meetings or as silent partners entering into secret agreements with individual members or official bodies within these associations.
A wide literature has developed that documents some of the interactions between American social science professional associations and intelligence agencies. Benjamin Harris documented the FBI's monitoring of the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues since the 1930s. In Stalking the Sociological Imagination (1999, Greenwood), Mike Keen used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to document the FBI's surveillance of prominent sociologists as well as the meetings of the American Sociological Association. Christopher Simpson likewise established that the "FBI and US military intelligence agents kept the American Sociological Society conventions under surveillance in an effort to smoke out radicals." Sigmund Diamond's book, Compromised Campus (1992), used FOIA to painstakingly declassify CIA and FBI documents revealing the extent to which post-war Area Studies centers were manipulated by the CIA and Pentagon.
full: http://www.cia-on-campus.org/social/price.html
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
