"It’s this: that America, the Mideast, and the world would have been better off if “the single most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the US military,” Raphael Patai’s racist tract The Arab Mind, had been taken off Pentagon reading lists, and been replaced with Edward Said’s Orientalism* instead. As Seymour Hersh and others have reported, the Patai book, which is almost universally held in contempt by academics as “a thoroughly discredited form of scholarship” and “an example of bad, biased social science,” was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior” and also “the bible on Arab behavior for the U.S. military.” Hersh reported that:
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.” . . .In their [the neocons’] discussions, he said, two themes emerged-”one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”" (thanks Maria)