Using racism "correctly"

Using racism "correctly"
"Sider was interviewed in November at the 105th annual business meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose. The meeting was abuzz over a year-old New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, alleging that a 1973 book by cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai, "The Arab Mind," might have inspired the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, on the theory that sexually humiliated Arab men would become willing informants. Hundreds of anthropologists at the business meeting -- the first official quorum in 30 years -- unanimously endorsed a resolution condemning "the use of anthropological knowledge as an element of physical and psychological torture." But one anthropologist, while sharing her peers' condemnation of torture as immoral and ineffective, worried that some of her colleagues had the wrong response to Abu Ghraib: Don't scold the military, she argued. Educate it. "If Patai's book had been used correctly, they would never have done that. Because they would have understood that ... you're not going to get intelligence information out of these people, you're going to get them and their families attacking you," she said later. "Half-baked knowledge is sometimes worse than none at all."" (thanks Nabeel)