The Arab Mind Story aired: Thursday, June 24, 2004
A book published 30 years ago on how Arabs think is in the news these days after it was mentioned by Seymour Hersh in a "New Yorker" article last month.
The book is called "The Arab Mind," and it was written by a scholar now dead, named Rafael Patai. Hersh claimed that top Pentagon officials, the so-called "neocons," had taken the book as their bible on Arab culture, and found in it justification for among other things, the interrogation techniques used in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
Patai's daughters took issue with that conclusion and have gone public with a spirited defense of their father and his book.
