Raphael Patai — The Jewish Zionist intellectual source of provocative anti-Islam film
By Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
September 15, 2012
Writing about the anti-Islam film that has provoked a storm of anti-American rage in the Muslim world since September 11, Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo identifies the most likely “intellectual” source of the deliberately provocative “Innocence of Muslims.” Observes Raimondo:
On a somewhat higher level, the excerpts we have seen resemble nothing so much as a dramatization of the “theories” of one Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who averred in his 1973 book, The Arab Mind, that Arabs are peculiarly susceptible to sexual humiliation. As Seymour Hersh put it in his 2004 investigation into the horrors of Abu Ghraib:
“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.’”
Shame and humiliation — followed by murderous rage. Precisely the reaction that greeted the posting of Innocence of Muslims online and led to the deaths of four Americans, and the first such incident involving an American ambassador in quite some time. If someone was deliberately setting a fire in the Middle East, this was the fuel that would burn hottest.
Whether deliberate or not, both Raimondo and Hersh fail to provide their readers with some crucial background information on this influential “cultural anthropologist.”
Born Ervin György Patai in Budapest, Hungary in 1910, Raphael Patai grew up in a prominent Jewish Zionist family. His father authored numerous Zionist writings, including a biography of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. József Patai also founded a Zionist organization in Hungary that supported the settlement of Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine, where Raphael and his parents moved in the 1930s. In 1936, the younger Patai received the first doctorate awarded by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Unlike many of his fellow colonists, Patai was not a secular Jew: in the late 1930s he had been ordained at the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary. Later, he served as the secretary of the Haifa Technion, Israel’s oldest university, which, as its website notes, “played a key role in laying the country’s infrastructure and establishing its crucial defense and high-tech industries.” Yet in 1947, a year before the creation of Israel, the successful young Zionist moved to New York, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1952. However, by going on to produce and promote such works as “The Arab Mind” in his new home — the world’s leading military power — Patai perhaps served the interests of the expansionist Jewish state far better than if he had remained in Palestine.
For anyone who wants to know who might be “deliberately setting a fire in the Middle East,” Raphael Patai’s ideological background provides some very strong clues.
Update: Raphael Patai was Professor of Anthropology at Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Philadelphia from 1948-57. He was not the only prominent Zionist on Dropsie College’s staff. Benzion Netanyahu, the late father of the current Israeli Prime Minister, earned his doctorate from Dropsie College during the 1940s while serving as secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was seeking to build American support for militant Zionism. During the 1950s and ’60s, Netanyahu lived alternately in Israel and in the United States, including a return to Dropsie, first as professor of Hebrew language and literature, and chairman of the department, (1957–1966), then professor of medieval Jewish history and Hebrew literature, (1966–1968).
Update II: Whether or not Israel was ultimately behind the making of the anti-Islam video, they are certainly taking advantage of it. Haaretz reports on the Israeli Prime Minister’s campaign to win American public support for his position on Iran:
Netanyahu is expected to mention recent attacks against American embassies in the Middle East. In a preview clip of the interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Netanyahu said, speaking on what he called Iranian fanaticism, “it’s the same fanaticism that you see storming your embassies today. Do you want these fanatics to have nuclear weapons?”
“… crucial background information on this influential “cultural anthropologist.”
I really would like to know what one single person has got to do with the current situation.
The obscene-by-any-standards video or trailer or whatever it is called was little more than a detonator.
Look what has been happening in the Middle East since the end of WW II and even before that. Imperialism of one form and another has been rife almost forever in that volatile region: then came the establishment of Israel; the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians; U.S. and European support for the region’s most oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia; the reinstatement of the Shah of Iran, following Iran’s attempt to at least give a nod to a few of the principles of democracy, that oft-trumpeted but spurious benchmark of what successive U.S. presidents have claimed are essential to a civil society, while being bought and sold on a daily basis by their Zionist masters.
The ongoing theft of Iran’s oil wealth and the current attempt to isolate it and force it to “change its ways” followed the reinstatement of the Shah, and then his inevitable overthrow. Later came the decimation of Iraq; the laying waste of Afghanistan the overthrow and murder of that thorn in America’s side, Colonel Gadhafi and now we have constant the murdering of innocent civilians by remotely controlled big-boy’s war toys in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and wherever else we have not been told about, by those who control the media, all with the excuse that this has to do with the “The War on Terror” that followed the most vicious one-day massacre since Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a crime which went uninvestigated and its perpetrators unpunished.
Like I said: That Video was just the detonator. The greedy have never stopped laying down the explosives and now they are looking for someone to blame because those explosives have suddenly started to go off.
Anthony Lawson
September 15, 2012 at 9:11 am
The murder of Christopher Stevens was a planned assassination by Israeli Mossad. Zionists know how to incite and demean their perceived ‘enemies’. The anti-Islam movie is based on Zionist porn-weapon which they have been using to propagate their version of Holocaust, military recruitment and tourism.
The pro-Israel gangsters have used similar tactics against Iranian president Ahmadinejad, especially ahead of his visit to New York City to address the UN General Assembly. Last week, Israel’s UN envoy, Ron Prosor, has called on world leaders Thursday to boycott Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s September 26 speech to the 67th General Assembly of the world body in New York.
Benjamin Netanyahu said on August 30, 2012: “I will go to the UN General Assembly and, in a clear voice, tell the nations of the world the truth about Iran’s terrorist regime, which constitutes the greatest threat to world peace“. I wonder why Netanyahu has not blamed Iran for the murder of Ameican ambassador in Libya? However, the Zionist-controlled mainstream media is covering Jewish-Israeli Sam Bacile by blaming California Coptic Christian Nakoula Basseley Nakoula for producing the anti-Islam movie ‘Innocence of Muslims’.
http://rehmat1.com/2012/09/14/ahmadinejad-and-the-zionists-outrage-campaign/
rehmat1
September 15, 2012 at 11:56 am
Anthony,
The people who made this video are no scapegoats. The makers of the detonator were well aware that enough explosives had already been laid to almost guarantee the firestorm that it set off.
What Raphael Patai has to do with it is that the producers of this video appear to have applied his theories of Arab culture in their deliberate provocation designed to advance the “Clash of Civilizations.” Incidentally, the “Clash” narrative can be also be traced to one single person, Jewish Zionist intellectual Bernard Lewis — another example of the destructive influence one well-placed individual can have on the course of world events.
Maidhc Ó Cathail
September 15, 2012 at 12:38 pm
Revealingly, The Weekly Standard wants its readers to believe that “The Video Didn’t Do It.”
Maidhc Ó Cathail
September 15, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Rehmat,
Why do you think the Israel secret service would want to assassinate the Ambassador? Did he discover something about the phony revolution?
Saur Ben Zvi
September 15, 2012 at 2:07 pm
Saur Ben Zvi – you better ask yourself: “Why Israeli Mossad murdered five Iranian scientists, Lebanese Rafiq Hariri, Hamas founder Sheikh Yasin, US president John F. Kennedy, etc.?”.
Israel’s record as one of world’s greatest terrorist entity is hardly reported in the Zionist-controlled western mass-media.
Tel Aviv is known to have supplied arms and military training to rebels, terrorists and dictators in the US, Sudan, Syria, Kurds (in Turkey, Iraq and Iran), Britain, Burma, Argentina, Philippine, Kosova, Nigeria, India, Georgia, Uganda, South African apartheid regime, Egypt, Indonesia, Libya, Dubai, Lebanon, Islamic Republic, Spain, Pakistan, Yemen, Malaysia, and Kenya – as reported by Israeli professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi in his book ‘The Israel Connection’.
http://rehmat1.com/2011/06/11/israel-caught-in-terrorism-in-25-nations/
rehmat1
September 15, 2012 at 5:25 pm
The point about Patai being more useful to the Zionists in the US rather than in Israel is an important one since it can be argued that there is really no dividing line, other than geographical, between hard line Zionists in Israel and those in the US and why trying to trace the early history, such as the birthplace, of English speaking Israelis, has been deliberately muddled. Many critics of Israel tend to assume that such propagandists for Israel such as Dennis Ross, Wolf Blitzer and David Makovsky of WINEP have dual citizenship since they lived and worked in Israel, but it is to the Zionist advantage for them NOT to get Israeli citizenship since it would place legal and perceptive limitations on their effectiveness in spreading Israeli propaganda in the US. Thus, someone like Makovsky who edited the Jerusalem Post for ten years, yet did not become an Israeli citizen, according to him, is able to frequently testify before Congressional committees as an “independent” expert on Middle East issues. In the current issue of the New Yorker, another liberal Zionist outlet, he has a report on Israel’s bombing of the Syrian reactor site which lists all the publications he has worked or written for but from which the Jerusalem Post is curiously missing.
Jeff Blankfort
September 15, 2012 at 5:39 pm
Rehmat,
There’s always a reason. For example the Iranian scientist are working on “nukes”, or in a position Israel deems dangerous. So they kill them. Kennedy wanted the Lobby to register, he was for the Palestinian right of return and wanted to stop Israel’s nuclear program. That will not do, so they killed him. By the way, that was the last time any USA President tried to do that.
So do you know of any specific reason the Ambassador was killed. For example you could say:
– He found documents linking Soros’s NED to the revolution.
-He found a studio where they were making their phony videos.
-He found out who paid Mahdi al-Harati the 200K.
I am hopping to find a good reason why he was killed. By the way, I’m sure he was. For me these revolutionaries/Rebel factions in Libya are nothing more that a secret division of the USA/Israeli military. When these guys do a hit, they do it for a reason.
Any thoughts on what this guys may have done to get killed?
Have you heard any statements he made about the Libya, any kind of policies he was pushing?
Saur Ben Zvi
September 15, 2012 at 6:35 pm
Saur Ben Zvi – you mean what’s good for Israeli Jews – is not good for the Goyims! Would not that be the reason, Iranian may go for a few nuclear bombs to “wipe Israel off Map”? (though Ahmadinejad never said that. It was cooked-up by Jewish MEMRI). I mean the 97% Jews now living in Palestine don’t belong to that land – they’re aliens to the Arab world.
However, I can understand people like you – since after reading a 2010 study conducted by Professor Daniel Bar-Tal (Tel Aviv University) which had concluded that an average Israeli prefer to live in ‘self-denial’ as he/she is not interested to know the facts about the Israel’s problems with the Muslim world.
http://rehmat1.com/2010/05/24/study-israelis-prefer-to-live-in-self-denial/
rehmat1
September 15, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Rehmat,
I have no idea what your talking about. Our discussion was about:
Was the Ambassador assassinated and why?
Not too sure why your telling me about how Israelis live in denial.
Saur Ben Zvi
September 15, 2012 at 8:06 pm
Saur Ben Zvi – After dealing with Israeli professional hasbara dudes – I’m least surprised by your above response.
Let me say in simple English. US ambassador was assassinated by Israelis by using the insulting anti-Prophet movie, knowing that it will fuel hatred toward the United States. They have seen it by posting Danish cartoons in 2006. Based on their 9/11 false flage operation which destroyed two anti-Israel Muslim nations, Afghanistan and Iraq – Libyan operation was a “mini 9/11”. It was meant to push the US into war with Syria and Iran.
BTW – the above is not my ‘conspiracy theory’. Canadian Jewish academic Henry Makow PhD, Gordon Duff, senior editor ‘Veterans Today’ and Kaven Barrett PhD also agree with me on this.
rehmat1
September 15, 2012 at 11:05 pm
Well I finally got an answer and it’s clear. Nevertheless, I still have no idea what your talking or trying to get to.
Keep the eye on the ball: The ambassador. Nothing else. No books, no Duff.
Saur Ben Zvi
September 15, 2012 at 11:52 pm
Rehmat,
You seriously undermine your credibility by citing the likes of Gordon Duff as an authority on anything except disinformation.
Maidhc Ó Cathail
September 16, 2012 at 1:48 am
I agree with Maidhc with reference to your sources, particularly G Duff who has a habit of playing fast and loose with facts, even excusing Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty back in 12/10, because it thought its Dimona nuclear plant was going to be attacked by LBJ (who was apparently sharing a bed with a beautiful ex-Mossad agent, Matilda Krim, the morning of the Israeli ’67 attack) who the Israelis believed was anti-Israel when he was well known to be more in The Lobby’s clutches than any president who had preceded him.
Rehmat, you should also be aware that there are a number of Christian Arabs who, for opportunistic reasons, have associated themselves with the most outrageous of the Zionist operatives, such as Bridget Gabriel and her Act for America, as well as with the Christian Zionists, who are rabidly anti-Islam and would be only too happy to pull off a stunt like this.
Jeff Blankfort
September 16, 2012 at 3:20 am
Take a look at this one:
FBI wants safer terrain before heading to Libya
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/15/world/africa/libya-us-ambassador-killed/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn
They are delaying their investigation. By the time they get there, there will be nothing left of the crime scene.
Saur Ben Zvi
September 16, 2012 at 10:31 am
Maidhc Ó Cathail – For God sake, spare me from your “credibility standard”. During my 15 years on the internet, I have noticed many turn-coats – from Gordon Duff, to Dr. Tariq Ramadan to Ali Abunimah – and who knows who will be the next.
Gordon Duff is not a liar – he too has his priorities. He posted a few of my blog articles – but then we parted when he blessed US-NATO attack on Libya to liberate Libyan Muslims. When I challenged him on his site early last year – he banned me from commenting, which is nothing new – I have been banned at dozens of Jewish and their so-called “Muslim websites”.
I don’t keep grudge against anyone – as the life goes on.
rehmat1
September 16, 2012 at 5:17 pm
Rehmat,
I won’t spare you or anyone else who comments here from my “credibility standard.”
Gordon Duff once called Jeff Blankfort, one of the most respected critics of the lobby’s influence on American politics, “a big defender of Israel.” Only a fool or a liar would make such a laughable claim.
If you wish to continue commenting here, you will have to be more discerning in the sources you cite.
Maidhc Ó Cathail
September 16, 2012 at 10:07 pm
Maidhc Ó Cathail – I know Jeff Blankfort as much as I know Juan Cole. Both has many things in common – except Cole has an “extra credibility point” over Blankfort – Cole’s second wife is a Pakistani “muslim”. As far your website is concerned – Your Lordship; I give a damn!
rehmat1
September 16, 2012 at 11:12 pm
Take your nonsense elsewhere then, Rehmat.
Maidhc Ó Cathail
September 17, 2012 at 2:43 am
Check this out:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/pcp/
Before he was involved in the making of a noxious video that provided an excuse for anti-American riots in the Middle East, and before he was convicted of federal bank fraud, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was arrested on charges relating to the making of angel dust.
Court records reviewed by Danger Room show that Nakoula and a co-defendant were brought before the Los Angeles County Superior Courthouse in Downey, California on April 15, 1997. They were charged with possessing the narcotic’s chemical precursors with “the intent to manufacture phencyclidine,” otherwise known as angel dust or PCP.
In the latest in a series of odd revelations about the man thought to be at center of a viral video, “The Innocence of Muslims,” which has been publicly seized upon by people in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia as a reason to attack U.S. embassies. At least four American government employees have been killed during the confrontations. And that’s brought enormous scrutiny to Nakoula, an Egyptian immigrant and gas station owner, who has alternatively confirmed and denied a role in the making of “Innocence.”
In recent days, we’ve learned that Nakoula used 14 different aliases — including “P.J. Tobacco” and “Kritbag Difrat” — in a complex check kiting scheme. We’ve learned that Nakoula was sentenced to 21 months in federal custody for the affair. According to The Smoking Gun, Nakoula was released from the the United States Penitentiary in Lompoc, California in September, 2010. He spent the following nine months in and out of a halfway house in Long Beach. Unnamed officials tell ABC News he wrote the script for the film, which depicts the prophet Muhammad as a thug and a child molester, while in prison.
The punishment was relatively gentle, even though it wasn’t Nakoula’s first encounter with the law. That’s because Nakoula had decided to become a federal informant.
“I am sorry for what happened. Now I know it was wrong. I decide to cooperate with the government to retrieve some of those mistakes,” Nakoula told Judge Christina Snyder in June of 2010, according to a sentencing transcript obtained by The Smoking Gun.
The man Nakoula agreed to help the feds catch was Eiad Salameh, the ringleader of the check kiting scheme and “a notorious fraudster who has been tracked for more than a decade by state and federal investigators,” the Smoking Gun says. “In his debriefings, Nakoula said he was recruited as a ‘runner’ by Salameh, who pocketed the majority of money generated by the bank swindles.”
Because of the promised help, because of his many ailments (including Hepatitis C and diabetes) and maybe because of a friendly letter from a friend calling Nakoula “a God-fearing man whose first priority is his family,” Bakoula was sentenced to just 21 months in prison.
That’s in spie of his previous arrests. In August of 1991, he was convicted on two counts of selling watered-down gasoline. And then came the arrest for PCP manufacturing in 1997. A local judge found there was probable cause for the case to continue against Nakoula and a co-defendant, Khaled Yameen Abraham, on August 6th of that year. Nakoula and Abraham were also briefly charged with conspiracy.
Three months later, Abraham was convicted on the PCP charge. Nakoula, on the other hand, was not. Nearly five years later, the case against him was dismissed, for reasons unknown.
According to The Daily Beast, Nakoula and Abraham weren’t just attempting to make PCP. The news site claims that the pair were arrested for trying to mass-produce methamphetamine. Nakoula was arrested on March 27, 1997, according to the Beast, with $45,000 in hundreds and twenties in a paper lunch bag on the seat beside him. Abraham’s house in Lake Elsinore contained 30 boxes of pseudoephedrine, meth’s central ingredient. Another 99 cases were allegedly found at the storage facility. Danger Room hasn’t been able to confirm this account. But it’s entirely possible that Abraham and Nakoula were simultaneously busted for being both PCP and meth makers.
saur ben zvi
September 17, 2012 at 1:31 pm
I did not think Libya was a big fish, compared to Syria, and nothing that has happened there has changed my mind. Qaddafi had become a CIA asset in 2003 and had made deals for all of Libya’s oil with the major oil companies well before the Arab Spring and IMHO, I believe the reason that the French and the British were so anxious to play a visible role in overthrowing him is that they wanted to make sure they didn’t lose those lucrative contracts. During the early days of the Libyan uprising, Stratfor published a map showing where the various companies had their respective territories but, curiously, the fact that all the country’s oil was spoken for did not get much play in the media.
Jeff Blankfort
September 18, 2012 at 5:39 am
Jeff,
But it was the Zionist BHL not French oil companies who convinced Sarkozy to be the first to recognize the “rebels.” Meanwhile in the U.S., the usual suspects — FPI, FDD, Lieberman/McCain et al. — led the call for “humanitarian” intervention. This suggests to me that Libya was no more a “war for oil” than was Iraq.
Maidhc Ó Cathail
September 18, 2012 at 9:38 am
Well it seems that there was no protest, or only a small one and during the afternoon, at the Embassy.
“The latest clarification from the administration came in response to an intelligence source on the ground in Libya telling Fox News there was no significant or sizeable demonstration when the attacks unfolded sometime after 9:30 p.m. in Benghazi last Tuesday. That appeared to challenge the view, espoused by the Obama administration, that ongoing demonstrations over an anti-Islam film had simply spun out of control.”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/18/administration-walks-tightrope-in-carefully-worded-accounts-libya-violence/
Saur Ben Zvi
September 18, 2012 at 10:16 am
Ah, the mere mention of BHL causes me almost to vomit. Despite that, I don’t think the odious, aromatic BHL, who is considered a joke among the French intelligentsia, could do it my himself. The French Lobby, while powerful, does not have the same clout. In Libya’s case, I think the push to intervene was made by TOTAL.
I don’t believe the Obama administration was that anxious to intervene, given the unpopularity of Iraq and Afghanistan but could not be seen as hanging back once it became a NATO operation. Only time will tell how much the US benefited from it.
The FDD, FPI, WINEP, etc., have been pining for a US attack on Iran and intervention in Syria but haven’t gottten their way to date because of opposition within the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. The Libyan operation, from the US standpoint, didn’t cost that much and certainly not what an attack on Iran or intervention in Syria would at the present time.
Jeff Blankfort
September 18, 2012 at 8:14 pm