When "Orientals" Succumb to "Orientalism", Mubarak and the "Arab Mind"

Could one argue that evinced in this interview with the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, is an example of when so-called "Orientals" succumb to "Orientalism"? Charlies Rose is actually the first regrettably to use the term 'Arab mind', but clearly the Egyptian president fully buys into such a notion and advocates a variation on the theory of the "Arab Mind". This is the full interview on Charlie Rose, while the late Hafez al-Asad was broaching talks with the Israelis, mediated by the Clinton administration, over the Golan Heights - land for peace blah, blah, blah etc... The relevant comments aren't until the latter stages of the interview, but it's very interesting to note that Mubarak believes that Arab resentment of the United States stems from the US's lack of insight into the 'Arab mind'. Perhaps, he reckons officials in the State Department should continue reading the catastrophic and unabashedly racist text on which they had previously relied and which topped the reading list of recommended reading for American officials stationed in the Arab world, The Arab Mind by Ralph Patai, whose only logical result was Abu Ghraib. If anything reading The Arab Mind tells us a great deal more about the attitudes towards the Arab world of American policy makers, and the rationalization which underwrites many of their decisions and initiatives and this is the light in which it should be read. There has been a great deal of talk about how academics especially anthropologists and psychologists have been instrumental in the formulation of techniques used to break the will of detainees in order to extract information. This is what the late and great Edward W. Said spoke of some 25 years ago in Orientalism, when Empire and academia go hand in hand, the latter undergirding and succouring the former in terms of the production of knowledge, which both rationalizes and legitimates imperial actions. The discourse of Orientalism, however, should never be equated with the impetus and cause of those same imperial actions...