# Posted 3:09 PM by Patrick Belton
INTO THE ARAB MIND: Retired Col. Norvell De Atkine, who teaches at the
John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and is an 'incurable romantic' about the region in which he served during tours in Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, in this issue of
Middle East Quarterly corrects some of the more misguided factual errors in Seymour Hersh's
New Yorker piece
'The Gray Zone' about the book
The Arab Mind, by the cultural anthropologist
Raphael Patai, and its rather less sinister role in Army education about the Middle East than Hersh imagined. De Atkine also presents his own thoughtful, nuanced exposition of the psychology of the Arab world, its potentialities, and his reflections as an area officer traversing the semipermeable membrance separating it from the West. He is, in the end, touchingly an optimist: in a concluding sentence worthy of T. E. Lawrence, he writes 'Ultimately, the Arabs, who are an immensely determined and adaptable people, will produce leadership capable of freeing them from ideological and political bondage, and this will allow them to achieve their rightful place in the world.'
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