The Muslim-monster fantasy only partially explains Abu Ghraib’s atrocities

Evidence

However, the existence of the Muslim monsters documented in this study only partially explains Abu Ghraib. The United States of America has a long history of brutality and violence toward its enemies. One only needs to look at the annals of American Indian history, or at slavery, to know this. This is a violent country that has done, and continues to do, very bad things. Add to this the policies established under Bush and Rumsfeld, a military culture that counts on the dehumanization of the enemy in order to be successful, and the popularity of books like Ralph Patai’s The Arab Mind, a “study” of “the Arab” and their sexual neuroses that had widespread readership among US policymakers, military brass, and soldiers during the early 2000s. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 751

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s third guiding question — what the monster lets makers avoid seeing: here, America’s own long history of violence against Indians and enslaved people.
• SHARE: The claim that The Arab Mind was widely read among US policymakers and soldiers in the early 2000s is a specific, verifiable detail worth sharing with someone studying the Iraq War.