Word: arabist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...four I knew at all well, he being my wartime boss at M16, never gave me an impression of having any serious intellectual interests. I regarded him as just an adventurer, who found in Stalin's very ruthlessness something to admire, as his father, St. John Philby, the Arabist, had found in King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Anyway, his appalling stutter would have precluded any sort of Marxist dissertation: Marx spoken is bad enough, but Marx stuttered would be intolerable...
...Nothing is profane to this very proximate God whose hand is everywhere," writes Arabist Peter A. Iseman. "Men's accidents are God's purposes, and All is Divine Plan. One of the more striking aspects of the Arabians is that doubt, inner guilt, anxiety are alien to them. Their world is more reassuring, pervaded as it is with a soothing sense of inevitability...
James E. Akins, 52, is a career Foreign Service officer, now retired, who was long a leading State Department Arabist and oil-policy expert. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1973 until late 1975, but was dismissed following policy disputes with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Akins felt Saudi Arabia, not Iran, should have been the prime focus of U.S. interests in the region...
...officer in question was Alexandra U. Johnson, 32. An Arabist who had studied in Beirut and Tunis, she was assigned to the Jerusalem consulate two years ago as part of her six-year probationary training period. From interviews with Palestinians seeking visas, Johnson compiled a list of 29 incidents involving such tortures as "refrigeration, use of electricity, hanging by the hands or feet, extreme forms of sexual sadism, interrogation accompanied by starvation, enforced sleeplessness." Details were cabled to Washington last May and November by the consulate, which functions independently of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv...
...Secretary of State Harold Saunders, who gave Jordan's King Hussein the official U.S. answers to 14 questions that the King had raised about the Camp David accords. Saunders, at various times a CIA, National Security Council and State Department specialist in Middle East affairs, is a respected Arabist. Selective leaks of his purported answers to Hussein tended to fuel Jerusalem's suspicions that the State Department, if not the White House, had an anti-Israel bias...