The Times: The lost Arabic school for scandal: the spy school
By Michael Binyon
June 22, 2004
EXOTIC, influential, reviled and mysterious, few institutions have exercised such a lasting and controversial hold over British diplomacy as a modest language school founded in Jerusalem 60 years ago this month.
The Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (Mecas), later based in Lebanon and known throughout the Arab world as “the spy school”, began as an attempt to train army officers in the language and culture of the Middle East, where Britain still ruled a dozen countries directly or indirectly. When the last intake of young British diplomats, oilmen and students, Japanese businessmen and international civil servants scuttled out of the beleaguered school at the height of the Lebanese civil war in 1978, they left behind an institution that has never been matched and will never be repeated: a piece of Whitehall nestling amid the terraces, vineyards and old stone houses of Shemlan, a sleepy Christian mountain village that became synonymous with broken plurals, weak radicals and all the intricacies of modern newspaper Arabic. read more
Like this:
Like Loading...
This website and sisters
royaldutchshellplc.com,
shellnazihistory.com,
royaldutchshell.website,
johndonovan.website, and
shellnews.net,
are owned by
John Donovan. There is also a
Wikipedia segment.