Adam Shatz assures you that Orientalist depictions of Arabs are rather accurate and true: he found a group of natives who told him that over dinner, damn it

"I had dinner with a group of Algerian intellectuals who grew up in socialist Algeria, under the rule of Colonel Houari Boumédiène, and who told me that Sattouf might as well have been writing about their childhood."  That is what I can Orientalist documentation as its best.  Where is Thomas Friedman's tax driver or Robert Fisk's Abed when you need them?