For a New Yorker, Washington, D.C. is an odd town. Instead of the mercantile hustle of Manhattan, you sense the hum of a massive bureacratic machine going about its business. Cabs pick up more than one fare, few people wear black; conversation in restaurants does not revolve around the perennial New York topics of media, fashion and rent, but is peppered with names likes McCain, Greenspan, Dean, and some new phenomenon called the "Nationals." If Manhattan is all about money and power, a cynic might say that D.C. is all about the power that money can buy.
I emerged from the Metroliner at Union Station on February 16, just in time to catch a cab to the headquarters of that neo-conservative think-tank the American Enterprise Institute. I'd received an invitation to attend an AEI conference addressing the Center for Religious Freedom's recent report on Saudia Arabian hate literature promulgated in U.S. mosques. Members on the panel included former CIA director James Woolsey and CRF director Nina Shea. In the audience were numerous AEI and Hudson Institute scholars, in addition to journalists, a few clerics and several Muslim women.
If you haven't read the CRF report, I suggest you remedy that oversight at once. The conference discussed the report, the depth of Wahhabi infiltration into U.S. mosques and how America should respond. "We don't need to accept claims by the Saudis or Wahhabis that they represent Islam, any more than we should accept that Torquemada represented medieval Catholicism," said Woolsey.
For me the most interesting moment of the conference came immediately afterwards, as people approached the panelists for further discussion. Three Muslim women and a cleric from a local mosque accused of displaying Saudi "hate" literature confronted Shea and demanded to know why the CFR report seemed to go out of its way to brand Islam as an extremist religion. Shea tried to explain that the group's finding implicated Saudi Arabia, not Islam, but the four Muslims would have none of it. "This gives the impression that all American mosques distribute extremist literature," one woman said. "I can assure you that my mosque in Washington does not." If that's true, her congregation is an exception: according to Sheik Hashem Khabbani, perhaps the country's leading moderate Muslim cleric, 80% of the mosques in the U.S. are under Wahhabi control.
In New York, we would have adjourned to an after-party in some cavernous Flatiron District bar. This being Washington, I fell under the wing of a military journalist named Paula who took me to a well-known bookstore where the seminal Egyptian writer Bat Ye'or was reading from her latest book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. In this work, Ye'or traces what she sees as a series of "informal alliances" in the 1970s between the European community and Mediterranean Arab states, which resulted in the 1974 Euro-Arab Dialogue. According to Ye'or, the EAD seeks to tie Arab and European foreign and economic policies together under an anti-American, anti-Israeli banner. The result, she says, will be "Eurabia," or the Arabization of Europe and the destruction of the continent as a Christian-oriented civilization.
I haven't read the book, and although I have great respect for Ye'or, her position--and the proof she adduced to support it--smacked a little too much of conspiracy-thinking. I made the mistake of venturing this opinion to a journalist named Andrew who glared at me in disbelief. "What will it take to wake you up?" he cried, causing people to glance up from their book browsing. "We're talking a MASSIVE EFFORT to launch JIHAD in Europe! Can't you see it?" Coming on top of the AEI conference and the complaints from the Muslims about the CFR slandering their religion, this outburst of Islamophobia took me aback. I managed to extricate myself and caught a cab back to my hotel.
The next morning I rose early and jogged, listening to C-Span on my Walkman. The Syrian ambassador to the U.S., Imad Mustafa, was assuring listeners that his country was doing "everything it could" to cooperate in the War on Terror with America; moreover, he informed us, Damascus had "nothing to do" with Rafik Hariri's assassination. After showering, I caught a cab for the Washington Mall, and more particularly what I knew would cleanse my spirit of such diplomatic mis-information, the Lincoln Memorial.
Climbing the steps of Daniel Chester French's masterpiece, I was immediately surrounded by a flock of schoolkids pouring down from the memorial--giddy, screaming, laughing kids, of all shades and ethnic groups, the best testimony I could think of to Lincoln's dream. The magnificent statue itself caused, as it always does, the breath to lodge in my throat and tears to well in my eyes: the flowing clothes, the majestic visage with the calm, but determined look in his eye, the left hand clenched as if the President were about to rise from his seat to annouce some profound resolution. And, of course, the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Speeches engraved on each marbled side of the neo-classical building. Flowers and wreaths from various groups festooned the feet of the 16th president; his birthday had been four days earlier, although to save time and expedite vacations, we celebrate it today, along with George Washington's.
Washington's monument lies directly in front of Lincoln's, across a pool adopted by geese, and surrounded by churned-up dirt, buidling material and construction equipment. No matter. The soaring majesty of the unadorned column transcends the mundane grit of a restoration project to remind us of Washington's own simple majesty--one of the few men in history, as one scholar has remarked, "Whom the more we learn about, the greater he seems."
After spending some time contemplating the debt we owe to men like Washington and Lincoln, I walked to the Vietnam War memorial. Here, I contemplated in a different way the name etched in the wall of a brother of a childhood friend, who died in combat on April, 1969. I then went to my second meeting of my trip--a State Department conference on import restrictions for Chinese antiquities (my other life is an art journalist). On the way I passed by the Capitol. The noon sunlight gleamed off the upper windows of the dome, causing the whole edifice to shine like an image of Jonathan Winthrop's "City on a Hill." Romantic and idealistic, I know, but at that moment the skeptical journalist in me faded away, replaced by someone gazing at a wonder of history: a government of the people, by the people, for the people. May such miracles never perish from the earth.
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