So It Goes

Cordoba House and American Pluralism

I'M BEGINNING TO WORRY THAT the Cordoba Initiative, which is building a community center a couple of blocks near the site of the destroyed World Trade Centers, took America's claims of being one of the world's most pluralistic cultures a bit too much to heart.

Not that we shouldn't have expected and even understood some opposition to the plan. After all, Ground Zero is practically -- and rightly -- sacred to so many in this country and around the world, and the crimes there were unabashedly carried out in the name of the Islam. Even to someone like me, who has no objection to the building of the the facility -- which will be known as Cordoba House and contain, alongside other secular facilities, a mosque -- I see why it makes some uncomfortable. Symbols are powerful. Our message to them cannot simply be "get over it."

From the little bit I've read about the Cordoba Initiative and its leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the builders of the Cordoba House are trying to create a catalyst of peace and reconciliation. The Cordoba Institute promises to "steer... the world back to the course of mutual recognition and respect and away from heightened tensions" and to "serve the Muslim and non-Muslim community." That may sound a bit earnest, but hardly threatening, and I'll take earnestness over cynicism any day.

But, aside from those who feel the symbolism is awkward, there are still others for whom opposition has more to do with a profound antipathy toward all things Muslim.

As Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times reported in an article this past Sunday, all over the U.S. there are fierce fights against a growing presence of Islamic houses of worship.

"At one time, neighbors who did not want mosques in their backyards said their concerns were over traffic, parking and noise — the same reasons they might object to a church or a synagogue," Goodstein wrote. "But now the gloves are off.

"In all of the recent conflicts, opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. They quote passages from the Koran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law."

One photo accompanying the Times story shows a woman with a picket sign that reads: "Mosques are monuments to terrorism."

If there's any question that such highly vocal anti-Islamic acts are anomalous in the U.S., the Pew Research Center last year found that 52 percent of Americans say they are "very concerned about the possible rise of Islamic extremism in the United States," up 46 percent in 2007. Depending upon how you look at this finding, it could be a lot worse, but it could be a whole lot better, too.

There are at least two notably and disconcerting assumptions embedded in Americans' fear of Muslims that deserve some scrutiny.

First, that the people involved in the erection of this mosque -- and, to many, just about all Muslims -- are "radical Islamists," as one other high-profile leader has branded them, or "terrorists," as the woman with the sign claims. According to these folks, Muslims are categorically guilty of being a threat until proven innocent.

Second, that Muslims are bent on the "imposition of sharia," or Islamic law, on American society. Never mind that our First Amendment case law has pretty strong safeguards against such an outcome, which is ironic because many of the conservatives who are warning of Islamic takeover of American society are probably the same ones who have fought vociferously for getting rid of those safeguards. Also, this charge has the ring of 19th and 20th century cries about the "Papists" who would be a Trojan Horse for the Vatican in its attempts to Catholicize the U.S., and of the Jews' alleged subversion of American culture with their alien theology. As Ecclesiastes said, there's nothing new under the sun.

Obviously there are some Muslims -- call them "radical" or "militant" or whatever you wish -- who truly intend to do harm to Americans and other "infidels." Their goal, no doubt, is to impose their religious laws on secularly governed societies -- as they have in a number of countries. No doubt the people who subscribe to this approach are a bad and dangerous lot. Ground Zero is Object Lesson No. 1 of this. These people give the vast majority of good Muslims a bad image and scare the hell out of non-Muslims.

But those increasingly vocal and angry Americans who paint all Muslims with the same brush of such "radicalism" are doing great damage not just to the objects of their rage but to America itself. We Americans fancy our society as "exceptional," particularly in the way we manage our pluralism. Aside from some notable and tragic examples, we've lived up that to that ideal a lot better than most nations.

It feels rather unremarkable to say this, but apparently it needs to be said: if we go out of our way to alienate an entire category of people -- in this case, a large and growing part of our nation -- based on some misguided assumptions, we will as a nation be much less well off and hardly exceptional. 

Jeff

“There is no news at the moment.”

I WAS SEARCHING this morning for more information and analysis about the plane crash that killed 97 Polish leaders, including the Polish President, and I ended up on the official web site of the President’s office. When I clicked the tab for the site's “news” page, it reported that for today, April 11, "There is no news at the moment."

This is perhaps one of the few instances when a rather expressionless, automated message speaks volumes about what must be a stunning moment for the Polish people. Though many reams of articles have yet to be written and hours of TV and radio news reports to be produced about this tragedy, it renders one speechless and all other "news" in such a stricken nation nearly irrelevant. 

We Americans read about the tragedies of distant lands daily, and so often it is hard for us to fully grasp their impact. And we must reserve our grief for our own tragedies, such as the loss 29 coal miners this past week in West Virginia. 

I don't want to say that this plane crash deserves our attention any more than others; a lost life anywhere is a great blow. But this one has the potential to tear a huge hole of devastation in the spirit of a nation that has, for the last 21 years, reconstructed itself into a proud and prosperous place. 

For good reason, nearly every report about the crash points to the irony that the delegation of officials who perished were headed to one the most infamous symbols of Poland's suffering during the 21st century: Katyn. That is where, in 1940, more than 20,000 top Polish leaders -- military officers, intelligentsia, clergy and any others who might lead the Polish nation in the tumultuous years ahead -- where murdered by Soviets as part of a secret deal between Stalin and Hitler, who had just invaded Poland. It wasn't until the last couple of decades that the Russians admitted their true role in the massacre, which Poles long knew to be true.

Few in the United States ever really tuned this in or the fact that the end of World War II was the beginning of decades more bondage for Poles and others swept into the Soviet orbit. For us, on the other hand, it was a beginning of great prosperity and liberation. Writing for Newsweek today, Andrew Nagorski puts this in terms that an American can understand: "In the United States, all you have to do is say 'Pearl Harbor,' and everyone knows what you are talking about. In Poland—a country that was invaded countless times by Russians from the east and Germans from the west—there are far more names of places that everyone instantly recognizes because of their tragic symbolism. But one stands out above all others: Katyn."

He adds: "When I started visiting Poland as a student and then as a journalist in communist times, people only had to whisper the word 'Katyn' to signal their opposition to the government and its wholesale falsification of history. You could talk openly about the truth of Katyn only in the West, where Polish exiles like my father and grandfather, who served in the Polish government-in-exile in London during World War II, kept insisting that the cover-up was as bad as the original crime."

The death count from the crash yesterday is only a fraction of what it was in those woods in western Russia 40 years ago, but, as then, the current and future leadership of Poland has been devastated. Along with President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, the dead include top leaders of Polish Sejm (parliament), the President of the National Bank of Poland (their Ben Bernanke), the chiefs of the major military services and of the National Security Bureau, and accomplished career diplomats and government servants. Essentially, the people who run the country.

Among those was Mariusz Handzlik (left), who, until yesterday, was Undersecretary of State in the Office of the President of Poland. He was President Kaczynski's foreign policy advisor. I worked closely with Mariusz when he was posted as a counselor at the Polish Embassy in Washington during the 1990s, and I stayed in touch with him sporadically since then. His exceptional energy, intelligence, sensitivity and charm were perfectly suited for the role of a diplomat, and many of us who knew him figured he was destined to play big parts in the unfolding story of post-Communist Poland. He would some day certainly be a top Foreign Ministry official, or an ambassador, many assumed, perhaps to Israel, as he had become sensitive to and well-educated about the complex issues of the relationship between Poles and Jews. Indeed, he was a great example of how this "new" Poland was grappling with, and trying to set straight, the difficult history of Polish-Jewish relations.

He came to much of this on his own, but he absorbed some of it from Jan Karski, the great hero whom Mariusz (and I) idolized. Karski courageously smuggled himself into and out of several Nazi-imposed Jewish ghettos during the war and then again out of Poland to tell the Allies about the great tragedy of the Jews. After the war, Karski became a celebrated professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, where he inspired many other future diplomats and world leaders.

While in Washington, Mariusz became Karski's regular chess-playing partner, and he helped the great hero navigate the last years of his life. (I didn't know until reading this today that "the two men were playing chess on July 13, 2000, when Karski fell ill. Alarmed, Handzlik started to call an ambulance. Karski sternly responded: 'Minister Handzlik, Check! Your move.'”) It was an unofficial grandfather-grandson relationship, as far as I could tell, with all the affection that comes with that. Not long after, when one of Mariusz's three children was born, he named him Jan -- "after Karski," he told me with pride.

Having spent all of his childhood and early adult life under Communism, Mariusz, age 44 when he died, was of a generation old enough to understand the evil ordeal Poland had been through for the decades before and young and smart enough to be part of the difficult project of steering his country toward a democratic, progressive future.It is because of people like Mariusz -- and because, in their hearts, Poles always felt they were part of a Western, enlightened tradition -- that Poland has since 1989 worked hard to become one of the great economic, political and social success stories among the foreign Soviet satellites.

This tragedy takes many like Mariusz away from continuing that work in progress, though the good news is they put in place an infrastructure and a frame of mind that will allow Poland to withstand such a loss, to replenish these ranks with others of similar talent and sensibility, to carry on. In the longer run, that is. For now, that project will lose a step, though not stop completely. For now, there is no news. 

Jeff

**

P.S. On the homepage of the President's Office is a picture of the President and wife, and bold headline saying, "May they rest in peace..." If you click further on that item, the following page includes an excerpt from a poem on Katyn by the late Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, entitled "Buttons."  The excerpt ties the tragedy of April 2010 with that of 1940:

    a bird flew by a cloud is sailing
    a leaf is falling mallow sprouting
    and there’s silence on high
    and the Smolensk forest is steaming fog

Here's the full poem, which is worth a read and gives a sense of what the Katyn massacre symbolizes for Poles. For those like me who don't know, the word "pertinacious" means "stubborn or perversely persistent," which is what the memory of Katyn, now and then, is in Poland.

    Only the pertinacious buttons
    have endured death, witnesses of crime
    surfaced from the depths
    as the only monument on their grave

    they are to witness God will count
    and take pity on them
    yet how can they resurrect body
    being a sticky element of the soil

    a bird flew by a cloud is sailing
    a leaf is falling mallow sprouting
    and there’s silence on high
    and the Smolensk forest is steaming fog

    only the pertinacious buttons
    a powerful voice of silenced choirs
    only the pertinacious buttons
    of coats and uniforms.

    In memory of Captain Edward Herbert

Life Well Lived: Rebecca Lipkin

TODAY, I ATTENDED memorial service for a friend, Rebecca Lipkin, who died a week ago today from inflammatory breast cancer at the age of 48.

Too young, you may think, and she was. But in such a short lifespan, she accomplished so much, as this obituary details. When she died, she was Director of Programming at Al-Jazeera English, which she had helped found only a few years ago. Before that, she was a longtime producer for ABC News, where she was responsible for major pieces for "World News Tonight" and "Nightline." She not only saw the world -- particularly spots of conflict and controversy -- but she interpreted and showed those places and the people in them to the rest of America.

She also cultivated friendships with so many people in many corners of the world. That's why large numbers of friends turned out today, at her burial in New York two days ago and on an online tribute page devoted to her. I won't summarize what they all said, except to say that these were not just names in her Rolodex but people whom she touched and inspired with humor and wit.

I can't imagine how hard it has been for her mother and siblings to see her go. This is a very close family, and they all adored and admired her. But it must be gratifying in some way for them to see Becca's legacy: the countless people who profitted from knowing her and from all she gave to the world.

Becca's was a life extraordinarily well lived, and the stories people told about her today made the memorial service a joyful experience -- even if the reason for being there wasn't so joyful. Imagine if she'd had even a few years more.... Still, we were all lucky to have gotten what we did from the life she did live.

Jeff