THE TRAVEL SPECTATOR: Oh, Jerusalem
Tucker, William
THE TRAVEL SPECTATOR WILLIAM TUCKER ^11.1.,LIL-f III U Oh, Jerusalem EOPLE TAKE their religion seriously in the Middle East. Things that happened eight centuries ago often seem like...
...You used to be able to stand here and hear gunfire coming from the West Bank," says my nephew...
...At an intersection deep in the Arab Quarter, an elderly man in a threadbare tweed suit approaches us...
...Everybody's trying to sell you something...
...His mother, St...
...Jesus preached and was crucified just outside the city...
...Do I want a picture of my nephew and me, smiling for the camera...
...For example, do you know the story of the Dome of the Rock...
...The Council of Nations idea seems to have taken hold...
...William Tucker is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York...
...First he goes after me...
...The flight back to New York was beautiful...
...To which the anthropologist bit his lip and replied, "Cannibalism is all right for cannibals...
...Jerusalem is the logical place for such a council to sit," says Dmitry Radyshevsky, the Russian j ournalist who has organized the Summit...
...Are you Christian...
...Everything is so small...
...These are the thirty pieces of silver that Jesus was sold for," he intones solemnly...
...They are standing in prayer when we arrive and still bobbing when we leave...
...The altar is built right into the granite...
...You can touch the stone that sealed the tomb...
...Walling off the Palestinians is one thing, but trying to take Like everyone who visits the Holy City for the first time, I expect something to blow up every time I turn a corner...
...Mohammed was careful to make sure no one tinkered with his faith after he was gone," confides Gopalaswami Parthasarathy, India's former ambassador to Australia and Pakistan, who is sitting next to WILLIAM TUCKER me at the Jerusalem Summit...
...Would that mean France and Germany would sit on the council...
...The objective of all this, of course, is peace...
...Mohammed had four wives, the third of whom was three years old when he married her...
...He began sexual relations with her when she was nine [neatly confirming my thesis that polygamy leads to a shortage of women and child brides...
...Sure," I say...
...We hope to restore Jerusalem's status not only as a religious but as an intellectual center of the world," But isn't that exactly what Muslim mythmakers were thinking when they decided to make King Solomon's Temple the site of Mohammed's Ascension...
...An entire Muslim sect, the Ahmadaiyya Movement, is founded on this belief...
...It is only mildly pornographic by MTV standards—a little nudity through a semi-transparent veil—but obviously offensive to most Muslims...
...Sure enough, when the roundtable discussion begins, things explode...
...All for one and one for all...
...Another, Dr...
...Well, I'm going to be Khrushchev and pound my shoe on the table...
...You see what they have done to us...
...We move on...
...But he did have a dream...
...It's amazing no one has ever blown this place up...
...They must understand that this land has already been taken," says Daniel Pipes, the scholar and columnist with the New York Sun...
...Inside, the Old City is a catacomb, with tunneled passages that never see the light of day...
...Is cannibalism okay...
...Let me put you on our e-mail list," they say...
...I want to ask but hold my tongue...
...y nephew is Jewish (my sister converted years ago) and lives just outside Tel Aviv...
...Parvin Darabi, a California engineer and author of Rage Against the Veil, a feminist critique of Islam...
...I am getting a little uneasy about all this...
...The European women smile as they light candles...
...The consensus at my end of the table isthat God probably only takes his vacations there, but everyone is too polite to disagree...
...He rises with shoe in his hand and pounds viciously...
...One of the most dignified is Luis Alberto Lacalle Herrera, the former president of Uruguay...
...There is acute embarrassment...
...Women have their own section, just to the right...
...It wouldn't take much...
...Those dirty Jews!' "Somebody said something about Lenin earlier," he concludes...
...When we cross to the Arab quarter, the only change is that the signs are in Arabic...
...Legend takes it from there...
...A few stations are marked with nothing more than an inscription on a doorway...
...This is Israel...
...According to one obscure passage of the Koran, the Archangel Gabriel whisked The Prophet to Jerusalem on a flying horse...
...There it sits today, the perfect embodiment of the clash of faiths that still rages throughout the Middle East and may eventually engulf the whole world...
...You know how crowds are...
...The speaker is Khaleel Mohammed, a "friendly" Muslim who grew up in Guyana, studied law in Riyadh, and now teaches religion at San Diego State...
...Islam is a flawed religion," she continues...
...Thank you for injecting a little humor into this meeting," someone says later...
...Our guide deftly steers us into one, obviously owned by an associate...
...The conference has already made the Jerusalem Post...
...THE TRAVEL SPECTATOR WILLIAM TUCKER ^11.1.,LIL-f III U Oh, Jerusalem EOPLE TAKE their religion seriously in the Middle East...
...But the City is sublimely beautiful...
...They are almost completely unrepresented at the Summit...
...The Jews have been here since King David conquered the city in 1000 B.C...
...IIKE EVERYONE who visits the Holy City for the first time, I expect something to blow up .every time I turn a corner...
...WILLIAM TUCKER the inscription, "Don't Worry America, Israel Is Standing Behind You...
...There is no security, no guide ropes, no guards shooing you on—only silent Eastern European women in prayer shawls, kissing everything in sight...
...You can take a picture...
...Don't pay any attention to these people," he says, waving them away...
...Let's go...
...Every 30 yards there is a T-shirt stand with a marvelously non-denominational collection...
...The Dome of the Rock, its gold facade glistening, dominates the cityscape to the north...
...My premise is that polygamy produces an excess of males, who sense their own superfluousness and are happy instead to blow themselves up for the religion...
...As soon as we park the car, we are hassled by would-be guides and street vendors...
...He drives down for lunch and then we visit the Old City, where all this began...
...asked the philosopher...
...Here we are on the spot where Jesus was crucified...
...The man behind the counter shows us some Roman coins...
...Isn't 30 centuries of fighting over every square corner of Jerusalem enough...
...At the foot of the Second Temple's remains, whole congregations have set up makeshift lecterns and are holding services...
...is corrupt and should be abandoned...
...What can we do to promote peace in the Middle East and the world...
...Put on a cardboard yarmulke and you can join them...
...He shows me suburbs where Palestinian Arabs live in peace...
...It's amazing no one has ever blown this place up...
...Our guide has promised to take us to the room of the Last Supper, but we decide to save that for another day...
...AM ON THE PANEL, "The Liberation of Moslem Women," based on my Spectator article (June 2004) connecting suicidal terrorism and Muslim polygamy...
...Commerce knows no religion...
...When I see you showing this pornography, all I can hear are my people saying, 'Those dirty Jews...
...And so we visit the Fourteen Stations of the Cross...
...The King David Hotel is not as magisterial as I imagined but still resplendent and elegant, made from that beautiful limestone that characterizes almost every building in the city...
...Here the woman of Jerusalem wiped Jesus' brow...
...At almost every one, some order of nuns or friars has built a chapel...
...This is a people who are not curious about other cultures," says David PryceJones, the British journalist and author of The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs...
...Some Protestants claim another nearby site, the "Place of the Skull...
...All for one and one for all...
...Things that happened eight centuries ago often seem like yesterday...
...Myles Munroe, president of the Bahamas Faith Ministries International, assures us that "the Bahamas is the Western Hemisphere's oldest democracy" (have to check that one) and "although some people may think of Jerusalem as the center of world faith, God actually lives in the Bahamas...
...This is the market...
...According to a healthy body of scholarship, Jesus survived the crucifixion by having one of the disciples take his place, then went on to live in India, where he had a wife and children...
...Television crews are setting up interviews in the lobby...
...Jerusalem is the "City of Three Faiths...
...I pay him handsomely...
...You can touch the stone that sealed the tomb...
...Instead, there are scholars and diplomats from England, Russia, South Africa, India, China, Jordan, and Lebanon...
...Darabi and Van Gogh...
...Can we come up with something in three days that hasn't been thought of in the last 3,000 years...
...Couldn't you aspire to be Albania or Switzerland...
...Then we are inside the Holy Sepulcher, built in the fourth century by Constantine the Great, right on the spot—supposedly—where Jesus was crucified...
...My nephew, who is 30, has never heard the story of the crucifixion...
...In illustrating the reluctance of contemporary anthropology to criticize anything, I tell an anecdote about a philosophy professor challenging an academic anthropologist on the idea that all cultures are equal...
...But why did the crowd turn against him...
...We must propose instead a 'Council of Civilizations,' made up of the world's democracies," suggests Dore Gold, Israel's former U.N...
...One frequent theme is that the Palestinians should find somewhere else to live...
...IT IS NOW THE LAST SESSION of the Summit and the group has dissolved into an informal discussion...
...Just imagine what the other one billion must be thinking...
...Do these people work...
...I don't think so...
...To the south, stretching serpentine across a hillside, is a portion of the Wall, looking almost exactly like the Great Wall of China (which, come to think of it, was built for the same reason...
...Shirts emblazoned with the Israeli flag sit next to ones with the Palestinian flag, a portrait of Yasser Arafat (then only two weeks dead), and one that depicts a jet plane with "I'm Christian, he's Jewish, you're Muslim," I say...
...But did you ever wonder how the city became sacred to Muslims...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR March 2005 What is going on here, of course, is the appropriation of one people's religious traditions by another...
...Legend also says the Prophet Abraham lived here...
...Boarding his winged steed, he was back in Mecca before dawn...
...March 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 51 THE TRAVEL SPECTATOR away their women under the guise of "liberating" them seems a sure way to inflame this sex-starved population...
...I ask him if he has a copy of Jesus' birth certificate...
...Muslim warriors captured Jerusalem in 638 A.D., six years after Mohammed's death, and—based on Mohammed's dream—built the Dome of the Rock atop the Mount Moriah, once the site of Solomon's Temple, where the Arc of the Covenant was kept...
...They have to write their own laws instead of following the laws of God.' Muslims are not inclined toward an open society...
...Homa Darabi, immolated herself in 1994 in protest against the inhumane treatment of women in Iran," she tells the hushed audience...
...It wouldn't take much...
...If my father had suggested taking a second wife, my mother would have considered a second bris...
...N THE THIRD AFTERNOON, I am ready for a break...
...A short climb up a narrow passage and we are at Mt...
...Yes, but you never know when you're going to meet those few...
...Before it, Orthodox men with wide-brim hats swarm like ants...
...Why do you have to be the center of the world...
...My nephew is frantically signaling against it, but I am curious...
...March 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53...
...There's still not much tourist traffic...
...Ten feet across the room is "Jesus' tomb," a tiny mausoleum where barely three people can slip inside...
...They are beautiful, silent, and empty...
...We shake hands and part...
...ambassador...
...Wouldn't the world be better off if there weren't any news out of Jerusalem for a couple of years...
...Scattered among them, young men stand alone, bobbing their heads from the waist, like those toy cranes that drink water...
...She was a psychiatrist and returned to Iran because she wanted to live in her own country...
...It's only a few people that cause the trouble," he says...
...When my sister converted, she burned all her bridges...
...He called himself 'The Last Prophet.'" The Jerusalem Summit—"New Ideas from the Old City"—is in its second year, summoning scholars from around the world to discuss the whys and wherefores of the Middle East and explore pathways to a more permanent peace—meaning one that might last beyond the next suicide bombing...
...My sister, Dr...
...When Ibn Khaldun—who was a great historian—wrote about the Franks, he said, 'And what goes on there, God only knows.' When a 19th-century caliph sent one of his ambassadors to observe France and Britain, he returned saying, 'These are the most benighted people on earth...
...The Four Quarters—Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Armenian—sit on the side of Mount Zion, facing east...
...You are American...
...The clouds above the Mediterranean seemed Olympian, although I didn't see any gods playing among them...
...Just for good measure, she shows "Submission," Theo Van Gogh's ten-minute short that led to his stabbing by a militant Dutch Muslim...
...A morning session entitled "The Palestinian Refugees as a Humanitarian Problem" roughly translates, "Let's give them money so they can go away...
...One suggests Iraq, another Egypt...
...When he begins, he is boiling...
...the Arab asks as we start up the hill...
...Things have calmed down quite a bit since they built the Wall," my cab driver tells me as we climb the first hills at the edge of the city...
...At lunch I tell him a few of the details...
...On the Temple Mount—the site of David and Solomon's temple—he met Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, leading them in prayer...
...I thought they liked him...
...I think we must begin all over again with a new Koran...
...The U.N.: The Search for Alternatives" is the first panel, and there is no doubt where everyone stands on this one...
...Security is tight...
...He is right...
...In the lobby we are besieged by freelance publicists—nearly all expatriate Americans52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR March 2005 each with a plan for where the Palestinians ought to go...
...That is why she killed herself...
...Let's go...
...Helena, had confirmed it by finding a piece of the True Cross...
...This is our friendly Muslim...
...On the opposite slope is a huge graveyard that blends imperceptibly with the limestone houses of the West Bank...
...Calvary...
...The narrow streets of the Armenian Quarter are lined with shops selling cheap clothing and religious knickknacks...
...But she was not allowed to practice and in the end not even allowed to speak...
...After me comes Dr...
...This is the place where the rocks split when Jesus died," our guide tells us, pointing to a large crack...
...It is the only place that commands the respect and awe of the majority of the world's nations and its three major religions...
...After that, things settle down to Muslim-bashing at a more refined level...
...Islam has done the same with Christianity...
...And so we drive back to the hotel, before the impossible afternoon traffic begins to mount...
...It is oddly like Disney World, with souvenir shops located strategically across from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher...
...But his real rage is reserved for Dr...
...Then he climbed a golden ladder and talked with Allah...
...I'm Christian, he's Jewish, you're Muslim," I say...
...We descend to the Wailing Wall and its plaza, which has the feel of a giant archaeological excavation...
...In fact, Mohammed never set foot in the place...
...Continental European democracies don't seem very promising allies these days...
...The U.N...
...Would you like to see the place where Jesus was brought before Pontius Pilate...
Vol. 38 • March 2005 • No. 2
