Ever since I’ve become chairman, there have been profiles of me in People, George, The Washington Post, The Detroit News, and all of them could have been written by the same person.
Washington
Washington isn’t a city, it’s an abstraction.
I don’t think you can rely on Iran. I don’t think you can rely on other radicals like the Taliban. They dispatched Al Qaida to bomb New York and Washington. What were they thinking? Were they that stupid? They weren’t stupid. There is an irrationality there, and there is madness in this method.
The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington – wasn’t nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
Harriet Washington, in ‘Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,’ documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson performed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system.
If cars and buses were attacked daily by petrol bombs or stones for 16 months in Washington, could you imagine it would be tolerated? It would not, because in the name of democracy, to preserve democracy, steps would be taken.
Fantasy is the tendency of Americans, going back to colonial times, to look at the Middle East as a type of fractured mirror of the United States – a type of mirror that could look a lot more like the United States, if, say, a Middle Eastern George Washington would emerge.
Sometimes when I get home at night in Washington I feel as though I had been in a great traffic jam.
My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It’s about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It’s about Washington and the army and the war. It’s the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.
I often hear them accuse Israel of Judaizing Jerusalem. That’s like accusing America of Americanizing Washington, or the British of Anglicizing London. You know why we’re called ‘Jews’? Because we come from Judea.