INSIDE America
The Elephant in the Room
Ground Zero, Two Years Later
By Lorenzo Albacete
On September 11, 2003, the President of New York University, John Sexton, hosted
a special dinner in the lobby of a historic building located in downtown New
York’s government and business district, next to “Ground Zero” in lower Manhattan.
The purpose of the dinner was to gather a “cross-section of New Yorkers coming
together with political leaders to assess, after two years, the lessons of 9/11
for New York City, the nation, and the world.” The dinner was entirely video-taped
by PBS-TV in order to be shown later this fall or winter as a two-hour documentary
special on “September 11 and the Future of the West.” The guest list was impressive.
It included Raymond W. Kelly, New York City’s Police Commissioner; Paul McHale,
the second in command at the new Federal Department for Homeland Defense; Robert
Morgenthau, District Attorney for New York County; Jessica Stern, Harvard professor
and terrorism expert; and prominent journalists (Calvin Trillin of the New Yorker;
Fareed Zakaria, Chief Editor of Newsweek International; Ti-Hua Chang, correspondent
for NBC-TV news; and Rossana Rosado, publisher of the oldest Hispanic daily in
the United States); as well as authors (like Salman Rushdie), scientists, and
business leaders. I was invited to attend the dinner as “a prominent Catholic
educator and scholar, and as commentator of the role of religion in terrorism.” Since
most of us did not know each other very well, I thought it would take long before
the conversation would pick up. However, the conversation was in fact heated
almost from the very beginning. All day long, the City had been commemorating
the second anniversary of the terrorist attack, and these “expert guests” seemed
anxious to make their pronouncements. It became immediately clear that we were
facing two hours of old, pre-packaged opinions challenged by other, opposing
pre-packaged opinions. At no time did anyone give evidence of having changed
his mind or penetrated more deeply into the subject. From the outset, it was
mostly a discussion about politics. NYU President Sexton, a Catholic lawyer with
a degree in religious studies, tried numerous times to bring the conversation
to a deeper level of discourse, but it quickly returned again to the usual themes:
unilateralism vs multilateralism, globalization, US arrogance, Arab resentment,
poverty and hopelessness, racism and loss of civil liberties, and comparison
with casualties in other terrorist attacks, tragedies, genocides, and even traffic
accidents. The mood was certainly anti-Bush Administration, with the exception
of the Assistant Secretary for Homeland Defense and New York City’ s Police Commissioner.
As to the non-political types, Iranian-American artist Shiria Neshat bemoaned
discrimination at airport security checks, and Professor Jessica Stern (author
of Terror in the Name of God) did not pursue the connection between religion
and terrorism but concentrated instead on the humiliation that the modern age
had inflicted on the Arab world. The representatives of the business world were
remarkably subdued, except a member of the prestigious “Council on Foreign Relations,” who
questioned the seriousness of war leaders who asked the people to “sacrifice” by
spending more money in order to spur the economy and show the terrorists that
we were not intimidated. The only difference was Salman Rushdie, who, frankly,
seemed out of place in a discussion like this one. Early on, he insisted on the
need to understand the present religious situation of Islam and the internal
struggles for its future. It seemed he was suggesting that the “future of the
West” was tied to this struggle between modernity and a religion that had yet
to go through the encounter with critical thinking and tolerance. Toward the
end of the dinner, sometime between the “Tribeca Grill” and the “Warm Apple Tart
with Vanilla Ice Cream,” President Sexton asked me to more or less try to summarize
the new insights learned from the conversation (providing more or less the “exalted” view “from
the perspective of eternity, I guess), but since I had not discovered any new
insight so far, I repeated again what I had said beforenamely, that we would
not understand our present situation adequately if we failed to perceive its
basis as a religious war. The human vocation to the Infinite had been effectively
suppressed by modern criticism and, instead of disappearing, it had struck back
with a deadly force. The proper response, I suggested, was not further suppression
of the religious instinct, but its adequate education by insistence on the requirements
of reason and a humble respect for a non-syncretistic pluralism based on true
religious liberty. Salman Rushdie exclaimed: “We have all failed tonight to see
the elephant in the room [a reference, I imagine, to the famous Buddhist parable].
Only the Monsignor has described it adequately. In the end, our future depends
on the encounter between religion, critical reasoning, and humility.”