A new book digs into the deadly 1977 siege that shook the city.
, it sheds light on an incident that was big news at the time but, 45 years later, has to some extent faded from memory. The story of the siege is well worth telling, though, as it touches on lots of facets of modern Washington, including political violence, policing, media, and the quest for DC statehood.The District Building wasn’t the only site of the attack.
But the author also digs into how Khaalis’s hunger for media attention fueled the violence. The siege was directly inspired by the heavily covered 1972 attack at the, when Palestinian gunmen murdered 11 Israeli athletes. Mufti says the lesson was clear to Khaalis: “If you take downtown Washington, the cameras are going to come.”
Simon and his sister soon joined other members of their family at a church across Scott Circle from B’nai Brith’s headquarters. At that point, it was just becoming clear that something big was unfolding. “We figured out in a relatively short time that all three locations were connected,” says, who was then working for Channel 9 and was one of the first journalists to arrive at the Islamic Center. Reporters across the city began to fan out to all three sites.
The situation was complicated by jurisdictional issues. Should local police or federal law enforcement lead the response? DC had gained home rule less than four years earlier, and the situation quickly turned into a test of its self-governance. President Carter was reluctant to get involved, but in the book Mufti reports that the administration prepared an executive order that would give the US military a green light to take control of the city, if necessary.
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