The Ground Zero Memorial Has Been Hijacked!

I worked a few miles from the World Trade Center and was witness on the morning it became Ground Zero. I visited the site a number of times after that horrific day to pay homage to those we lost there. I have never visited the site -– whether a week after or a year after -- and not been brought to tears. It was and remains my opinion after seeing the site a few days after the carnage that, had it not been for the need to recover the bodies of the victims of that attack, we should have left the rubble and ruin there until every American and supporter of democracy worldwide had an opportunity to view it. It was truly that horrific and no image captured in photographs or film can convey the magnitude. People who have visited the Grand Canyon or the Great Pyramids will understand what I mean. I would like to have seen it left there for the same reason the Nazi concentration camps were left standing: to bear witness to those who perished and to be a testament that we can never let either event happen ever again.

Now individuals who want to share their “vision” and have us all believe that we brought this atrocity upon ourselves are hijacking the WTC Memorial. They intend to turn the Memorial into a statement on human rights atrocities in the world. It will not be a Memorial to the American citizens, firefighters, police and emergency medical personnel who were murdered September 11, 2001. It will apparently be a multi-media extravaganza of man’s inhumanity to man – the Nazi Holocaust, Native American Genocide, Soviet gulags, the KKK …

You just have to read Debra Burlingame’s piece in the Wall Street Journal about what the Memorial at Ground Zero is becoming. The writer of “The Great Ground Zero Heist: Will the 9/11 "memorial" have more about Abu Ghraib than New York's heroic firemen?” is a member of the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines fight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

She writes, in part, “Rather than a respectful tribute to our individual and collective loss, they [people] will get a slanted history lesson, a didactic lecture on the meaning of liberty in a post-9/11 world. They will be served up a heaping foreign policy discussion over the greater meaning of Abu Ghraib and what it portends for the country and the rest of the world.

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom"--but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same… To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man… This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.” I wholeheartedly agree. If people want a memorial to "teach" the world about its failings, put it somewhere in Washington DC or perhaps in Switzerland -- the next home (we hope) of the U.N... Better yet, how about France? But it certainly does NOT belong at Ground Zero.

She goes on to reveal that the principles of the Memorial are mostly members of various human rights organizations and liberal college professors (one who believed that maybe we brought the attack on ourselves and one who can't figure out whether the attack at the WTC or the Patriot Act is worse!) who have hijacked and kidnapped the memorial at Ground Zero for their own purposes.

Ms. Burlingame also writes, “While Gov. George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and LMDC [Lower Manhattan Development Corp.] are focusing their attention on the economic revival of lower Manhattan, there has been no meaningful oversight with respect to the "cash cow of Ground Zero." Meanwhile, the Freedom Center's organizers are quickly lining up individuals, institutions and university provosts with this arrogant appeal: "The memorial to the victims will be the heart of the site, the IFC will be the brain." Indeed, they have declared the World Trade Center Memorial the perfect "magnet" for the world's "great leaders, thinkers and activists" to participate in lectures and symposiums that examine the "foundations of free and open societies." Put less grandly, these activists and academics are salivating at the prospect of holding forth on the "perfect platform" where the domestic and foreign policy they despise was born.”

Read the full article at http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006791

I think you have to subscribe (free) to read the full article -- but trust me it will be worth it!

If you don’t want to register, then you can check out additional information at the wonderful Michelle Malkin’s place… http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002680.htm She has lots of links and other information on her site… Thanks Michelle!

Ms. Burlingame asks, how do we get it back? Noise. Lots of noise. Register your disgust and disapproval with the current plan and demand that the WTC Memorial BE a memorial to the American people who were attacked and murdered on September 11, 2001.

Update: For auto links to contact various private and elected individuals to protest, go to the new Take Back The Memorial site: www.takebackthememorial.com

Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.