An Insult To The Three Thousand

...who died at The World Trade Center on 9/11.

{...}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 as that of those Marines. 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, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. 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.

The public will be confused at first, and then feel hoodwinked and betrayed. Where, they will ask, do we go to see the September 11 Memorial? The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation will have erected a building whose only connection to September 11 is a strained, intellectual one. While the IFC is getting 300,000 square feet of space to teach us how to think about liberty, the actual Memorial Center on the opposite corner of the site will get a meager 50,000 square feet to exhibit its 9/11 artifacts, all out of sight and underground. Most of the cherished objects which were salvaged from Ground Zero in those first traumatic months will never return to the site. There is simply no room. But the International Freedom Center will have ample space to present us with exhibits about Chinese dissidents and Chilean refugees. These are important subjects, but for somewhere--anywhere--else, not the site of the worst attack on American soil in the history of the republic.{...}

Wait for it.

{...}In fact, the IFC's list of those who are shaping or influencing the content and programming for their Ground Zero exhibit includes a Who's Who of the human rights, Guantanamo-obsessed world:

• Michael Posner, executive director at Human Rights First who is leading the worldwide "Stop Torture Now" campaign focused entirely on the U.S. military. He has stated that Mr. Rumsfeld's refusal to resign in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal is "irresponsible and dishonorable."

• Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, who is pushing IFC organizers for exhibits that showcase how civil liberties in this country have been curtailed since September 11.

• Eric Foner, radical-left history professor at Columbia University who, even as the bodies were being pulled out of a smoldering Ground Zero, wrote, "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." This is the same man who participated in a "teach-in" at Columbia to protest the Iraq war, during which a colleague exhorted students with, "The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military," and called for "a million Mogadishus." The IFC website has posted Mr. Foner's statement warning that future discussions should not be "overwhelmed" by the IFC's location at the World Trade Center site itself.

• George Soros, billionaire founder of Open Society Institute, the nonprofit foundation that helps fund Human Rights First and is an early contributor to the IFC. Mr. Soros has stated that the pictures of Abu Ghraib "hit us the same way as the terrorist attack itself."{...}

{my emphasis}

Nice, huh?

Martini Boy says it best:

{...}But the IFC exhibit is treason to the memory of the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered for the crime of going to work on 9/11/2001. Whatever our nation's faults, whatever injustices have been committed in our names, no matter what someone might ever have suffered at our hands...

...those are not the stories to tell at the site where the World Trade Center towers once stood. At the site where 3,000 people were burned or crushed or leapt to their deaths. Not at the site where we suffered one of the worst surprise attacks in modern history, and against a civilian target.

We don't memorialize our war dead by including pictures of them picking their noses. We shouldn't remember our losses by blaming its victims - or even their great-great-grandfathers. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier isn't inscribed with, "What a Fuck-Up, Huh?" {...}

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The victims of 9/11 deserve better, as do those who mourn them still and those who want to remember. It's really quite simple: a memorial is meant to memorialize. Not to teach. Not to educate. Anything that might happen along those lines is pure gravy. Primarily a memorial is meant to remember those who have fallen.

If these people can't even do that without trying to politicize it---or even realize that some people would think that they're politicizing it---well, they've got their heads shoved so far up their bums that they should be able to save their health insurers the cost of a colonoscopy.

Posted by Kathy at June 8, 2005 11:40 PM