The Proposed World Trade Center Memorial “Guilt” Complex

Did you ever read an article or see something on television and think, this can’t possibly be right? That was our reaction to recent articles about the World Trade Center Memorial at Ground Zero, beginning with a post yesterday on Michelle Malkin’s blog - The Soros-ization of Ground Zero.

It’s been our experience that Michelle Malkin does not jump to conclusions and that she does her homework. So, when Malkin wrote yesterday, “George Soros and other human rights zealots who are trying to turn Ground Zero into a blame-America monument”, we took notice.

Malkin provided these quotes from an article by Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines fight 77, which terrorists crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

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..."

...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.

Today the Burlingame piece, originally published in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, is available for reading on Opinion Journal. Just reading the title, The Great Ground Zero Heist: Will the 9/11 "memorial" have more about Abu Ghraib than New York's heroic firemen?, is enough to make your blood boil. Brace yourself before reading the rest.

Burlingame is well positioned to give us an honest account of the proposed project; she’s on the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation. Consider this:

Rather than a respectful tribute to our individual and collective loss, they 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.

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.

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.

The World Trade Center is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, in others words the people of the Empire and Garden states. A large portion of the World Trade Center Memorial Complex is being subsidized by the American taxpayers. How in the world have the Anti-American activists been given control over our land, our money and our memorial complex?

Act now to stop the desecration of Ground Zero. We suggest you contact the board members and trustees of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and make your thoughts about the proposed project known before it's too late.

Update: Here is an interview with Debra Burlingame conducted yesterday by Bill Bennett about the memorial scandal.