Deborah Burlingame outs new 9/11 memorial as "Why They Hate Us Pavillion"

UPDATE:  (via Michelle Malkin) Dick Tofel, president of the IFC, responds to Debra Burlingame's accusations in a WSJ piece published today.  However, bloggers are questioning whether his response is little more than politically correct sleight-of-hand rhetoric designed to distract attention away from his organization's agenda.  In response to Tofel's lack of specifics, Malkin asks, "And what about the disappearance of the Iraqi voter mural? What about the pressure from the ACLU to include its America=Gulag exhibits? What about the involvement of moonbats such as Eric Foner and George Soros?"

And please make sure that you visit 9/11 Families For America.  They were kind enough to link to my post and to the posts of other bloggers following this story.

A new website, Take Back The Memorial, plaintively asks, "Why should visitors be greeted with a 'we must understand how we brought this on ourselves' exhibit?"

Front Page Magazine: "How The Left Hijacked The September 11th Memorial"

And here's a link to a more recent post of mine regarding the obscene anti-US art from The Drawing Center that was slated to be exhibited at the Memorial, and the statement by Gov. Petaki pledging his support to fight any anti-America and anti-military displays at Ground Zero.

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This story was Little Green Footballs' "Outrage of the Day" for Tuesday, June 7.

Debra Burlingame, sister of one of the airline pilots murdered on 9/11 when his plane was flown into the Pentagon, wrote a sickening op-ed for the Wall Street Journal (who, hopefully, will make it public access this weekend) in which she details the plans of the International Freedom Center to turn the proposed 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero - the former site of The World Trade Center - into a multi-million dollar Anti-American display.

Who is the International Freedom Center?  With a name like that, one should immediately be suspicious.  And those suspicions are rightly founded in the fact that the IFC is tied in closely with the ACLU and Human Rights First, two notoriously left-wing, anti-American and anti-military organizations.  Its members include Professor Eric Foner, the Columbia University faculty member who hoped that Middle Eastern terrorists would slaughter American soldiers because we needed "a million Mogadishus" to make us recognize the error of our ways.  And guess who is holding the IFC purse strings?  None other than George Soros.

Here is a short excerpt from the WSJ op-ed:

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.

It is sad to think how far down the tubes our country has traveled in order for city officials to allow such anti-American and anti-Western intellectual puffery to constitute a memorial to the deaths of 3,000 civilians murdered by terrorists. 

Of course this isn't the only sad chapter in the pitiful legacy of the Ground Zero Memorial.  Remember the proposed statue of the firefighters raising an American flag over the ruins of the WTC that  was to be part of the Memorial?  It was squelched because sculptors decided to recast the statue to include phony minorities, and NYC firefighters were livid that the Memorial's developers would engage in such an outlandish re-writing of history.

Thank God I live in Oklahoma.  Here, at least, when terrorism strikes we understand who did it and why.  And we cherish the memories of the victims more than political agendas.

Michelle Malkin was outraged too.  Check out her posts here and here.

Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine was the one who came up with the "Why They Hate Us Pavillion" meme.

If you're incensed by all of this, here is a directory of the officials responsible for the Memorial.  Let them know what you think.

Comments

[abutom]

The bodies were still splatting like tomatoes and the rats were running adds on TV showing ethnic people saying I am an American. Deliberately done to create terror among Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. Then they printed new labels to spin the blame. Terrorists Yes from Swordi Arabia absolutely. Every terrorist has a home address and that's where the j-dams should be sent. The greatest threat to America is George Sorros and the pitiful Hollywood dupes. Throw in or out the Aclu, The UN COMMISION ON COMMISIONS, The International Red Cross,Amnesia International and my Joe Mc Carthy weegee board says News Weak and The New York slimes. It is time for a second political party to arrive on the scene. To compete against the DNC divide n conquer demoncrats and their solemn looking accomplices the panty waste repubs.
Orin Hatch is no match for terror town. Time for the loose cannon party on deck.
No more terms for termites. Let them feel terror for a change. Steven Decatur said my country right or wrong.
Captain Boycott says my country is never wrong in war time. There is a war on moron.
www.spiritofamericaparty.com