The Memorial Center to be built at Ground Zero 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. The reason there is no room is that the International Freedom Center (IFC) is getting 300,000 square feet of space to teach us how to "harness the power of history and use it a a springboard for contemporary dialogue and debate" on the meaning of freedom.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 IFC, have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom." However, the IFC's organizers plan is to focus not only history's triumphs but also its failures.
People will travel to the Memorial Complex 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 (Camp Delta too) 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.
From the website of the IFC we learn the following, "The International Freedom Center is a multi-dimensional cultural institution combining history, education and engagement. It will be an integral part of humanity’s response to September 11. Rising from the hallowed ground of the World Trade Center site, it will serve as the complement, and its building as the gateway, to the World Trade Center Memorial, playing a leading role in the Memorial’s mission to 'strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to hatred, ignorance, and intolerance.'”
The Center will include three major cultural components that have little to do with the attack on the World Trade Center.
1. The Museum Exhibition Spaces will tell freedom's story from a liberal-left perspective, by looking at the countless individual women and men around the world who have made a difference. The museum will include a “Freedom Walk” – offering visitors a multimedia collage of some of freedom’s most inspiring moments, and a set of galleries offering compelling and thought-provoking treatments of great freedom issues and stories from around the world, throughout the ages and up to the moment.
Translation: The Marxist-left, anti-American media center
2. Educational and Cultural Center: sponsoring an extensive array of lectures, symposia, debates, films and other events in its theaters and public halls that will nurture a global conversation on freedom in our world today. Much of the Center’s evening programming will draw on offerings from members of a university consortium being assembled by the Center and its partner the Aspen Institute. Universities that have already agreed to participate include the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Cape Town; New York, Columbia and the New School Universities (the leading socialist educational institution in the United States) and the City University of New York; and Princeton and Yale Universities.
Translation: The Marxist-left propaganda forum
3. Civic Engagement Network: connecting visitors with opportunities to act in freedom's service in their own communities and around the world. Opportunities for service will be provided on site, and through a virtual network, and will run the gamut of visitor interests, from symbolic gestures to life-changing commitments. Leading NGOs will be offered outposts at the Center to reach out to its visitors. A service advisory board now includes 35 of the leading bi-partisan and non-partisan experts on service and civic engagement from across the nation; the group will soon expand to be international in scope.
Translation: The Marxist-left network headquarters
More disturbing, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is handing over millions of federal dollars and the keys to that building to some of the very same people who consider the post-9/11 provisions of the Patriot Act more dangerous than the terrorists that they were enacted to apprehend -- people whose inflammatory claims of a deliberate torture policy at Guantanamo Bay are undermining this country's efforts to foster freedom elsewhere in the world.
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:
The driving force behind the IFC is Tom Bernstein, an activist lawyer in the human rights movement. He has been a proud member of Human Rights First since it was founded, as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 27 years ago, and has served as its president for the last 12.
It was Mr. Bernstein's organization, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, that filed a lawsuit three months ago against Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was Human Rights First that filed an amicus brief on behalf of alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, an American citizen who the Justice Department believes is an al Qaeda recruit. It was Human Rights First that has called for a 9/11-style commission to investigate the alleged torture of detainees, complete with budget authority, subpoena power and the ability to demand that witnesses testify under oath.
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."
George Soros, billionaire founder of Open Society Institute, the nonprofit foundation that helps fund Human Rights First was an early contributor to the IFC. Soros was also a principal funder of MoveOn.org. He spent 18.5 million of his own money to defeat George Bush, has been quoted as saying, "America, under Bush, is a danger to the world" and "defeating George Bush in 2004 is the central focus of my life." This lunatic has even said that the pictures of Abu Ghraib "hit us the same way as the terrorist attack itself."
link: No place for politics
