Posted on 10/01/2005 6:58:32 AM PDT by NCjim
Four years ago, when the first Qantas jet flew into New York after the September 11 terrorist attacks, you could see out the window the huge plume of thick smoke still billowing from the hole where the twin towers of the World Trade Centre had been. The sky was blue, the weather balmy, and the air smelled of death.
Last week it was wet and windy when I went again to Ground Zero. The six-hectare site is orderly now, but oddly quiet. The base of the four-storey deep crater is lined with orange safety cones. Around the perimeter fence are plaques with the names of the 2749 people killed when terrorists flew two passenger jets into the towers. The roll call begins with Gordon M. Aamoth jnr, a 32-year-old investment banker, and ends with Igor Zukelman, 29, a Ukranian-born computer technician.
Inside the fence, poignant in its simplicity, mounted on a plinth under an American flag, is an enormous rusted piece of steel in the shape of a cross, which rescuers retrieved from the rubble.
"Yo New York", reads graffiti nearby. "I hope you are feeling better. I see that nasty scar is starting to heal . . . Stay strong."
The problem is, four years on, while New York is as bustling and upbeat as ever, the nasty scar downtown is showing few signs of healing. Just last week builders on the roof of the unstable former Deutsche Bank building, across the road from where the south tower once stood, found several bone fragments which may belong to victims. Also last week a group representing the families of many victims, and police and firefighter unions, won a bitter battle for control of a memorial museum planned for the site.
They feared the International Freedom Centre, part-funded by billionaire George Bush-hater George Souris, would have created a politically correct Blame America First museum controlled by left-wing academics which would have been an insult to the memory of their loved ones.
On Wednesday, New York Governor George Pataki caved in to public pressure, including from Senator Hillary Clinton, and banned the Freedom Centre from the site.
Heading the ginger group against the centre was Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles F. Burlingame III was the pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
"Rather than a respectful tribute [the public] will get a slanted history lesson, a didactic lecture on the meaning of liberty in a post-9/11 world," she wrote in an influential article in June in The Wall Street Journal.
"The centre would have been the site of academic symposiums on the foundations of freedom, and a magnet to activists and academics to debate the US domestic and foreign policy they despise. It would have focused on 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 . . . exhibits about Chinese dissidents and Chilean refugees. These are important subjects, but for somewhere - anywhere - else."
She pointed out that the head of the Freedom Centre was a wealthy activist lawyer and founding member of Human Rights First, a group suing US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Controversial left-wing academics were among the project's advisers.
"Good riddance" editorialised the New York Post on Thursday.
The debate has echoed the controversy over our own $155 million National Museum built in 2001. In fact, the architect who won a competition to design the master plan for New York's Ground Zero site, Daniel Libeskind, inspired the architects of the Canberra museum, Ashton Raggatt McDougall. As a politically provocative statement they modelled the Aboriginal gallery on Libeskind's Jewish Holocaust museum in Berlin.
At least New Yorkers managed to stop their project being hijacked by ideology before it was built.
It's back to the drawing board now for a memorial at Ground Zero that does not politicise the dead.
But with the US public purse under strain due to the hurricane damage on the Gulf Coast, the new memorial will be more modest, which may turn out to be a blessing. The names of the dead speak for themselves.
They feared the International Freedom Centre, part-funded by billionaire George Bush-hater George Souris, would have created a politically correct Blame America First museum controlled by left-wing academics which would have been an insult to the memory of their loved ones.
Has ever a more true statement been printed in a left wing newspaper?????? A glimmer of hope from the SMH.
That this group had to resort to a legal fight to honor their dead in their own way is a crying shame. God bless them for their fortitude to fight for their side. As if losing their loved ones in such a horrific way is not enough with which to deal.
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