MEMO TO GOV. PATAKI: RETRIEVE THE MEMORIAL
NEW YORK POST
June 20, 2005
Herewith an update on the International Freedom Center at Ground Zero. The news is worrisome.
Richard Tofel, the center's president, chatted with Fox News' Neil Cavuto last week in an entirely unconvincing effort to refute charges that leftists and other intellectual lowlifes are out to hijack the Ground Zero memorial.
The fireworks started earlier this month when Debra Burlingame, a sister of the pilot of one of the hijacked 9/11 planes, wrote in The Wall Street Journal: "Ground Zero has been stolen right from under our noses."
Burlingame, a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, specifically charged that Tofel and others are planning to host exhibits at Ground Zero devoted to such wholly off-topic issues as the alleged "genocide" of Americans Indians, the fight against slavery, the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag.
Worthy subjects for study, each and every one — but not at Ground Zero.
Tofel, for his part, insists that the controversy is all about nothing.
But when Cavuto asked, specifically, whether the museum would feature "atrocities Americans have committed," Tofel repeatedly refused a direct answer.
"Atrocities is such a loaded word," he stammered, the weasel.
Tofel needed to say — unequivocally — that the museum will not impugn or disparage America in any way, shape, form or manner.
End of discussion.
But that probably would have been a lie. In fact, the IFC seems destined precisely to become a multimillion-dollar bash-America palace.
Real Americans, after all, have no trouble recalling that Ground Zero is the site of an unspeakable atrocity committed against them. They'll wonder by what perverted logic is it appropriate to use the spot to dredge up shameful, painful episodes in American history that have nothing to do with 9/11.
Yet that is transparently Tofel's plan.
Slavery in America, for example, "probably" would be focused on, he said, because a key goal is to "inspire an end to hatred, ignorance and intolerance."
Let's be clear: America did nothing to deserve 9/11. Indeed, the fanatics — infused with "hatred, ignorance and intolerance — targeted the United States precisely because it stands as a monument to freedom and the material prosperity it produces.
The Islamists hate freedom because it threatens their power and underscores their failures.
And they hate material prosperity because it has eluded their culture; thus they must deny it to everyone.
So destroying the iconic evidence of the fruits of U.S. freedom — the Twin Towers — was vital to sustaining their credibility.
Which is why it would be outrageous for the IFC to entertain even the possibility that America somehow deserved what it got on 9/11. And yet that seems to be exactly what is going on.
"The International Freedom Center will host debates and note points of view with which you — and I — will disagree," Tofel wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
Debates?
Like, whether America is sufficiently sensitive to other cultures?
Whether Muslims — and non-Americans generally — need to protect themselves from U.S. "hegemony"?
What utterly offensive nonsense.
It better not rear its ugly head anywhere near Ground Zero.
True, some IFC affiliates are serious, reasonable folk. Its advisers include John Bridgeland and Adm. Charles Abott, former aides to President Bush.
Tofel himself is a respected Wall Street Journal alum.
But, ideologically speaking, there are some very reprehensible characters involved in this project.
To wit:
* Tom Bernstein, an IFC founder, and Michael Posner, an advisor, also run the George Soros-funded Human Rights First, a bash-America forum of the first order. If you doubt it, visit the Web site: humanrightsfirst.org.
* Board member Anthony Romero of the ACLU (aclu.org) reportedly wants exhibits on what he believes have been post-9/11 "curbs to civil liberties."
* Stephen Heintz, the board's secretary, is with the Rockefeller Bros. Fund (rbf.org), which at present is concerned with what it terms the "pressing need to examine the content, style and tone of U.S. global engagement and to ensure that they reflect an understanding of the reality and implications of increasing global interdependence." (Translation: Blame America First.)
* Eric Foner, a Columbia University professor who, three weeks after 9/11, said he wasn't sure which was more frightening, the attack or the White House's response, is another adviser.
And the list goes on.
Ten years ago, the Smithsonian Institution proposed a seemingly benign plan to commemorate the 50th anniversary of end of World War II in the Pacific.
The undertaking swiftly morphed into a naked attack on American war motives, tactics and strategy that highlighted Japanese suffering and totally ignored the fact that Tokyo started the conflict.
That happens these days when academics are left to their own devices.
Tofel seems to be part of the problem — and thus he'd be a good place to start when Gov. Pataki puts his foot down on this hijacking-of-history-in-the-making.
As the governor must.
Clean up your act or pack up your desk, is the message Pataki needs to de liver. Unambiguously.
And the governor, or Ground Zero Czar John Cahill, would do well to be at Church and Liberty streets at noon today, when Burlingame and others rally on behalf of the memorial they mean to see erected at site of the bloodiest assault on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
There are many questions to be answered, and today is as good as any for Pataki to begin answering them.
Burlingame isn't going to fade quietly away.
Nor will we.
Nor will New Yorkers who care about doing the decent thing at Ground Zero.
American atrocities, indeed.
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