Mark Steyn says: Don't build it
Power Line
The new issue of the British Spectator carries Mark Steyn's great essay on the International Freedom Center about which we have written at length: "Un-American activities."
Here Steyn is just getting warmed up:
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While the Bush administration and most of the rest of the country were focused on Afghanistan and Iraq, Ground Zero in New York got snaffled up for something called the `World Trade Center Memorial'. An unexceptional name that would lead you to expect ...what? The names of the dead? A tribute to the courageous firemen who died in their hundreds heading up the stairwells and into the flames? A recreation of the iconic image of the three rescue workers raising the flag and evoking Iwo Jima?
But somehow the World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex has wound up mostly in the hands of something called the `International Freedom Center', on whom millions of taxpayers' dollars have been lavished in return for a display that will place the events that took place on that ground in the `broader context' of Native American genocide, black lynchings, Pinochet, the Holocaust, not to mention Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Most Americans were unaware of this amazing heist until Debra Burlingame, a member of the board of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and sister of the pilot of one of the hijacked planes, revealed the extent of the subversion.
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Steyn concludes with a recollection of the other disgusting Durban:
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It feels like summer. Summer 2001, that is. Then, as now, Africa was in the news. There was a big UN conference on `racism' in Durban the week before 11 September. Remember that? They demanded America pay reparations - for the Rwandan genocide. And Robert Mugabe was cheered to the rafters when he called on the United States and the United Kingdom to `apologise unreservedly for their crimes against humanity'.
Four years later, plus ça change. The only difference is that His Homophobic Excellency was too busy razing mosques and destroying crops back home to attend Live 8, so they had to get Pink Floyd and George Michael instead. In terms of the reviews, that's not a bad move. But the message stayed pretty much the same: Africa is our fault, and we need to pay up for it. For, as Sir Bob Geldof put it, `Something must be done, even if it doesn't work.' No wonder that bloke from Coldplay who's married to Gwyneth described Live 8 as `the greatest thing that's ever been organised probably in the history of the world'.
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Please read the whole thing, visit Burlingame's Take Back the Memorial site and let your voices be heard.
takebackthememorial.org
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spectator.co.uk |
