Bringing Back the Memorial

Real progress is being made to Take Back the Memorial.

The tireless efforts of 9/11 family member organizations are paying off.

(Read some background, from the Wall Street Journal, on "The Great Ground Zero Heist.")

Wednesday, from the New York Post:

If Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg are smart, they'll sit up and listen to 9/11 family members who are demanding that the International Freedom Center be booted from plans for Ground Zero.

Fourteen family-member groups are expected presently to release an "Open Letter to the American People." The petition will call for the removal of the IFC and an equally iffy institution, the Drawing Center, from the site.

The center, to its credit, already is rethinking its intention to locate at Ground Zero. The IFC has dug in its heels.

Critics are worried that museums with open-ended missions unrelated to 9/11 will bring inappropriate political controversy — and, let's face it, the usual ugly anti-Americanism found in much of the "art" world — to sacred ground.

Up in the air is whether the groups will explicitly call for Americans to withhold donations from the 9/11 memorial fund until the controversial projects are scrapped.

"We urge you not donate to the World Trade Center memorial until the I.F.C. and the Drawing Center are eliminated from the memorial plans," said a draft letter that was mistakenly posted at Take Back the Memorial.org recently.

Sounds like a plan to us — even if some of the groups hadn't yet signed off on it.

After all, as chief Ground Zero memorial fundraiser Gretchen Dykstra tells Crain's New York Business, "We need to raise a lot of money with the imperative to be respectful."

No imperative, no money?

Again, that sounds like a plan.

In any event, Americans appear already to have gotten the message.

The chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., John Whitehead, has repeatedly complained that the dust-up is hurting fundraising.

While some at the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation have tried to control the damage by claiming that all the fundraising going on now will benefit only the memorial itself and a museum dedicated specifically to 9/11, such distinctions ultimately are meaningless.

Not donating is a way for Americans to make it clear that they won't be involved in this project in any way until they're sure that Ground Zero will be respected and anti-American nuts shipped elsewhere.

No one is against "culture."

But Ground Zero is just the wrong place for any museum or other institution that wants to have any sort of artistic freedom.

Last month, Gov. Pataki asked for "assurances" that offensive content would be banned by all facilities at Ground Zero.

He was right to do so.

But it also means that there's nothing left to discuss regarding the IFC and the Drawing Center.

They have to go.

The Drawing Center, again, seems to realize this. It balked at Pataki's ultimatum and demanded that he relent.

He won't. So they should find another location.

The IFC (showing a bit less integrity) said it would gladly be censored.

That was followed promptly by one lefty — Eric Foner, a professor at Columbia who equated the 9/11 attacks with America's response to them — quitting the IFC's board.

But there are others of his ilk still aboard.

The fact is, there's simply no way to accommodate either of these two institutions.

It's just the wrong place for them.

If they won't relent, a campaign aimed at slowing memorial fundraising is entirely appropriate.

I agree completely.

The International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center have to go. They do not belong at Ground Zero.

Not surprisingly, today's New York Times takes a different approach in reporting the latest on the Memorial.

The Times had been a staunch supporter of the IFC and Drawing Center. The paper openly campaigned for their location on the Memorial site. Editorials belittled 9/11 family members interested in maintaining the integrity of the hallowed Ground Zero.

For instance, the Times lead editorial on July 12, 2005, slammed the "Take Back the Memorial" initiative.

[W]e've watched a handful of vocal family members, who may not represent a majority of 9/11 families, change the dynamic at the World Trade Center site for the worse. They have begun a movement to "take back the memorial," which means, in essence, eventually purging ground zero of its cultural partners, including the International Freedom Center.

Now, the Times is backtracking. You can tell it's painful.

From today's Times:

TWO lines on a plan drawn two years ago may have settled the fate of a cultural building at the new World Trade Center.

By dividing the trade center site into quadrants around the east-west line of Fulton Street and the north-south line of Greenwich Street, planners created a clearly defined parcel containing the twin towers' footprints.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that this parcel would come to be regarded by some as the memorial precinct exclusively; no matter that planners envisioned a cultural building there as a buffer for the memorial, as a place of "memory and hope"; no matter that people died throughout the whole trade center site.

In retrospect, it also seems obvious that it might grow politically difficult to situate anything in the precinct that was not directly related to 9/11 or that veered at all from a tributary function.

Although the Times elitists have begun to come around, they are still in the corner of those interested in using Ground Zero to push a leftist perspective of moral equivalency to denigrate the country, rather than honor the victims and heroes of 9/11.

To make a case for the freedom center, Mr. Bernstein, the chairman, and Paula Grant Berry, the vice chairwoman, described in a July 6 letter to Mr. Pryor how it could play "an integral role in telling the story of Sept. 11." They also pledged that the center would never "be used as a forum for denigrating the country we love."

They proposed accommodating the Family Room that is now in 1 Liberty Plaza, where victims' relatives come to mourn and remember privately. In one exhibit, they said, they would tell the stories of the men and women lost on Sept. 11 "alongside the freedom heroes of history." They proposed a gallery "devoted to the international outpouring of sympathy and support for the U.S. and the victims."

...Mr. Pryor said yesterday that any 9/11-related proposals would have to be coordinated with the museum being planned in the memorial precinct. "We're still in the process of analyzing elements of this letter," he said.

But the letter has already had an effect. Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University, said its "general stance of surrender" prompted his resignation from the center's committee of scholars and advisers. (Richard J. Tofel, the president and chief operating officer of the freedom center, declined to comment.)

"I objected to the failure to say a word in defense of freedom of expression, or that difference of opinion is not anti-American but essential to the exercise of freedom," Professor Foner wrote in an e-mail message on Tuesday.

"It convinced me that if the freedom center is in fact built, they will surrender again and again whenever anyone objects to anything in it. In those circumstances, I don't see how a genuinely interesting, complicated and historically accurate presentation about freedom and its history can be developed."

He added, "I hope I'm wrong."

Months ago, in explaining to the center's creators why he was reluctant to become an adviser in the first place, Professor Foner seems to have anticipated the current storm.

"There is a danger that the site itself could overwhelm what any good museum needs to have," he wrote, "which is a critical eye, an ability to look carefully and in a complex way at historical questions."

I'm glad Foner resigned.

His arrogance about what constitutes a "good museum" got in the way of what constitutes a fitting memorial to one of the most horrific days our country has ever seen.

The "current storm" wasn't created by anti-intellectuals incapable of grasping history. It's the result of the inability of Foner and his comrades to understand the significance of the site as hallowed ground.

Foner just can't seem to comprehend why NOTHING should be allowed to detract from memorializing the victims and the impact of the events of September 11, 2001.


The Coalition of Family Member Organizations

Advocates for 9/11 Fallen Heroes
Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund
Coalition of 9/11 Families
Fix the Fund
Give Your Voice
9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America
9/11 Families for a Secure America
September 11th Families Association
September’s Mission
Skyscraper Safety Campaign
Voices of September 11th
W. Doyle 9/11 Support Group
WTC Families for Proper Burial
WTC Family Center
World Trade Center United Family Group