Stop the IFC

Count me in under the multitude who finds this utterly offensive. In my life I have never written a letter to any polititians stating my displeasure over any political matters, but I just started. Yesterday I mailed my letters to Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg to express my disgust over the wonderful people at International Freedom Center who are planning to turn Ground Zero into a political statement:

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 International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom"--but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come 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 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.

The public will be confused at first, and then feel hoodwinked and betrayed. Where, they will ask, do we go to see the September 11 Memorial? The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation will have erected a building whose only connection to September 11 is a strained, intellectual one. While the IFC is getting 300,000 square feet of space to teach us how to think about liberty, the actual Memorial Center on the opposite corner of the site 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. But the International Freedom Center will have ample space to present us with exhibits about Chinese dissidents and Chilean refugees. These are important subjects, but for somewhere--anywhere--else, not the site of the worst attack on American soil in the history of the republic.

More disturbing, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. 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.

I briefly worked in the 2 WTC, but was fortunate not to be in the building on September 11th. As the fires still burned under the rubble, I remember remarking, in a rather pissy tone, to a friend that I was afraid that this moment would become trivialized as time passed. How many that showed sympathy in the immediate aftermath that day would reveal their true colors; that 9-11 must be a statement on the sins of humanity and not the 19 cold-blooded murders who executed this plan? How loud would the chorus grow of people who, instead of the heroic efforts of the many that made it and those that didn't, drowned out by politics and "art?"

It must and WILL be stopped.