Poisoning the American Conscience

Here are brief bios of the individuals with the International Freedom Center (IFC) that are creating the World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Center. Despite how they characterize themselves, each is a viscerally anti-American leftist.

Tom Bernstein, who made a fortune financing Hollywood movies, but whose true calling is as an activist lawyer in the human rights movement. He is a proud founding member of Human Rights First and has served as its president for the last 12 years.

Michael Posner, executive director at Human Rights First, is leading the worldwide "Stop Torture Now" campaign focused entirely on the U.S. military. He stated that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's refusal to resign due to the Abu Ghraib scandal is "irresponsible and dishonorable."

Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, who wants the World Trade Center Memorial to show how civil liberties in the U.S. have been curtailed since September 11.

Eric Foner, radical-left history professor at Columbia University who, even as the bodies were being pulled out of a smoldering Ground Zero, wrote, "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." This is the same man who participated in a "teach-in" at Columbia to protest the Iraq war, during which a colleague exhorted students with, "The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military," and called for "a million Mogadishus."

George Soros, billionaire force of the Open Society Institute, the foundation that helps fund Human Rights First and contributes to the IFC, believes that the pictures of Abu Ghraib "hit us the same way as the terrorist attack itself."

Their intentions are for the Ground Zero Memorial to give the public a lesson on man's (primarily American) inhumanity to man. Visitors will learn about Native American genocide, Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings, racial lynching and riots, and, presumably, every other blemish, mistake, and failure of the United States that can conceivably be plungered up and represented or misrepresented. The IFC has been allocated 300,000 square feet of space to present its anti-American propaganda. People who arrive to remember the victims and to pay their respects will find themselves subjected to a force-feeding of anti-American rhetoric.

Debra Burlingame gave voice to the issue in her recent WSJ column and, as a result, the president of the IFC, Richard Tofel, responded by stating that the victims will be respected. However, seemingly in the same breath, Tofel assures me that I will disagree with the points of view expressed by the IFC. My God! The way the project is going, it hints that we should expect someone of the likes of Michael Moore as the keynote speaker at the dedication ceremony.

Nonetheless, Tofel's intention is to respect the victims and he's going to do it by intentionally pissing off the visitors. If I arrive to pay tribute to the lost lives of the innocent victims of murderous fanatics and I leave incensed, how are the victims being honored?

This pending travesty needs exposure. I encourage everyone to write a post and bring it up in conversation to spread the word. Others weighing in thus far include:

Wizbang - Stealing Ground Zero
Michelle Malkin - Battle At Ground Zero
Jeff Jarvis - Using the Innocents

For compilations of interested participants in the blogosphere, see Technorati here and here.