Victory at Ground Zero
By Rocco DiPippo
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 17, 2005
On September 28, 2005, New York Governor George Pataki announced that he was removing the controversial proposed International Freedom Center (IFC) from the World Trade Center (WTC) Memorial. His announcement officially ended an important battle in America's 40-year-old culture war and signaled a stunning defeat for the far-Left.
The IFC's founders had touted their âFreedom Centerâ as a âworld-class place of education and engagement, helping people to understand, appreciate and advance freedom's narrative of hope.â As the gateway to the greater WTC Memorial it would seek to âeducate, inspire and engage people around the world to consider freedom's promise, to feel freedom's power and to act in freedom's service.â But as facts concerning its founders, its advisory board and its financial donors, including billionaire George Soros, emerged, the IFC looked more like a left-wing indoctrination center than a fitting addition to the WTC Memorial.
The battle cry against the IFC was first sounded by Debra Burlingame, a Westchester, N.Y. housewife, in an op-ed titled The Great Ground Zero Heist. Burlingame, whose brother, Charles âChicâ Burlingame, was murdered on 9/11, served on the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, the parent organization of the IFC. The IFC was the brainchild of Tom Bernstein, the board president of the U.S.-bashing Human Rights First, and Peter Kunhardt, a leftist documentary filmmaker. I wanted to know what had initially caused Burlingame, a self-described âlife-long liberal Democrat,â to oppose the IFC so I contacted her and asked her directly.
Burlingame says that she initially became suspicious of the IFC's mission when she noticed that its founders seemed to avoid specifics when describing IFC programs and when discussing what content would fill its 300,000 square-foot interior. Her concerns became more serious when she discovered that IFC planning sessions made no mention of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan, Islamists or Iraq â all topics directly related to the attack on the Twin Towers. While examining the IFC's development program she also discovered that the iconic photo of an Iraqi woman holding up ink-stained fingers â a pro-freedom statement related to 9/11 if there ever was one â had been removed from a list of possible IFC display items and had been replaced by a photo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had little or no relevance to events surrounding September 11, 2001. |