For those of you who aren’t aware of it, a group of leftist idealogues, among them, George Soros, are attempting to create the International Freedom Center at “Ground Zero.” Read this article for details.

For example:

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.

Debra Burlingame, who wrote the article, is the sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines fight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. She and other surviving family members started the opposition to this desecration of the 9/11 Memorial.

Yesterday, the New York Times wrote an editorial villianizing the Take Back the Memorial campaign. In their editorial, the Times stated,

If the International Freedom Center must continually bend over backward to placate a handful of angry family members, then all of its commitment to the conscience of that site, to what it can teach us about the character of freedom in the world, will have been compromised.

What we build at ground zero has to honor the memory of one terrible day in the history of America, but it also has to belong to the future as well, a future as optimistic and forward-looking as we can imagine. It cannot be a place devoted entirely to death. If ground zero is not a place of life and creativity, of true artistic and political freedom, then it will not be successful even as a place of grief.

Does someone refer to the U.S. Holocaust Museum as a place devoted entirely to death? To anyone who has any sensitivity, Ground Zero should be the place to honor those who fell in this attack on our civilization and to commemorate the heroism of New York’s police and firefighters. It should not be to promote agendas of idealogues whose world view is not shared by most of the citizens of this country.

Read Cox and Forkum’s analysis of the New York Times editorial, titled “The Art of Desecration.”

The Times’ criticisms are based on the false assumption that the WTC site was somehow destined to be a publicly-built venue for the arts and political discourse. Operating from this premise, attempts by Take Back The Memorial to ensure that the WTC memorial site deals exclusively with 9/11 are characterized as “abrogating the rights of everyone else.”

One particular passage reveals the Times blindness to the real issue. They write that if Governor Pataki attempts to “appease one small, vocal group of protesters,” “he runs the risk of turning ground zero into a place where we bury the freedoms that define this nation.”

“Bury”? The Times has the gall to use the word “bury”? There are actual Americans buried at Ground Zero, murdered because they lived in a free county, and the Times’ main concern is not the victims but that Ground Zero have an art gallery able to exhibit “controversial images of 9/11 and America’s role in the world,” all in the name of “free speech.”

What is being proposed is that instead of the IFC a larger, more comprehensive 9/11 memorial museum than what is currently planned be built. There are plenty of other places for “artistic and political” expression and a “history of freedom” museum. The memorial area of Ground Zero should be exclusively dedicated to highlighting the lives of those taken from us on 9/11 and in 1993. It should document what happened and why. That alone will inspire visitors to appreciate their freedoms.

If you haven’t already, consider signing the “Take Back The Memorial” petition. And for the latest information on the issue, see the Web sites for Take Back The Memorial and 911FamiliesForAmerica.org.