On second thought, New York Times likes controversy
I simply can’t comprehend how in the world the 9/11 memorial was hijacked by mraxists, but apparently it was. Here’s a brief summary by one of the projects opponents, lifted from an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
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.
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.
Needless to say, the New York Times doesn’t take kindly to people who don’t take kindly to anti-American propaganda. But notice how selective The Times is when it comes to pushing “controversy.”
So here’s how the New York Times raps patriotic 9/11 families:
It is a campaign about political purity - about how people remember 9/11 and about how we choose to read its aftermath, including the Iraq war. On their Web site, www.takebackthememorial.org, critics of the cultural plan at ground zero offer a resolution called Campaign America. It says that ground zero must contain no facilities “that house controversial debate, dialogue, artistic impressions, or exhibits referring to extraneous historical events.” This, to us, sounds un-American.
One would think New York Times would know un-Americanism, but one would be wrong. Anyway, nobody expects NYT to embrace “political [im]purity” in general, and of course it doesn’t. Here’s how New York Times earlier this year rapped Larry Summers:
It’s fun to toss out provocative ideas and watch as everyone’s ears redden and all eyes turn to the daring speaker who started the hubbub. But it’s an exercise better restricted to radio talk show hosts than the heads of major academic institutions.
Yes, Air America would be a good place for the IFC-istas to hawk their garbage. Ground Zero isn’t.
(HT: Michelle Malkin)
