Our Freedom Tower, and Theirs

The idea that the Ground Zero memorial is being “hijacked” by a bunch of left-wing “prograndists” is itself propaganda. Michael Smerconish echoes the complaint of one Debra Burlingame, who doesn’t like it that “the people who are going to run this building are the same people who are suing Don Rumsfeld over the Abu Ghraib/Guantanemo stuff.”

Yeah, that’s what Abu Ghraib is, Debra – “stuff.” Not a moral obscenity. Not shameful. Not un-American. Just “stuff.”

But you know what, Debbie – and Michael – in America we get to sue government “leaders,” albeit not in all cases. We can take them to court and demand that they explain themselves: they must answer to us. And why shouldn’t they have to? A few lower-echelon grunts get punished for the horrific crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, and no one takes responsibility: Three cheers for Human Rights First and the ACLU for trying to get to the bottom of it.

I, too, get impatient with obligatory political correctness, but there are worse ways to commemorate the 9/11 terrorist attacks than by reflecting on man’s inhumanity to man. Ms. Burlingame talks about the message of “peace through understanding” as if it was the Communist Manifesto. What message, then, would she suggest? Perpetual war for perpetual peace? Would she prefer "Faster, pussycat: Kill! Kill!"?

Mr. Smerconish has a suggestion: let’s build a monument to the idea that “radical Islam” – not Al Qaeda – is the enemy, a concept that Osama bin Laden will find agreeable. After all, Al Qaeda’s ideology is marginal even within what we might describe as “radical Islam, and bin Laden willl no doubt rejoice to hear that he’s now considered more mainstream.

“Is American blood so cheap,” says Burlingame, “that [it] is not enough to tell the story of that day and must all the 9/11 artifacts be hidden underground?” It is cheap enough that we are spilling it in a mis-directed crusade to avenge 9/11 on the soil of a country that had no connection whatever to the events of that tragic day. Saddam Hussein, whatever his other crimes, didn’t bring down the World Trade Center.

So the “artifacts” are hidden underground – but this is entirely appropriate. After all, key portions of the official government report on 9/11 are also hidden – “redacted,” in bureacratese – along with a good deal of the truth about how and why we never knew what hit us until it was too late.

Ms. Burlingame goes on to complain that the “original schematics that the Norwegian architectural firm put together, pictured a mural of an Iraqi voter in one of the exhibits, and the Freedom Center people yanked it out and put in Martin Luther King and LBJ, because you can’t have real international freedom in an international freedom center.” I have trouble with LBJ, too – why honor another warmongering American President, who was so shamed by his failed policy of mass murder in Vietnam that he declined to run for a second term? However, the yanking out of that mural depicting an Iraqi voter waggling a purple-stained finger is just fine with me -- and, I suspect, fine with the majority of Americans, who don’t think the war in Iraq was worthwhile, according to the latest polls, and are rather cross at having been stuck with a bill that could reach $1.9 trillion. The Iraqis held an election – under lockdown – in which the winners were Islamic fundamentalist parties that had long been succored by the Iranian regime. The victory of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Da’wa party, is not about “freedom,” however loosely one defines it.