Planned Desecration at Ground Zero

I spoke to Debra Burlingame yesterday, and my heart hasn’t stopped racing since. She’s the sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame, III, who was piloting American Airlines flight 77 when he was murdered by terrorists who then crashed into the Pentagon.

Debra Burlingame is also the person who blew the lid off the planned International Freedom Center at Ground Zero in a widely discussed op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.

Prediction – her coming forward and energizing of Americans will kill current plans for the IFC - as it should.

She pulled no punches with me, yesterday.

“The people who are going to run this building are the same people who are suing Don Rumsfeld over the Abu Ghraib/Guantanemo stuff – I’m talking about Human Rights First and the ACLU, they’re going to cram that building with what we think is going to be propaganda – they’re going to show slavery, cross burnings, native American genocide, Nazi Germany atrocities, and the Soviet gulag. Apparently they don’t think September 11th was enough an atrocity of an epic proportion and their message is going to be multi-culturalism, internationalism, and peace through understanding,” Burlingame explained to me.

“Is American blood so cheap that is not enough to tell the story of that day and must all the 9/11 artifacts be hidden underground?”, she asks. “People are going to stand up in this huge building , trying to wrap their mind around the monumental destruction of September 11th , and they’re going to look to the left and right and see Chinese dissidents and Chilean refugees. It is infuriating.”

Amen to that.

As I spoke to her, I was thinking of one way to envision some of what is at stake. A few years from now, our children – my three sons – are going to get on school buses and take trips to Ground Zero as they have already done – as we did - to visit the Statue of Liberty. When they get there, what is the lesson they should learn? I say the honest and simple truth – that on 9/11, radical Islam committed an unprovoked attack on the greatest, most freedom loving nation on earth, and killed 3,000 innocent Americans.

But, as Burlingame told me, that’s not what these folks are planning.

“Just to get a preview, and by the way, we don’t want this to be political in any way, left or right, but their 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,” Burlingame told me.

What an outrage.

This isn’t about teaching a red or blue state lesson. It’s not a Republican or Democratic thing. It shouldn’t be about conservatives or liberals. It is about honestly presenting what occurred on the single most important day in American history in my lifetime.

No wonder her newly created website is being flooded with support.

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