"Preserve Sacred Ground"

AP: Families Rally Against 9/11 Museum---

NEW YORK - Holding up pictures of their loved ones and signs that read "Preserve Sacred Ground," more than 500 relatives of Sept. 11 victims rallied at the World Trade Center site Saturday against a proposed museum.

Family members worry the International Freedom Center will take attention away from those who died in the attack. They said the museum should not be allowed to show exhibits about struggles for freedom around the world.

"These are important stories to tell," said Jack Lynch, whose firefighter son Michael Lynch is one of the 2,749 people who died at the trade center. "Elsewhere, not at America's memorial."

The rally by more than a dozen family groups came a day before the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks. A bouquet of white flowers and several single, red roses were tucked into the metal fence surrounding the site, while huge American flags hung outside nearby office buildings.

"The IFC threatens to turn ground zero into a place of endless controversy rather than a place of honor," said Anthony Gardner, whose brother Harvey died at the trade center.

The Freedom Center and another museum, the Drawing Center, were chosen more than a year ago to occupy cultural space at the site in a building close to the planned "Reflecting Absence" memorial.

Please visit the Take Back the Memorial website for more of the truth.



Please also sign this petition. Here is what it says:

To Governor George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation:

We, the undersigned, believe that the World Trade Center Memorial should stand as a solemn remembrance of those who died on September 11th, 2001, and not as a journey of history's "failures" or as a debate about domestic and foreign policy in the post-9/11 world. Political discussions have no place at the World Trade Center September 11th memorial, and the International Freedom Center honors no one by making excuses for the perpetrators of this heinous crime. The memorial should be about what happened that day, about the brave heroes who risked their lives so selflessly, and about the innocent lives that were lost... nothing more.

To read why these 9/11 families are rallying against the proposed memorial, please read this excellent op-ed by Debra Burlingame.

Ms. Burlingame is a member of the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines fight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Here is an excerpt:

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. 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.

In fact,

the IFC's list of those who are shaping or influencing the content and programming for their Ground Zero exhibit includes a Who's Who of the human rights, Guantanamo-obsessed world:

Michael Posner, executive director at Human Rights First
Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU
Eric Foner, radical-left history professor at Columbia University
George Soros

These men cannot be allowed to dictate the memorial of the worst terrorist attack on America and some of the greatest heroism in America. We all know that they regard America as the evil and those terrorists as some sort of freedom fighters. Please visit the Take Back the Memorial website today and sign the petition.