NYT: Freedom Museum Is Headed for Showdown at Ground Zero

[DeepModem Mom]

Freedom Museum Is Headed for Showdown at Ground Zero
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: September 22, 2005


The International Freedom Center, a proposed museum that is facing expulsion from ground zero under pressure from angry relatives of 9/11 victims, will make a forceful new appeal today to stay at the World Trade Center site.

The museum's decision to stand firm would force the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and Gov. George E. Pataki to make a tough choice. They could either infuriate hundreds of impassioned relatives of those who died, or alienate influential cultural, academic and business figures, as well as family members who support the center.

The Freedom Center was chosen by the development corporation in June 2004 to occupy the cultural building on the memorial quadrant. It would portray the history and role of freedom around the world in exhibits and programs....

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But the Freedom Center is now fighting for its life, in part because some victims' relatives do not want anything around the memorial that smacks of anti-American politics or detracts from the story of 9/11....

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Casting itself as a living memorial along the lines of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the planned Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum, the center pledged that its board would ensure that it hew to a mission of including the "heroes of Sept. 11" in its accounts of the history of freedom, sponsoring educational and cultural programs "to advance freedom's cause...".Natan Sharansky, a former dissident and political prisoner in the Soviet Union and a former government minister in Israel, is one of five new board members the Freedom Center will name in the report. The others are Sara J. Bloomfield, the director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum; Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University; Richard Norton Smith, the former director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, who is now executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum; and Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/nyregion/22rebuild.html?hp&ex=1127361600&en=1a27e3cdfcfc985d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[ContraBass Black]

1. The word "freedom" has been perverted

into a vomit-inducing obscenity.

[MisterP]

2. pardón, but WHAT does 9-11 have to do with either freedom or "freedom"

(the latter meaning naked world-conquest aggression)?!

[donco6]

3. My question exactly.

In fact, I'm sick of memorials altogether. What is the point of all of this?

[TheDonkey]

4. the actual museum that was proposed was a good idea

and I'm sad that some people were so enraged by it. A lot of the exhibits dealt with struggles for freedom all over the world and didn't give a right wing spin on history.

[CJCRANE]

5. People in WTC

on 9/11 were just going to work. However, unbeknownst to them, it now appears that they were really involved in a struggle to bring "freedom" (increased heroin cultivation) to Afghanistan and an Islamic govt in Iraq.

[tainowarrior]

6. am I the only one that gags at the mention of the word Freedom?

Freedom Center, Freedom Fries, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom.

Newsflash America: we're not the only free country, we're not remotely the BEST free country, and we don't have a patent on it. Please stop your masturbating with the word freedom, and actually do something to REALLY enhance it here.

Now back to your regular baseball game and singing God Bless America.

[suegeo]

7. What does George Bush's intended screw up...

What does dying a horrible death due to George Bush's intended screw up have to do with freedom?

[Javaman]

8. Is it just me or does this "freedom" museum sound more like...

one of those "Peoples" museum in china?

[EndElectoral]

9. How about a Temple of Peace?

A quiet place where people come and reflect, and let the freedom dogma lessons stay in DC.