This brings us to the latest clash between those who despise this country and those who don't. Debra Burlingame is the sister of Charles Burlingame, the pilot who died on Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. A member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, Burlingame published an account in The Wall Street Journal of the foundation's plans for memorializing 9/11. The liberal leadership of the International Freedom Center (as part of the memorial will be called) includes one-time Marxist Columbia University Professor Eric Foner and Michael Posner of Human Rights First, and receives advice from George Soros and Anthony Romero of the ACLU. The IFC plans, writes Burlingame, not a moving evocation of that catastrophic day, but instead "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."
Actually, if liberals had been in charge of the Arizona memorial, it would probably have featured an exhaustive exhibit about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and little about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Consider a thought experiment: Suppose we were planning a memorial to honor murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, whose killer was finally convicted last week (and, by the way, a memorial is good idea). But what if the proposal included a section on black-on-black violence? Wouldn't liberals be quick to object that such a display is beside the point, not to say antithetical to the spirit of a memorial? They would, and they'd be right.
Richard Tofel, president of the International Freedom Center, denies that the exhibit will malign the United States. As proof of his bona fides, he quotes Judge Learned Hand: "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women." Feel reassured? Neither do I.