Future visitors to the 9/11 memorial that's planned for the rebuilt World Trade Center site won't learn what we learned that day. They won't learn about terrorists murdering defenseless civilians in the name of their vicious version of Islam. They won't learn about the horror, the grief or the pain we all felt, or how we came together as a united nation... at least, until we began to fight back. They won't learn how ordinary Americans rose to the stature of heroes, or the reasons for our determination to root out terrorism wherever it is found. They won't learn what we learned at all; they won't feel what we felt. That's not politically correct, you see. Instead of a memorial honoring the dead, both the innocent victims and the brave men and women who died trying to save them, visitors will "learn" that America "deserved" what we got. That's right: the 9/11 memorial itself is being hijacked by Liberals.

Debra Burlingame, sister of flight 77's pilot Chic Burlingame (the plane that hit the Pentagon), revealed the horrible truth in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. As a member of the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, she is privy to the plans that have been kept secret from the rest of us. "Rather than a respectful tribute to our individual and collective loss, they will get a slanted history lesson, a didactic lecture on the meaning of liberty in a post-9/11 world," Ms. Burlingame wrote. "They will be served up a heaping foreign policy discussion over the greater meaning of Abu Ghraib and what it portends for the country and the rest of the world." Abu Ghraib -- the sorry story of a few soldiers exceeding their orders and being duly punished for it long before the media blew the whole episode out of proportion -- is somehow the Left's "answer" for 9/11. Murdering thousands of innocent people by deliberate design, they seem to feel, is nothing compared to a couple of rogue guards putting underwear on the heads of captured enemies.

The editorial continued, "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." This is Liberal moral equivalence at is worst -- trying to pass off 9/11 as something those people who died deserved for the awful "crime" of being Americans. It's a version of history combined from the twisted visions of Osama bin Laden and Ward Churchill (the America-hating professor who vilified 9/11 victims by referring to them as "little Eichmans.")

Who's behind this evil scheme? Who is trying to minimise the meaning of 9/11? Who's trying to "Blame America First?" Why, the usual suspects, of course. The same Liberal icons who fund organisations like MoveOn.org and who have bought the once-great Democratic party at wholesale prices. Tom Bernstein heads the IFC (International Freedom Center), the group responsible for the World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex. He also happens to be the president of Human Rights First. Bernstein's organisation worked with the ACLU to file lawsuits against America on behalf of the terrorists held in Gitmo, demanding that they be granted all the rights and privileges of the Americans they conspired to murder. That's the man selected to tell us that 9/11 was all our fault, on the very spot where that sort of self-flagellating apology to the killers has the least right to exist. The rest of the crew, as listed by Ms. Burlingame, includes:

- Michael Posner, executive director at Human Rights First who is leading the world-wide "Stop Torture Now" campaign focused entirely on the U.S. military. He has stated that Mr. Rumsfeld's refusal to resign in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal is "irresponsible and dishonorable."
 
- Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, who is pushing IFC organizers for exhibits that showcase how civil liberties in this country have been curtailed since September 11.
 
- Eric Foner, radical-left history professor at Columbia University who, even as the bodies were being pulled out of a smoldering Ground Zero, wrote, "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." This is the same man who participated in a "teach-in" at Columbia to protest the Iraq war, during which a colleague exhorted students with, "The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military," and called for "a million Mogadishus." The IFC website has posted Mr. Foner's statement warning that future discussions should not be "overwhelmed" by the IFC's location at the World Trade Center site itself.
 
- George Soros, billionaire founder of Open Society Institute, the nonprofit foundation that helps fund Human Rights First and is an early contributor to the IFC. Mr. Soros has stated that the pictures of Abu Ghraib "hit us the same way as the terrorist attack itself."

9/11 was an attack on every American. Every one of us felt the shock when the terrorists finally declared war in a way no one could mistake. Al-Qaeda's previous attacks on the USS Cole, the embassies at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Khobar Towers and Riyadh went unanswered. Even their first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 (in partnership with Saddam Hussein) was largely ignored, treated as a mere criminal act, forgotten once a few low-level scapegoats were arrested.

On 9/11, the targets were not soldiers or sailors, and they weren't in some dangerous far-off country. They were ordinary Americans, here at home, living their ordinary lives. Every American -- if only briefly -- realised that any one of us might have been attacked, merely for being Americans, and most of us remember that we still could be. We remember that we are Americans, heirs to a great experiment in freedom and democracy that our enemies hate simply for its existence. We want no excuses or apologies for our enemies' behavior. We want no multimedia attacks on the morale of our own military forces. All we ask is that the dead be remembered, not as pawns in some Liberal scheme to Blame America First, but as innocent victims of terrorism. All we want is for their memorial to be unsullied by some politically-correct offering of appeasement to their murderers. They deserve a true memorial, a fitting tribute, not this travesty.

This plan to hijack the 9/11 memorial is nothing less than an insulting stab in the back to every person who died that day, as well as every member of the US military who has died in the War on Terror, fighting to prevent a repeat. It's difficult to tell who's worse anymore: the terrorists who attacked us and murdered over 3,000 people, or the Liberals who want to use their memorial to advance their own personal agenda.

For more information: http://takebackthememorial.com