The Ashford Zone Blog

Yup, the WTC memorial site and plaza is sure to be crawling with leftist propaganda:

The hysterics of Malkin and others have focused entirely on who the International Freedom Center has turned to for advice. Here’s an idea: how about looking at who the International Freedom Center has actually endorsed.

Turns out the IFC has been one of the great champions of Nathan Sharansky. Yes, that Nathan Sharansky: President Bush’s foreign policy guru, who was offered an hour-long meeting with Bush in the Oval Office, and who has been praised in the pages of the National Review and on David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag. Earlier this year, Bush told “opinion makers” they should put Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy, on their “recommended reading list.” “If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky’s book,” Bush said.

And it gets better. Guess who turned Bush on to Sharansky? The co-founder of the IFC, Tom Bernstein, who sent Bush excerpts of the book shortly after his reelection, and “who was a financial partner with Bush in the Texas Rangers.” And guess who the IFC featured at its very first public program? Good ol’ Nathan Sharansky.

Source.  For background and related post, see here.

UPDATE: And for a well-deserved and funny skewering of Michelle Malkin and the WSJ opinion piece, you must must must read Sadly, No

SECOND UPDATE: The IFC responds to Michelle Malkin’s rant (indirectly) in this WSJ op-ed, laying out some actual, you know, FACTS similar to what I laid out (e.g., each of the reflecting pools of the Memorial will be one acre in size).

Malkin’s considered and intelligent response?: “Blah times 3.” (No kidding—that’s what passes for intellectual argument on the wingnut right these days).  By the way, please note that, according to Malkin, we’re no longer talking about actual evidence that the IFC will be a “Blame America First” monument (not that she presented any evidence before)—we’re talking now about Burlingame’s paranoid and uninformed “concerns” about what the IFC might be.

THIRD UPDATE: LGF’s surreply to today WSJ op-ed (written by the president of the International Freedom Center, Richard Tofel) is even funnier than Malkin’s:

This article is an attempt to soothe the critics, by tossing out a bunch of happy-sounding phrases about memory, loss, courage, etc. — without once confronting the appallingly simple fact that America was attacked on September 11.

Apparently, Charles Johnson doesn’t understand that memorials are about things like memory.  You can tell because both words come from the same latin root. 

Besides, I think most people who visit the new site will already aware of the “appallingly simple fact that America was attacked on September 11”.  Presumably, that is WHY they would visit the site in the first place.

Instead, Tofel sees 9/11 as a chance to learn lessons, a tragedy, anything but the atrocious mass murder it really was.

Aaaaah.  Now I get it.  Wingers want a “Victimize America First” memorial, dark and bleak and pessimistic.  A wall-to-wall tribute to despair.  Well, then “a basement” sounds like the PERFECT place for that, right wingnuts?

The most outrageous statement in Tofel’s piece, cloaked in tones of reasonableness

Reasonableness.  Another thing that is objectionable to wingers.

Tofel doesn’t even mention the involvement of the ACLU and Human Rights First, or radical leftists like Columbia professor Eric Foner and ubermoonbat George Soros; let’s just ignore the America-haters behind the curtain, shall we?

Let’s ignore the fact that Tofel, assistant publisher of the WSJ and VP of Dow Jones, is hardly a member of the “radical left”.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, what’s being expressed here is rampant hatred for, and fear of, organizations devoted to freedom and human rights, which overshadows any sense of objectivity that the wingnuts may possess.  In fact, their bile even overshadoes notions of decency and respect for what the memorial, taken as a whole, is TRYING to convey.

After reading Tofel’s “nothing up my sleeve” column, I’m more convinced than ever that this memorial will be a complete travesty, and a disgrace to the memories of 3,000 murdered people.

“I still have nothing to actually SUPPORT my belief, just my paranoia and hatred of anything that can be skewed by me as being leftist.”

THEN we get to the lizoid comments, showing their shallowness, hatred, bigotry and stupidity:

If they must have a place for their Celebration of Man’s Inhumanity to Man, allow me to offer a suggestion:

1. Crash a jet into the UN Secretariat Building.

2. Voilà! Instant site.

Yes, the whole ‘international’ thing reeks of PC crap!

All I needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11/01.

He can’t hide the fact that the IFC has already been hijacked by the Left and the George Soros gang; as such, it has become the anti-9/11 memorial.

There you have it—wingers HATE the idea of a musuem devoted to freedom and human rights (despite the fact that freedom and human rights is why we are supposedly in Iraq).

…why the enraged right is so, er, enraged about the construction of an International Freedom Center (or “IFC") at the site of the former World Trade Center.  As stated in this fact sheet (PDF format), the mission of the IFC is to “strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to hatred, ignorance, and intolerance”.

Now please tell me.  Which of those things—preserving freedom, ending hatred, ending ignorance, and ending intolerance—does the right despise so much?  And why?

Perhaps it is because the 9/11 site, rather than someplace else, is being used for such a purpose.  But isn’t our war in Iraq, which is a response to 9/11 itself, ostensibly to preserve freedom, etc.?  If there is no discontinuity between the events of 9/11 and giving Iraqis their freedom, then how can their be a discontinuity between the WTC site and a center devoted to international freedom?

Or maybe it is because wingers feel that the WTC site ought to memorialize those who lost their lives on that tragic day.  Well, they’re right.  Unfortunately, the IFC will be a building which will serve as a “gateway” to the actual World Trade Center memorial, depicted and described here (and if you think this tranquil and beautiful memorial lacks the respect for the WTC victims as well as their rescuers, then you have a heart of stone).

So what is the winger complaint?  Why do they call the IFC a “desecration” of the site?

Well, they just like to complain, I guess.

But if you ask them, they will tell you it is because some of the people behind the IFC are liberals.  Read Malkin’s uninformed whine.

She notes that the brainchild of the IFC is Thomas Bernstein who she describes as “a deep-pocketed Hollywood financier and real estate mogul”.  She also mentions that he is a friend of Dubya, but this is to “cover to his radical activism as president of Human Rights First”.  That’s right—he believes in human rights—what a radical.  She also fails to mention the fact that also has some expertise in memorials dedicated to human rights—like that radical liberal thing in D.C. called the Holocaust Museum. (Bernstein serves on the Board of Directors).

Malkin then lists a bunch of so-called “left-leaning elites”, including academicians from universities like Harvard and Yale.  Oh, and George Soros kicked in some money, too.  Therefore—according to some brand of right-wing paranoid logic—the IFC will effectively become the “The Ultimate Guilt Complex”.  It’s the old rightwing scare tactic, although it just makes them all look silly.

Interestingly, she closes her article with a quote from Richard Tofel, IFC president, who (understandably) minimizes the outrage of Malkin, the LGFers, and the wild-eyed Freepers.  And who is this Tofel guy, you ask, who serves as the President of the dreaded IFC?  Oh, only the assistant publisher of the radical liberal rag known as the Wall Street Journal, as well as the Vice-President of Dow Jones & Co. 

Michelle Magagagalot neglects to mention that.

She also neglects to mention that, serving with the “radical liberal” Thomas Bernstein on the Board of Directors (there are four on the board), is Paula Berry whose husband was killed at WTC on 9/11.  Indeed, she also fails to mention the hundreds of people and organization of various political and apolitical stripes who serve on various committees pertaining to the IFC (again, see here) as well as within the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (see here) which oversees the ENTIRE WTC redevelopment.

So again, why the gripes, simply because—out of the efforts of the hundreds involved—some people can arguably be branded with the label “liberal”? 

Because that’s what wingers do—whine, complain, selectively cherry-pick “evidence” and politicize issues that need not be politicized.  Even in sistuations like this, where the end result is a building devoted to “preserving freedom”, something which wingers CLAIM they are in favor of.

Prominent right-wing blogger John Cole speaks the truth and gives sage advice:

[Members of the media] may be offensive, in cases biased, and in cases all out jackasses (Linda Foley, Ted Rall, Eason Jordan, and others come immediately to mind), but, as a whole, they are not anti-military, and certainly not treasonous. If the media suffers from some Vietnam syndrome, so too does the right-wing, and the main symptom is an all-out hositility to all things media.

In fact, many in the media are downright flagwavers and damned patriotic, and in the case of some, outright jingoists. I have no problem attacking, by name, slimeballs (again, Eason Jordan and Ted Rall come to mind), but we have got to stop this generic smearing of the media. Most of them are doing their best to get it right. Just because they are rightly suspicious of the military establishment does not make them anti-military or anti-American.

So let’s stop these generic attacks on the media.

It gets even better when he talks about the right-wing victimology:

….And while we are at it, can we conservatives please stop this laughable cult of victimology? We have the Presidency (for the second time in a row and the fifth time in the last seven elections). We control the Senate by a ten seat margin. We control the House by a larger margin. We have dismissed or dismantled virtually every institutional check in order to limit opposition debate and increase institutional control, regardless how short-sighted that might be. We are ramming through just about every judge we wanted, and are about to reload the Supreme Court with Antonin Scalia at the helm.

We control dozens of governors offices and an equal number of state legislatures. We have hundreds of think tanks, hundreds of talk show hosts, hundreds of conservative columnists, millions of bloggers. We have dozens of partisan magazines and pundits, legions of 527’s and grass-roots organizations, and dozens of think-tanks. We have, ostensibly, our own damned cable news channel and so many right leaning editorial boards of newspapers I can’t even begin to count them. Memes that start in obscure blogs find their way onto the front page of allegedly liberal newspapers in the matter of two days.

We may be a lot of things, but persecuted victims we are not. To assert otherwise is to engage in a self-defeating flight of fancy that should be met with nothing short of outright ridicule.

Let’s remember that, and remember that the media is not the enemy and their attempts to report abuses by this government are not the problem. We will all be a lot better off if we do, and we can better address our own shortcomings (which are myriad) if we have a critical appraisal of who and what we are and what we are doing. Sure, Chris Matthews may be a sneering jerk at times and has difficulty presenting conservative positions. Tune in to Bill O’Reilly if you need a pat on the back. So you don’t like what the Washington Post wrote about Republicans. Pick up the Washington Times for that big wet kiss some apparently need. And so on and so forth.

Even if we do buy into the absurd supposition that the media is overtly hostile towards conservatives, I contend that their criticism would still be vital. An outside appraisal would be a good thing, particularly when you consider the self-referential and oft-delusional nature of our own manufactured media organs (National Review, for example) and the rest of the echo chamber that the right-wing blogosphere appears to be becoming. We are wasting out energy attacking what, in my mind, has been, overall, a pretty friendly media establishment as of late.

And just for fun, you might ask Move-On or Media Matters how liberal they think the media is. The answer might surprise you. So, some perspective, please.