St. Nicholas at Ground Zero

A short video showing the plans for the reconstructed St.Nicholas that was flattened on 9-11. They seem to have taken their inspiration from the new Roman Catholic cathedral in LA. Too big. Too modern. Way too sterile. This was a place where simplicity with traditional Orthodox iconography and interior design would have been far better. Color me unimpressed.

HT: Fr.Z

A 9-11 conspiracy story that may have an element of truth

After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.

But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

It was kept secret and remains so today.

President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).

A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.

Read the rest here.
HT: Bill (aka The Godfather)

Longtime readers will know of my general disdain for the modern fetish for conspiracy theories. That said, this one has a ring of truth to it. War is a dirty business. It seems perfectly plausible that at a time when we urgently needed allies in the Arab world to help prosecute our War on Terror, that Bush may have told the Saudis we would allow them to deal with some embarrassing issues quietly and internally provided we got full support from the Kingdom.

Does that mean it's true? Not at all. But it does mean that unlike 9-11 trutherism, birtherism and the gazzilion +1 Kennedy conspiracy theories, this one cannot be quickly dismissed as patently silly and or flying in the face of clear facts. For my part I will remain agnostic pending further evidence.

Memory Eternal

Memory Eternal

Atheists Demand Removal Of Famous 9-11 Cross From Memorial

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum's planned presentation of the World Trade Center cross-shaped steel beam, which became a famous Ground Zero symbol right after the September 11 attacks, is being legally challenged by an atheist group.

Last year, American Atheists sued the museum for the cross' removal, arguing that the steel beam promoted religion. Its legal director, Edwin Kagin, argued that the display represents "a violation of both federal and New York law in that public funds will be used to establish the Christian religion on public land."

Read the rest here.

What a bunch of doo-doo heads! Some people are just not happy unless they are pissing off everyone who has the misfortune of being aware of their existence.

Calif. used 9/11 scholarship funds to close budget gap

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Some Californians who lost parents or spouses in the Sept. 11 attacks were unaware of a scholarship program funded by fees from a specialty memorial license plate, while millions of dollars from the plates went to plug the state's persistent budget deficits.

An aspiring lawyer and an unemployed single mother are among those who say they would have signed up to receive a $5,000 scholarship had they known the program existed.

Other parents say they were told their children did not qualify for the funds, although they appear to have met the criteria.

After the September 11 attacks, lawmakers in California, where all four jetliners were bound when they were hijacked, established a special memorial plate emblazoned with the words, "We Will Never Forget."

The money raised through the sale of the plates was to provide scholarships to the children of California residents who perished in the attacks and to help fund anti-terrorism efforts.

The Associated Press reported in May that only $20,000 of the $15 million collected since lawmakers approved the "California Memorial Scholarship Program" has been paid out in scholarships...

...In the years since the program closed to new applicants, Gov. Jerry Brown and his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, borrowed $3 million of memorial license plate money to help plug the state's budget deficit.

Neither loan has been repaid.

Millions more raised by the plates have been spent on budget items with little relation to direct threats of terrorism, including livestock diseases and workplace safety.

Read the rest here.

Greek Orthodox Church destroyed on 9-11 to be rebuilt

Great news via Byzantine Texas. St. Nicholas is to be rebuilt!  Read the story here and here.

10 years after 9-11 St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church remains without a home

...Discussions began for the rebuilding of the church soon after the dust of the disaster had settled and the city had begun to heal. St. Nicholas was an important stakeholder in the dialogue -- legally, as a property owner in the immediate vicinity of the disaster area known as Ground Zero -- and symbolically, as the only house of worship destroyed in the terror attacks.

Almost immediately, the tiny church became a David amongst a field of Goliaths including the states of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, their governors and local officials, several local New York agencies, hundreds of corporations, and of course (and most importantly) the victims' families.

As early as July 2002 -- less than a year after the attacks, the Port Authority issued a statement that affirmed it was looking at six different options for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site. All six proposals that were set forth included "a rebuilt St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church," according to the official press release.

In July of 2008, the Port Authority and the representatives of the church ultimately agreed that the church's existing land would be swapped for a larger parcel less than a hundred yards away.

In exchange for the original church land, the Port Authority agreed to donate $20 million toward construction since the new St. Nicholas church would be built on a platform above a bomb screening center -- not an ideal location for a house of worship that would ultimately become a gathering place of people from throughout the world, as well as the new home to the original St. Nicholas congregation.

Then, abruptly in March of 2009, the Port Authority sent a curt email to the representatives of the church stating that negotiations would be "terminated," ultimately reneging on its previous agreements with the church officials that were well documented and publicly noted by officials.

Shortly thereafter the Port Authority illegally moved in on the Church's property, put up a fence and began excavating on it -- without even notifying the owners -- claiming that they needed to begin construction on the screening center underground.

Read the rest here.

9-11's Self Inflicted Wounds

On Dec. 8, 1951, the day after the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the New York Times’ front page made a one-paragraph mention of commemorations the day before, when the paper’s page had not mentioned the anniversary. The Dec. 8 Washington Post’s front page noted no commemorations the previous day. On Dec. 7, the page had featured a familiar 10-year-old photograph of the burning battleships. It seems to have been published because a new process made possible printing it for the first time in color. At the bottom of the page, a six-paragraph story began: “Greater Washington today will mark the tenth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack by testing its air raid defenses.” The story explained that “the sirens are part of a ‘paper bombing’ of Washington” that would include “mock attacks by atom bombs and high explosives.”

The most interesting question is not how America in 2011 is unlike America in 2001 but how it is unlike what it was in 1951. The intensity of today’s focus on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 testifies to more than the multiplication of media ravenous for content, and to more than today’s unhistorical and self-dramatizing tendency to think that eruptions of evil are violations of a natural entitlement to happiness. It also represents the search for refuge from a decade defined by unsatisfactory responses to Sept. 11.

Read the rest here.

LORD SAVE THY PEOPLE (CHESNOKOV)

How Un-Orthodox: Greek Church May Sue Port Authority Over Ground Zero Site

Which is more tragic: The destruction of the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church across the street from the World Trade Center, or the struggles of the parisioners to have it rebuilt?

In the grand scheme of Ground Zero rebuilding, the church is both literally and figuratively the least of the Port Authority's concerns. The transit agency has four huge towers, a memorial, a transit hub and a security network to oversee. This may explain why the authority broke off negotiations with the church two years ago so it could begin work on a security center that will screen all vehicles making deliveries to the 16-acre site. The church was once located where the screening center is now planned.

Now St. Nicholas is preparing to sue the authority to win its land back, according to DNAinfo. That possibility seems remote, given security center construction, but a deal for another site or reparations might be struck in the courts. The Port Authority said it has once again reached out to try and address the issue, but there appears to be some confusion:

Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward said two months ago that he planned to restart negotiations with the church soon, and a Port spokesman said Friday the agency recently sent a letter to the church.

But Arey said none of the church's leaders or anyone at the archdiocese had received a letter.

"I don't know where they sent it," [church spokesman Mark] Arey said. "There has been absolute silence."

Perhaps the Port sent the letter to the church's old address.

Source

More trouble for St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church

Via the Young Fogey...
The Port Authority appears to have simply started building on the property of the little Greek Orthodox Church destroyed on 9-11 without bothering with those little annoying details, like ASKING FIRST.

NEW YORK — Towers are rising again at the site of the World Trade Center, a place of devastation turned into a construction hub. But the cross-topped belfry of St. Nicholas Church isn't among them.

Nine years after it was destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the little Greek Orthodox church that stood across the street from the twin towers is farther away than ever from being rebuilt.

Slow progress toward a new home halted last year when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the Ground Zero site, broke off discussions with the church over where and how a new church would be built.

FAITH & REASON: Conversation about religion, spirituality & ethics

On Sunday, the eve of St. Nicholas Day, 70 families of the congregation gathered near the site to light candles and pray for a way to rebuild their spiritual home amid the office towers and memorial plaza taking shape. "It's not a political statement. This is our place, and we belong there," says Mark Arey, a priest and director of interfaith relations for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

Before the Port Authority pulled the plug in March 2009, the agency and the church had spent several years working on a plan for the church to be rebuilt a block from its original location. Each side says the other refused to come to terms. The Port Authority says the church wanted too much say in the design of a vehicle screening center underneath the new building. The church says the agency wouldn't finalize the swap of its original property for the new site.

"After nine months of negotiations in which the demands of the Orthodox Church continued to increase over and above what we originally agreed to, we had to make a practical decision," says John Kelly, a Port Authority spokesman.

To work on the vehicle screening center, the Port Authority has begun ripping up the 1,200-square-foot plot where the old church stood, though the agency has not bought the rights from the church to do so.

Read the rest here.

Memory Eternal

The other conspiracy nuts (the lefties have theirs too)

I have occasionally, and with some justification, been accused of harping on the far right conspiracy wackos that infest the Tea Party movement and have a solid following in the Republican Party while ignoring the kooks who inhabit the far left. I can only plead as a defense that I am a bit more sensitive about those on the right, having been for most of my life a Republican (never to be confused with a small 'r' republican) who just took it for granted that a goodly number of those on the extreme left were several fries short of a Happy Meal. That said, I offer the following in reparation for my hitherto one sided focus on the reality challenged in the GOP.

A small gathering of 50 or 60 people; roughly 95 percent white, 90 percent male, a few blond-haired kids, average age 45, all nodding in assent as a series of speakers explains that our government is conspiring against us and fabricating massive lies in order to hide its own crimes and frighten us into giving up our constitutional rights and liberties.

The Tea Party? Minutemen? Birthers? No, “Truthers,” left-wing conspiracy theorists who believe (among other things) that 9/11 was an inside job, that no plane hit the Pentagon, that Ted Olson did not receive a call from his wife, Barbara, shortly before she perished in the crash of Flight 77, that the anthrax scare was also a government hoax (although the anthrax was real and deadly), and that hurricane Katrina was the result of weather manipulation by racists or profiteers or both.

Like many others, I was aware of these theories and aware too that a significant percentage of Americans (about the same percentage that believes President Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya) was at least partly persuaded by them. But on Aug. 15 I got an up-close look at the phenomenon when I attended a meeting of Truthers that just happened to be held in Livingston Manor, a small Catskill town about 20 miles from my house.

Read the rest here.

Ironically many of the leading exponents of the "9-11 Truther" movement were also early and leading figures in the "Birther" movement and have filed multiple court cases in an effort to prove their many bizarre beliefs. In every instance they have been laughed out of court. In at least a few instances they were fined for abusing the legal system with their frivolous suits. None of which has deterred them.

Why does a new mosque take precedence over an already existing church?

Rebuild St. Nicholas First!

Read the story here.

Note: The original image used in this post has been replaced by the two above.

Sacrilege at Ground Zero

A place is made sacred by a widespread belief that it was visited by the miraculous or the transcendent (Lourdes, the Temple Mount), by the presence there once of great nobility and sacrifice (Gettysburg), or by the blood of martyrs and the indescribable suffering of the innocent (Auschwitz).

When we speak of Ground Zero as hallowed ground, what we mean is that it belongs to those who suffered and died there -- and that such ownership obliges us, the living, to preserve the dignity and memory of the place, never allowing it to be forgotten, trivialized or misappropriated.

That's why Disney's 1993 proposal to build an American history theme park near Manassas Battlefield was defeated by a broad coalition that feared vulgarization of the Civil War (and that was wiser than me; at the time I obtusely saw little harm in the venture). It's why the commercial viewing tower built right on the border of Gettysburg was taken down by the Park Service. It's why, while no one objects to Japanese cultural centers, the idea of putting one up at Pearl Harbor would be offensive.

And why Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz. He was in no way devaluing their heartfelt mission to pray for the souls of the dead. He was teaching them a lesson in respect: This is not your place; it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign.

Even New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who denounced opponents of the proposed 15-story mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero as tramplers on religious freedom, asked the mosque organizers "to show some special sensitivity to the situation." Yet, as columnist Rich Lowry pointedly noted, the government has no business telling churches how to conduct their business, shape their message or show "special sensitivity" to anyone about anything. Bloomberg was thereby inadvertently conceding the claim of those he excoriates for opposing the mosque, namely that Ground Zero is indeed unlike any other place and therefore unique criteria govern what can be done there.

Bloomberg's implication is clear: If the proposed mosque were controlled by "insensitive" Islamist radicals either excusing or celebrating 9/11, he would not support its construction.

But then, why not? By the mayor's own expansive view of religious freedom, by what right do we dictate the message of any mosque? Moreover, as a practical matter, there's no guarantee that this couldn't happen in the future. Religious institutions in this country are autonomous. Who is to say that the mosque won't one day hire an Anwar al-Aulaqi -- spiritual mentor to the Fort Hood shooter and the Christmas Day bomber, and onetime imam at the Virginia mosque attended by two of the 9/11 terrorists?

An Aulaqi preaching in Virginia is a security problem. An Aulaqi preaching at Ground Zero is a sacrilege. Or would the mayor then step in -- violating the same First Amendment he grandiosely pretends to protect from mosque opponents -- and exercise a veto over the mosque's clergy?

Location matters. Especially this location. Ground Zero is the site of the greatest mass murder in American history -- perpetrated by Muslims of a particular Islamist orthodoxy in whose cause they died and in whose name they killed.

Of course that strain represents only a minority of Muslims. Islam is no more intrinsically Islamist than present-day Germany is Nazi -- yet despite contemporary Germany's innocence, no German of goodwill would even think of proposing a German cultural center at, say, Treblinka.

Which makes you wonder about the goodwill behind Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's proposal. This is a man who has called U.S. policy "an accessory to the crime" of 9/11 and, when recently asked whether Hamas is a terrorist organization, replied, "I'm not a politician. . . . The issue of terrorism is a very complex question."

America is a free country where you can build whatever you want -- but not anywhere. That's why we have zoning laws. No liquor store near a school, no strip malls where they offend local sensibilities, and, if your house doesn't meet community architectural codes, you cannot build at all.

These restrictions are for reasons of aesthetics. Others are for more profound reasons of common decency and respect for the sacred. No commercial tower over Gettysburg, no convent at Auschwitz -- and no mosque at Ground Zero.

Build it anywhere but there.

The governor of New York offered to help find land to build the mosque elsewhere. A mosque really seeking to build bridges, Rauf's ostensible hope for the structure, would accept the offer.

-Charles Krauthammer
Source

I believe in religious freedom in this country, and that includes for Muslims. I don't think they should be told they can't build there. I DO think that they should be told, very frankly if necessary, that building a mosque at ground zero is insensitive (I really hate that term but it works in this case) and will be seen as offensive by many if not most Americans including me. There is a difference between "can" and "should." It is not our place to dictate. On the other hand we are perfectly within our rights to make it clear to someone or a group when they are behaving rudely or doing something that is in very bad taste.

Such is the case here.

Memory Eternal

Lest we forget...

May the memory of those lost on 9-11 be eternal.

Memory Eternal: 9-11

Lest we forget...