Today, I’ll be thinking less about the World Trade Center and more about my father and the relentless – probably unique – ability of New York City to bury its dead and move on without a backward glance.

My father was born in Manhattan in 1923, in a tenement building off Columbus Circle. A few years later, he moved to Brooklyn, a borough that was considered the country back then, a place that had more horses than cars. By the time he left there for good in 1966, it wasn’t the country anymore, that’s for sure.

He worked for Sea-Land, a shipping company that was one of the World Trade Center’s original tenants, and one of my very earliest memories is of my older brother and me playing in the company’s unfinished offices in one of the towers before the complex opened to the public in 1973.

Like many, probably most, New Yorkers, my father hated the Twin Towers at first, preferring the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, which had gone up during his childhood.

He’d seen King Kong when it came out in 1933, he explained, and he just couldn’t see the big ape climbing the towers. By the late ‘70s – after Philippe Petit tightrope walked across them, George Willig scaled them, Owen Quinn parachuted from them, and King Kong himself had been shot off them in a 1976 remake – he’d come around.

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I chose to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 by running throughout Manhattan, on a 14-mile route that took me from the East Village down to Ground Zero, up to the Central Park Reservoir, and back down through Midtown.

The day started with a brilliant blue sky, almost like the sky of that Tuesday ten years ago. The flags on the Brooklyn Bridge were at half-mast in the early morning.

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As a first responder paramedic and survivor of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center,  the tenth anniversary has brought for me an unsettling feeling of fear that was unexpected. A fear that is not based on the threat of another terror attack but rather the realization that 9/11 is being successfully erased from our collective consciousness and memories.

The threat of new terror attacks is not only real, but has changed from a possibility to an absolute certainty. The politicization of our homeland and national security has guaranteed a second 9/11 style attack or worse. The lessons that I hoped were learned post 9/11 were quickly forgotten, ignored  and replaced with a homeland security strategy that targets political opponents.  The highly charged political environment has corroded many of our capabilities and defenses, making every man, woman and child the next potential terrorist casualty.

While the physical threats are real, the greater threat we face is a country that has lost its guiding principles and values. A country that glamorizes reality show personalities and forgets the blood and treasure of its fallen guardians… minimizes their memories and sacrifice.   The media and politicians have hijacked 9/11 as a political pawn in an attempt to rewrite history, simply to fulfill a narrative that fits each of their own personal agendas.

The consequence in forgetting 9/11 is that we will be forced to  forget the most successful rescue effort in history.

It wasn’t politicians that ran up the stairwells of burning skyscrapers, or took control of hijacked planes, or used their bodies as shields to protect a stranger. It was a cop, a firefighter, a medic, a flight attendant, a locksmith, an iron worker, who said ….”you go home today, I won’t let any harm come to you.” They said this as they gave their lives to fulfill that promise.

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I’ll be covering the tenth anniversary of 9/11 from New York.

Thursday, the “Tribute of Light” was illuminated at Ground Zero.

Amidst the political chatter, its twin beams are a reminder of what matters most.

People have vivid memories of certain tragic events in our history. It used to be common to hear folks ask, “Where were you when JFK was shot?” Or, “What were you doing when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated?” Tragedies etch themselves into our collective psyche and the things we were doing at the time we first heard the news, or witnessed events first-hand, help us to remember.

Such is the case with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Not since Japan’s World War II attack on Pearl Harbor has the United States had its territorial sovereignty violated by such aggression. Everyone who was alive on 9/11/01 recalls today what they were doing, and how they reacted, felt, grieved, mourned, and prayed. For most Americans, that grief, sadness and prayer will never end.

Faith becomes more important to people when they are faced with the loss of loved ones. Religious ceremonies typically accompany the burial process, and the same holds true for memorial events like the upcoming September 11, 2011 ten-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Except that in the case of the ceremony to be held at the site of the World Trade Center– Ground Zero – Mayor Michael Bloomberg has put the kibosh on having religion be a part of it.

It is a decision that seems to defy all logic and commonsense, and it comes off as cruel, heartless, and suggests Hizzoner is out of touch with the people who elected him to be Mayor (not King) of New York City. It falls on the heels of another take-your-breath-away decision about the same event. In mid-August, Mayor Bloomberg nixed inviting first responders to the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the WTC.

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Most Americans are unaware (although readers of my website, AtlasShrugs.com, are well aware) of the atrocity that is taking place at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The New York Times reported last Sunday that “a dispute” is taking place over the remains of 9/11 victims, “between some of the victims’ families and the officials planning the National September 11 Memorial and Museum underneath where the twin towers stood.”

The dispute has arisen, says the Times, because “officials plan to take the remains seven stories below ground and place them in the new museum behind a wall with a quotation from Virgil about never forgetting, studded in letters of World Trade Center steel. But the families, appalled by the idea of remains that could belong to their loved ones being turned into a lure for tourists, want them kept in a separate above-ground memorial that would be treated like hallowed ground.”

The remains of the victims of the September 11th Islamic attack on this country do not belong to those ghouls at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum (Ground Zero mosqueteer Daisy the Khan is on their advisory board). Sally Regenhard, who lost her son Christian on 9/11, explained: “I personally feel I’ve been robbed of access to where my son’s remains are potentially being buried. My entire family, we will never go in there. This is a post-traumatic stress situation waiting to happen.” Rosemary Cain, whose son George, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, said that putting the remains in the museum was “like a freak show.”

However, the president of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Joe Daniels, was fine with the freak show: “What the families need most and what the public needs most is a memorial they can come to to pay their respects at.” The hubris of this creep. He is going to tell the 911 family members what they need.

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In July 2010, Mayor Bloomberg outrageously told reporters it was “un-American” to investigate the individuals behind the Ground Zero Mosque. Now we know why he wanted no one to look into the controversy.

Judicial Watch just obtained a new batch of documents from New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s office that show his office was instrumental in helping radical anti-American Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, his wife Daisy Khan and their partner Sharif el-Gamal obtain approval for a 13-story massive mosque and “community center” to be built in the shadow of Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

These documents, which we obtained through open records requests and a related lawsuit, earned widespread press coverage in New York and around the country. (Here’s the New York Observer’s take to give just one example.) They included email correspondence between top officials inside the Mayor’s office and supporters of the Ground Zero Mosque, a project spearheaded by the Rauf-led Cordoba Initiative. The documents were made available to us on December 23. This unseemly Christmas dump is a well-known ploy by politicians to use the holidays to release bad news in the hopes that it will go unnoticed. (It didn’t work this time.)

Here are some of the documents’ key highlights:

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In the six days that followed the attacks on September 11^th, the New York Stock Exchange was closed for the first and longest time ever since the Great Depression and World War I.  The markets would reopen on September 17^th, but to quite a rocky start.  During the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the heartbeat of our nation’s economy stopped, suspended in time.  And a forgotten class of Wall Street workers faced the difficult decision of whether or not to return to work. Those who did would return to a completely different world, one that had already changed them forever.  And today, nine years later, many of them are still there.  In a polarized political environment where the bad behavior of a few has unfairly demonized all of Wall Street’s workers, their contributions to our post-9/11 recovery have been largely ignored.  But had these workers made the choice back in 2001 never to return again, what might have happened?  This is one story, out of many, of the courage, determination and dignity of an entire class of forgotten patriots who stood by their country in the aftermath of September 11^th, 2001 when it would have been so easy to simply walk away.

Nine years ago, my brother Will was working for a Wall Street brokerage firm just steps away from what is now known as Ground Zero.  His office building overlooked Trinity Church on one side and the World Trade Center on the other.  Just on the other side of the river, near his home in Hoboken, NJ, he boarded the PATH train every day, bound for the bustling station at the World Trade Center.  Like so many others, he went to work on September 11^th thinking that day would be just like any other.

Just before 8:46 am as Will was settling into his day with his co-workers, a loud, screeching sound of shearing metal boomed just outside their building.  He looked up at the trading desk manager, and both were stunned.  Will thought it might be a high rise construction accident; the desk manager suspected an explosion.

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UPDATE: A New York Daily News correspondent reports the Hareetz story is untrue:

UPDATE from our Sam Goldsmith, who’s been following this issue and just got off the phone with Sharif El-Gamal, the developer of the project:

“That’s complete misinformation. That’s crazy,” El-Gamal said.

“That’s totally totally wrong. This is more misinformation in this web of misinformation.”

“We’ve never even talked about this as an idea. Everything is on track and moving forward at the same location.”

*****

From Haaretz.com:

After weeks of heated debate over plans for an Islamic community center near Ground Zero – the site of the 9/11 attacks on New York – it seems Muslim leaders will soon back down, agreeing to move to a new site.

The decision follows a high-profile campaign against the project that included advertisements on New York buses showing images of the burning Twin Towers, an iconic landmark razed when al-Qaida terrorists flew packed passenger planes into them in 2001. The New York Republican party is also said to be planning a hostile television campaign.

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Dear Imam Rauf and Daisy Khan,

The remains of another seventy-two people were discovered on Friday not far from where you plan to build a thirteen-story Islamic center and mosque. Here we are, close to ten years after the largest jihadist attack ever to take place on American soil, and bodies, corpses, are still being recovered. Who knows how many body parts were found in the Burlington Coat Factory building when the landing gear crashed through all five floors? Thousands were never recovered. Their cemetery, their burial ground, is the area in and around Ground Zero. not far from where you plan to build a thirteen-story Islamic center and mosque. Here we are, close to ten years after the largest jihadist attack ever to take place on American soil, and bodies, corpses, are still being recovered. Who knows how many body parts were found in the Burlington Coat Factory building when the landing gear crashed through all five floors? Thousands were never recovered. Their cemetery, their burial ground, is the area in and around Ground Zero.

Of course, as one of the leaders of the opposition to the painful and strangely thoughtless “Cordoba Initiative,” my group SIOA will be pursuing legal avenues to stop or at least dramatically slow down the building of this mosque on the site that many consider to be a war memorial, while also staging mega-protests and sit-ins if and when construction begins, etc. But must it come to that?

You and I are New Yorkers. We  are Americans, first. You, too, felt the devastating pain and anguish when the military arm of Islam (al qaeda) unleashed its attack on America on September 11th. The gaping hole at Ground Zero is a constant reminder of that terrible war.

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On June 6^th, the date of D-Day, scores of patriots from across the nation poured into Zuccotti Park at the corner of Liberty and Trinity, across the street from Ground Zero to protest the 9/11 mosque being built just 600 feet from our country’s most painful wound.

Many have spoken to the horrible insensitivity of this mosque, arguing that it is an affront to American sensibilities, a planting of the victory flag as evidenced by its 9/11/11 opening date and the name of the project itself, the “Cordoba Initiative,” and a reflection of the growing stealth Sharia in the United States given the mosque’s Imam’s pro-Islamic law stance.  Indeed Muslims have been building mosques for centuries as symbols of conquest and dominance, and this one in particular will mark the first to stand on US soil.

The 9/11 mosque however has far greater implications with regard to the fundamental principles of our nation.  As reflected by the guffaws of many in the crowd when one of the speakers at the rally argued in favor of the mosque on Constitutional grounds regardless of the abhorrence of its location, many find it hard to reconcile that Islam is allowed to use our freedoms to subvert or mock our freedoms.  The religious tolerance of our culture alone deems us largely unable to prevent against mosques in which Islamic supremacism is preached, creating fertile protected grounds for jihadists both peaceful and violent.

If in fact we are unable to safeguard against such institutions, or even criticize the ideology of Islam at all, then we are going to be neutered in a war against those who use Islam to justify murdering innocents and implementing universal Sharia law both overtly and stealthily.

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Imagine the American response in 1950 if the Japanese government sought to erect a shrine to its World War II Emperor in Pearl Harbor, right next to the sunken wreckage of the USS Arizona.

Would “outrage” be strong enough to describe the response?

Now fast forward to 2010.

Less than nine years after the worst terrorist attack on American soil in our history, an imam who blames America for the 9/11 attack wants to construct a 13 story, $100 million dollar mosque and Islamic center 600 feet from “Ground Zero.”

And he wants to unveil it to the world on September 11, 2011 – the ten year anniversary of the greatest jihadist atrocity ever perpetrated against America on its own soil.

News and blog sites across the country are heating up over this.  ACT! for America, the nation’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to combating radical Islam and global jihad, today launched a national petition opposing the mosque, which says in part:

We are opposed to the grotesque symbolism represented by the building of this mosque at “ground zero…”  We are deeply disturbed by the insensitivity to the families of the victims of the 9/11 jihadist attack exhibited by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his supporters.

As a measure of the public’s outrage , over 5,000 people had signed the petition in the first three hours.

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By Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer

A massive fifteen-story mosque and Islamic Center going up in what was once the shadow of the World Trade Center claims to offer “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.” The Center organizers, the America Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), have worked hard in the media to portray themselves as Islamic moderates working for peace on the exact spot where their belligerent coreligionists perpetrated murder and mayhem in the name of their religion. But the words and deeds of the leader of the effort, the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, suggests a more ominous reality: Abdul Rauf is a master of deceptive, Orwellian use of language, manifesting a deep contempt for non-Muslims and full accord with the supremacist goals of the 9/11 hijackers.

So anxious were they to secure the location at Ground Zero that a Muslim real estate company paid $4.85 million in cash for the building, with part coming from Abdul Rauf’s other Islamic group, the Cordoba Initiative. It is unnerving – the deliberate speed and anxiousness that the leader of the American Society for Muslim Advancement has demonstrated in working to open a mosque at the gaping wound of Ground Zero. He claims that it will heal that wound. But how will it do that? How will a mosque, the place where jihadis go for spiritual sustenance, at Ground Zero help stop jihad terrorism? Even the name of the initiative – Cordoba – speaks volumes. While Islamic Spain is held up today as a proto-multiculturalist paradise, in reality non-Muslims there suffered under the discrimination prescribed in Islamic law for dhimmis, non-believers who were subjugated as inferiors and denied equality of rights.

ASMA seems to have deliberately sought a connection to Ground Zero for their new mosque site. Muslims are already conducting daily prayers on the site, an old Burlington Coat Factory outlet where, according to Abdul Rauf, “a piece of the wreckage fell.”

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I was thinking about opening up a Japanese cultural center across the water from the sunken USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. Just as soon as I lay the cornerstone of a new German Brauhaus on the grounds of Auschwitz. What’s the problem? After all, not all Japanese attacked us on Dec. 7. And I reckon most Germans are genuinely ashamed and horrified by the crimes of the Holocaust committed in their  name. Insensitive nonetheless? Even insulting, despite the passage of time and goodness of these two nations far removed from their WW2 past? Of course it is. Which is why no one in their right mind would propose such hypothetical projects.

I guess the key phrase here is “in their right mind” because wouldn’t you know it, a plan to build what would, at 15 stories, be the largest community center/mosque in New York City is being hotly debated at the moment. Why the debate? Because its location will be only two blocks from the World Trade Center Ground Zero site. Yes. You read that correctly. And just like in my hypothetical examples I set forth above, the obvious question arises: why there?

First, a little background on the mosque’s sponsors helps frame the discussion. The imam leading the project is Faisal Abdul Rauf. Like many imams, Rauf seems to be a split personality. If one were to pull up CNN’s website or open up the NY Times, one would be dutifully fed the story of a soft-spoken introspective man. A respected religious and community leader who is dedicated to reaching across the chasm of religious animus to achieve peaceful co-existence with his Western hosts. A man with a sonorous voice and hypnotic charm who, according to his book What’s Right With Islam wants the mosque to be a place where inter-faith understanding is fostered. Aww shucks!

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Ex-White House counsel Greg Craig thought it was a good idea to transfer Elián Gonzalez from the arms of his loving family in Miami into the arms of Fidel Castro. Transfer Elián from Florida to Cuba. Bad idea. Attorney General Janet Reno thought she might have to prove her toughness by transferring dozens of women and children from a Waco cult headquarters to eternity. Really bad idea.

But Eric Holder’s plan to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from Guantánamo Bay to Manhattan for a civilian trial is perhaps liberals’ worst idea in years. KSM and his cohorts had agreed to plead guilty before a military tribunal, accept a sentence of death, and speedily rendezvous with their 72 ladies-in-waiting.

This offer of an efficient way out for the administration was not good enough for Attorney General Eric Holder. He insists on trying the terrorists before a civilian jury in federal court, just a few hundred yards from Ground Zero. Next to martyrdom and a free trip to paradise, this has to be the terrorists’ wildest dream.

No turbaned genie ever appeared out of Aladdin’s lamp to grant three greater wishes than these. KSM to Genie: One, I want to exploit my status as mass-murdering terrorist; Two, I want to inflict even greater pain and suffering on the families of those thousands whom I’ve murdered; Three, I want to make my trial a magnet for my brother jihadists throughout the world.

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