The International Freedom Center (IFC) was a proposed museum to be located adjacent to the site of Ground Zero at the former World Trade Center in New York City, USA. It was selected in 2004 to comprise a "cultural space" near to the memorial for victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, called Reflecting Absence.
However, opponents reacted against the IFC's mission, saying that plans to promote international freedom through exhibits and displays about various genocides and crimes against humanity through history, including genocide of Native American and the slave trade in the United States, were inappropriate at a site that many people consider to be sacred. On September 28, 2005, New York Governor George E. Pataki barred the IFC from the World Trade Center site."
George Soros, Tom Bernstein, Anthony Romero, and Eric Foner were promoters of the IFC. Within an hour of being barred from being on the WTC site, the IFC museum declared itself to be out of business, making no effort to find a new location. "We do not believe there is a viable alternative place for the I.F.C. at the World Trade Center site," said the statement from the center's executives, Tom Bernstein, Peter Kunhardt and Richard Tofel. "We consider our work, therefore, to have been brought to an end."
Famous quotes containing the words freedom and/or center:
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I don’t think America’s the center of the world anymore. I think African women will lead the way [in] ... women’s liberation ... The African woman, she’s got a country, she’s got the flag, she’s got her own army, got the navy. She doesn’t have a racism problem. She’s not afraid that if she speaks up, her man will say goodbye to her.”
—Faith Ringgold (b. 1934)