Tel-Chai Nation

Michelle Malkin points to how, 9 years since the tragedy of 9-11, almost none of the buildings meant to replace those lost have been completed, and that includes some of the memorial structures. Only a handful have been completed. The Bergen Record says:

We are supposed to be pleased that One World Trade Center is rising, that work on that national Sept. 11 memorial is well under way, as is the transportation hub and one of three additional commercial towers. And we are pleased that these projects are moving along. But it has been nine years. Nine years and nothing is completed.

The New York Post says:

The chief culprits of the go-slow were the Port Authority and then-Gov. George Pataki — whose absent leadership, absurd design directives and destructive meddling are ancient history to site-watchers.

Until Ward’s arrival in 2007, the agency’s six-year delay in excavating the site’s eastern side was entirely to blame for Larry Silverstein’s inability to build.

But there were many enablers of the PA’s dereliction and of Pataki’s fecklessness. In the aftermath of 9/11, many leading business advocates sounded willing to cede Downtown planning to Mohamed Atta. Even New York City Partnership head Kathryn Wylde unfathomably argued that Downtown’s commercial-center days were over before 9/11 (despite all-time low vacancy as of Sept. 10, 2001) — so why bother rebuilding offices?

The let’s-go-slow crowd included the think tanks like the Regional Plan Association, for whom no rebuilding would do without a utopian fantasy of parks and transit amenities.

Mayor Bloomberg (who’s since bravely changed his tune) undermined Silverstein and Downtown. He assailed the developer for asking proper rents for his new 7 WTC, neglected horrendous street conditions and proposed a “vision” for the area that included everything but new offices.

Rudy Giuliani, a great mayor (and great wartime mayor), lent the obstructionists a patina of moral authority by absurdly advocating to make a memorial of the whole 16-acre site.

Nervous real-estate developers, fearing competition, lobbied behind the scenes to delay reconstruction. Only one had a very public instrument of propaganda: Boston Properties Chairman Mort Zuckerman, who is also publisher of the Daily News.

Zuckerman never got over Boston’s early 2001 loss in a bidding war for the Twin Towers to Silverstein…

…The New York Times, meanwhile, made such a stink over preliminary reconstruction plans in 2002 that it cowed Pataki into yanking them for a time-consuming design competition. That set everything back a year and yielded Daniel Libeskind’s unworkable master site plan — which had to be revised again and again.

Gee whiz. Reading this, I gotta say, I'm really disappointed in a lot of the politicians cited here. It is this astonishing political correctness that's ruining America and denying justice to millions of victims of terrorism in America and other parts of the world. The time has come to make it clear to the politicians holding these memorial projects to the victims of 9-11 up that it's time already to stop the excuses and start building them seriously, with facts on the ground. A special movement is needed, and it must be made clear that there can be no whitewashing, and no political correctness getting in the way.

More on the subject at Hot Air.

Labels: anti-americanism, dhimmitude, islam, jihad, New York, terrorism, United States, war on terror