Quite a stream of invective – too vulgar for a family newspaper – has been hitting the incoming e-mail at the offices of the fledgling International Freedom Center in the wake of the article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month by Debra Burlingame. She warned that when the World Trade Center Memorial is finished, visitors to its International Freedom Center “will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man’s inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich’s Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond.” She wrote: “This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.”

Ms. Burlingame has plenty of standing to speak on this matter. She is a member of the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon on September 11. Our instinct when we read her piece is that it was a timely warning. Our city has watched a great university, Columbia, confronted with a faculty prepared to defend the most outrageous anti-Israel posturing in and out of its classrooms. We have seen a once-revered United Nations install Libya as chair of its human rights commission. We have watched Henry Ford II resign from the board of the Ford Foundation itself after it abandoned the principles he believed in.

The IFC is governed by a board that includes President Bush’s friend, Tom Bernstein, Paula Grant Berry, whose husband David was also killed on 9/11, Dan Tishman, a leading builder in the city, and Stephen Heintz, president Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It is a self-perpetuating board of a private not-for-profit corporation that entered a public competition, in the winter of 2004, for designation as a cultural institution at the Ground Zero site. It won designation by the city and state a year ago. It and three other cultural institutions – the Drawing Center, the Signature Theater, and the Joyce Theater – bested 1,300 other cultural institutions for a mandate. The IFC staff is run by its president, Richard Tofel, a lawyer and newspaperman whom we’ve known for years and for whom we have great regard.

These cultural institutions will be supervised by the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, whose own self-perpetuating board numbers more than 30 members, including seven family members of individuals killed on 9/11. The chairman is John Whitehead and other members include – to cite but a sampling – Barbara Walters, Vartan Gregorian of the Carnegie Corporation, Ira Millstein, Robert De Niro, Richard Parsons of Time Warner, Kenneth Chenault of American Express, and a former prime minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney. These are all serious persons. They will have an enormous responsibility to steer clear of the kinds of shenanigans of which Ms. Burlingame warns.

While there are risks, however, it is well to remember that what our common enemy was trying to kill on September 11 was not only the individuals on the planes and in the twin towers but also – as President Bush has often reminded – freedom itself. So there is a logic to the idea of a freedom center. If there is the risk of embarrassment, there is also the possibility of truly great things. When the Holocaust Museum was going up in Washington, many of us felt it was inappropriate and worried that it would devalue the Holocaust story. Yet millions have visited the museum and been educated and moved. And the fact is that while the idea of freedom is clear and simple, the story of the struggle for freedom takes all sorts of turns. A center that tells this story at Ground Zero would be a great thing for our city. So we hope Ms. Burlingame and all her colleagues keep their eye on this goal.