An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal early this month criticizing the International Freedom Center, a museum to be built at ground zero, has sparked a rebellion by some relatives of people who perished on September 11, 2001. Roughly 50 family members gathered yesterday to call for the museum to be removed from ground zero, leading the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to organize a press conference to address the complaints.

“There has been much recent controversy on the International Freedom Center, but the concept is an institute that celebrates man’s march to freedom, and not a place for political polemics,” the secretary to Governor Pataki, John Cahill, who was named recently to oversee the rebuilding of ground zero, said at the press conference. Mr. Cahill called the museum “a companion to the memorial” and “a buffer” between the memorial and bustling Church Street.

The museum’s critics have said it will create a debate on freedom that is not appropriate at a memorial site.

The International Freedom Center will represent “not only history’s triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures,” a member of the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, Debra Burlingame, whose brother was the American Airlines pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon, wrote in the opinion piece.

“The public 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.”

Mr. Cahill said members of the memorial foundation have had only two meetings, one of which divided the board into committees, including a committee to oversee programming at the International Freedom Center, of which Ms. Burlingame is a member. He said it was “way too early” to know what kind of programs the museum would present.

“There will be nothing about atrocities committed by Americans,” Mr. Cahill said. “There is a way to present Martin Luther King, Abe Lincoln, and Rosa Parks, but in a positive manner.”

In response to Ms. Burlingame’s column, the president of the Freedom Center, Richard Tofel, wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece the next day that the center “will serve as a complement to the memorial, bringing a universal ‘narrative of hope’ to a place where hope is imperative.”

In The New York Sun last Friday, Mr. Tofel was quoted as saying: “The IFC’s highest aims are to inspire people and engage them in service. It will tell the stories of Nazism – but also of the Greatest Generation that defeated it; of the Soviet gulag – but also of the courageous dissidents who helped bring it down; of Jim Crow segregation – but also Martin Luther King, who helped stamp it out. Inspiring people through these stories to do freedom’s work today is our best long run defense against more 9/11s.”