Eric H. Doss's Posterous Site

TPM Reader MK, a New Yorker, has had enough with out-of-towners like Sarah Plain protesting the mosque near the WTC site:

I first heard about this project a month or two ago, and the thing that struck me the most about it was the overwhelming support it had from the local community board in Lower Manhattan. As you are probably familiar it is nearly impossible to have a community board agree on even the most mundane issues, so to have a community board agree 29-1 on ANY this particular issue is quite an accomplishment.

Furthermore, why is land use in New York City the business of anyone else but the citizens of New York? If so, I would really like to know Sarah Palin's opinion of the Atlantic Yards (or Hudson Yards or the expansion of Columbia University) project, an issue that is 1,000,000x more controversial than this project. That's all this is: a land use issue.

Following her logic (no small feat, I might add), do I now have the right to protest the construction of a new office building in Anchorage because it may house the offices of an oil company and might insult the people who suffered from the BP oil spill?

Or can I have a say the next time some city in the "heartland" (because apparently that is the place that has veto power over land use in New York) decides to build more sprawl at the expense of more livable communities with mixed-use development, walkable streets, and public transportation? I think I should because it really "stabs me in the heart" when places do that.

This is a local issue, plain and simple. The people of New York, the ones actually attacked on 9/11 and who had to live through the aftermath, are the only ones who are effected by this and don't seem to have a problem with it, so no one else should. It is no one else's business. Sarah Palin and the "heartland" do not have permanent veto power over what gets built in Lower Manhattan. If they want a say over what happens there, my advice would be to move to New York. They might even learn something about the values of living in a multi-ethnic, multicultural community.

New Yorker - Sarah Palin - New York - New York City - United States

There are small sidewalk-affixed plaques in many locations in Berlin, including on my street.  Here are some visual examples and here are many more.  They sit by the victim's former home and list the victim's name, the date he or she was taken away, and date and place he or she was murdered.  The word given is the more brutal "murdered" (ermordet), not "killed."  

Most plaques refer to Holocaust victims, although one nearby plaque is for a German general who apparently disliked the Nazis (and vice versa) and others are for gypsies, gays, and resistance fighters.  Here are further sites on the plaques, including in German.  Here is Wikipedia on the plaques; some homeowners do fear price depreciation.  Since the plaques are placed in public space, the homeowner has no veto rights.

The plaques are the brainchild of Gunther Demnig, a sculptor from Cologne who has made them his life's work.  A plaque costs 95 euros and a sponsor, often a relative or former friend, commissions Demnig to make a "Stolperstein," as he calls them in German, or a "stone to stumble upon."  The story of the origin of the plaques is here.  Demnig's parents were ardent Nazis, which he reports caused him to feel some responsibility for what happened.  He relies on records collected by the Gestapo itself. 

The first Stolpersteine he laid illegally in the mid 1990s.  As of April of this year, Demnig himself has installed over 22,000 of the plaques.  Here is Demnig's home page.

The city of Munich has since relented in its ban, and now it allows the plaques.