In April 2006, Park Service Director Mary Bomar ordered an internal investigation into claims that the planned Flight 93 Memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque, built abound a giant Mecca-oriented crescent. Bomar’s investigation was a total fraud, concluding, for instance, that it isn’t possible to calculate the orientation of the crescent because the site-plan has not been geo-referenced. (Page 2, PP2 of September 2006 summary report. Page 1 here.)
In fact, the original Crescent of Embrace site-plan was drawn on a topo map that the Memorial Project provided to all participants in the design competition. A topo map is the epitome of a geo-referenced map. North marked on a topo map is true north, which is the only piece of information needed to calculate the orientation of the crescent. Just connect the tips of the crescent, form the perpendicular bisector, and calculate how many degrees it points from north (53.4).
Also known are the crash-site coordinates, which is all that is needed to calculate the direction to Mecca (55.2° clockwise from north). All of this is trivially easy to verify. Just use the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com to get a graphic of the direction to Mecca from the crash site and place it over the crescent site plan:
Somerset PA is ten miles from the crash-site. The “qibla” is the direction to Mecca. Red lines show the orientation of the crescent. The crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca. (Click for larger image.)
A request for oversight
Because it is the director’s office that has been covering up the Mecca-orientation of the crescent, oversight can only come from Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne himself. Several people sent letters to Secretary Kempthorne two weeks ago, showing how the giant Mecca-oriented crescent remains completely intact in the so called redesign. But Mr. Kempthorne also needs to know that he is getting bad information from his subordinates in the Park Service. Thus a request for all readers of this post: if you have a minute, please copy and paste this entire post into an email for Secretary Kempthorne.
We don’t need for the secretary to understand all the terrorist memorializing features in the design, or the numerous proofs of intent that architect Paul Murdoch included so that his accomplishment will be undeniable once it is a fait accompli. It is enough that he be concerned about features that can be readily interpreted as terrorist memorializing, whether they are intended or not. As Congressman Tancredo put it: we need “a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism.”
But even getting to the most basic facts about what is in the present design requires getting past Mary Bomar’s fraudulent report, which tries to pretend that there is nothing that can even be interpreted as untoward.
Mary Bomar’s intellectually dishonest “experts”
In addition to claiming that topo maps are not geo referenced, Mary Bomar’s internal investigation cites a small number of academic experts, all of whom spout nothing but the most absurd non sequiturs. One is Dr. Daniel Griffith, professor of “geo-spatial information” at the University of Texas. About Alec Rawls’ analysis of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, Dr. Griffith writes:
… Mr. Rawls’s arithmetic calculations appear to be correct … [but] … just because calculations are correct does not make the resulting numbers meaningful.
Dr. Griffith’s point, it seems, is that the mere fact of Mecca orientation does not imply intent. Who said it did? The way Murdoch proves intent is by repeating his Mecca orientations (scroll down to the last section here). But intent is not the only thing that matters. Even without terrorist memorializing intent, it is inappropriate to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the crash site.
The Memorial Project knows this, but it is committed to defending the crescent design, so it keeps using its doubts about intent as an excuse for denying the facts. Dr. Griffith, for instance, is telling every reporter who will listen that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca. “Anything can point toward Mecca,” he told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, “because the earth is round.” One billion Muslims face Mecca five times a day to pray, and Griffith pretends there is no such thing as facing Mecca!
Of course he knows better. The first thing that Griffith’s report does is calculate the direction to Mecca:
I computed an azimuth value from the Flight 93 crater site to Mecca of roughly 55.20°.
Bomar expert #2
Dr. Kevin Jaques, specialist in Islamic sharia law from the University of Indiana, acknowledges that the Mecca-oriented crescent is similar to the mihrab around which every mosque is built, but says:
…just because something is ’similar to’ something else does not make it the ’same’.
Yes, well, similar–very, very similar–is exactly the problem.
Like Daniel Griffith, Mr. Jaques is trying to make hay of the fact that Mecca orientation does not by itself imply intent. So what? Intentional or not, it is unacceptable for the central feature of the Flight 93 memorial to be a geometric match for the central feature of a mosque. Jaques is pretending that the questions he raises about intent somehow make the facts irrelevant.
Professor Jaques also dismisses the likeness between the Mecca-oriented crescent and a traditional Islamic mihrab by noting that lots of religious structures have prayer-direction indicators, not just mosques:
The biggest hole in [Rawls'] argument is that all of the elements he points to are common architectural features that one would find in a church or synagogue. The mihrab originated in pre-Islamic buildings and can be found in temples, churches, and synagogues around the Mediterranean.
This is logic? Because Christian churches are often oriented to the east, that somehow makes it okay to build the Flight 93 memorial around a half-mile wide Mecca oriented crescent? If this is “the biggest hole in [Rawls'] argument,” then there are no holes in Rawls’ argument.
Project spokesmen know the truth, and are lying about it
Memorial Project spokesmen have followed the lead of these academic frauds, using doubts about intent as a pretext for denying the facts. Asked about Rawls’ Mecca orientation claim, Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93, denied it:
Rawls’ claims are untrue and “preposterous,” according to Patrick White, Families of Flight 93 vice president. “We went through in detail all his original claims and came away with nothing.”
In fact, Patrick White is fully aware of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. At the Memorial Project’s public meeting in July he argued that the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.”
“Alec Rawls bases all of his conclusions on faulty assumptions,” said Joanne Hanley, the superintendent of the Flight 93 National Memorial. “In addition, the facts are twisted and people are misquoted, all to serve his intended purpose.”
But she too has admitted the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, telling Mr. Rawls in a 2006 conference call that she wasn’t concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the crescent because: “It isn’t exact. That’s one we talked about. It has to be exact.” (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, page 145.)
These are your subordinates Mr. Kempthorne. Please do not let them get away with this fraud. Congressman Tancredo is demanding answers from Director Bomar and many of us are hoping that you will do the same. There is not much time. Construction on Paul Murdoch’s terrorist memorial mosque is about to begin.
Mike Cox, Attorney General for the state of Michigan, wrote a very clear, concise and informed piece on the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" in the Wall Street Journal.
The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case that will affect millions of Americans and could also have an impact on the 2008 elections. That case, Parker v. D.C., should settle the decades-old argument whether the right "to keep and bear arms" of the Constitution’s Second Amendment is an individual right — that all Americans enjoy — or only a collective right that states may regulate freely. Legal, historical and even empirical reasons all command a decision that recognizes the Second Amendment guarantee as an individual right.
The amendment reads: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." If "the right of the people" to keep and bear arms was merely an incident of, or subordinate to, a governmental (i.e., a collective) purpose — that of ensuring an efficient or "well regulated" militia — it would be logical to conclude, as does the District of Columbia — that government can outlaw the individual ownership of guns. But this collective interpretation is incorrect.
To analyze what "the right of the people" means, look elsewhere within the Bill of Rights for guidance. The First Amendment speaks of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble . . ." No one seriously argues that the right to assemble or associate with your fellow citizens is predicated on the number of citizens or the assent of a government. It is an individual right.
The Fourth Amendment says, "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . " The "people" here does not refer to a collectivity, either.
The rights guaranteed in the Bill of Right are individual. The Third and Fifth Amendments protect individual property owners; the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments protect potential individual criminal defendants from unreasonable searches, involuntary incrimination, appearing in court without an attorney, excessive bail, and cruel and unusual punishments.
The Ninth Amendment protects individual rights not otherwise enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Here, "the people" are separate from "the states"; thus, the Second Amendment must be about more than simply a "state" militia when it uses the term "the people."
Consider the grammar. The Second Amendment is about the right to "keep and bear arms." Before the conjunction "and" there is a right to "keep," meaning to possess. This word would be superfluous if the Second Amendment were only about bearing arms as part of the state militia. Reading these words to restrict the right to possess arms strains common rules of composition.
Colonial history and politics are also instructive. James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to provide a political compromise between the Federalists, who favored a strong central government, and the Anti-Federalists, who feared a strong central government as an inherent danger to individual rights. In June 1789, then Rep. Madison introduced 12 amendments, a "bill of rights," to the Constitution to convince the remaining two of the original 13 colonies to ratify the document.
Madison’s draft borrowed liberally from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and Virginia’s Declaration of Rights. Both granted individual rights, not collective rights. As a result, Madison proposed a bill of rights that reflected, as Stanford University historian Jack Rakove notes, his belief that the "greatest dangers to liberty would continue to arise within the states, rather than from a reconstituted national government." Accordingly, Mr. Rakove writes that "Madison justified all of these proposals (Bill of Rights) in terms of the protection they would extend to individual and minority rights."
One of the earliest scholars of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, confirmed this focus on individuals in his famous "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States" in 1833. "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms," Story wrote, "has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of republics, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers . . ."
It is also important to consider the social context at the time of the drafting and adoption of the Bill of Rights. Our Founding Fathers lived in an era where there were arms in virtually every household. Most of America was rural or, even more accurately, frontier. The idea that in the 1780s the common man, living in the remote woods of the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania and Virginia, would depend on the indulgence of his individual state or colony — not to mention the new federal government — to possess and use arms in order to defend himself is ludicrous. From the Minutemen of Concord and Lexington to the irregulars at Yorktown, members of the militias marched into battle with privately-owned weapons.
Lastly, consider the empirical arguments. The three D.C. ordinances at issue are of the broadest possible nature. According to the statute, a person is not legally able to own a handgun in D.C. at all and may have a long-gun — even in one’s home — only if it is kept unloaded and disassembled (or bound with a trigger lock). The statute was passed in 1976. What have been the results?
Illegal guns continue to be widely available in the district; criminals have easy access to guns while law-abiding citizens do not. Cathy L. Lanier, Acting Chief of Police, Metropolitan Police Department, was quoted as follows: "Last year [2006], more than 2,600 illegal firearms were recovered in D.C., a 13% increase over 2005." Crime rose significantly after the gun ban went into effect. In the five years before the 1976 ban, the murder rate fell to 27 from 37 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose to 35. In fact, while murder rates have varied over time, during the 30 years since the ban, the murder rate has only once fallen below what it was in 1976.
This comports with my own personal experience. In almost 14 years as prosecutor and as head of the Homicide Unit of the Wayne County (Detroit) Prosecutor’s Office, I never saw anyone charged with murder who had a license to legally carry a concealed weapon. Most people who want to possess guns are law-abiding and present no threat to others. Rather than the availability of weapons, my experience is that gun violence is driven by culture, police presence (or lack of same), and failures in the supervision of parolees and probationers.
Not only does history demonstrate that the Second Amendment is an individual right, but experience demonstrates that the broad ban on gun ownership in the District of Columbia has led to precisely the opposite effect from what was intended. For legal and historical reasons, and for the safety of the residents of our nation’s capital, the Supreme Court should affirm an individual right to keep and bear arms.
I was reading through this article regarding Thanksgiving in America (the article is posted in the UK) and it got me thinking. Thinking about Thanksgiving, and about America, and about America’s image throughout the world. How all the mainstream media outlets are complaining (gloating?) that the rest of the world, almost every last other person, hates and despises America. How America is the bad guy world wide, the new villain, with it’s empire building goals.
All that, of course, is complete hogwash. Though I admit there are many (even in civilized countries) who dislike – even hate – America. I can say with all honesty, those that do, do so out of ignorance. Ignorance or jealousy. Yes, there I said it. Few others will admit to believing this, but I will admit it, and not be ashamed to admit it.
To borrow a bit from Lee Greenwood, this Thanksgiving, I give thanks to God that I am in a land where I am free. Free to choose, free to explore. Free to worship, or not to worship. Free to work at the job I want to work out, or free to strike out entrepreneur-like on my own. I am free to go to college, or not.
There is no other country in the world where everyone, and I don’t care who you are, every citizen has opportunity. Everybody. Everybody has the same opportunity. There are way too many rags-to-riches stories for me not to believe that anyone can achieve whatever they desire in America. The son of the town drunk, or an abusive step-father will never, ever have the opportunity to be the King of England, or Spain, or Norway. We don’t have castes or rigid classes here. We don’t have Lords and Dukes and Princes. Everyone is the same by station of birth in America.
All of those whiners and crybabies who talk bad about America remind me of that scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
Reg: They’ve bled us white, the bastards. They’ve taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers’ fathers.
Loretta: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Reg: Yeah. Loretta: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Reg: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don’t labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?! Xerxes: The aqueduct? Reg: What? Xerxes: The aqueduct.
Reg: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that’s true. Yeah. Commando 3: And sanitation. Loretta: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like. Reg: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done. Matthias: And the roads! Reg: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don’t they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads– Commando: Irrigation. Xerxes: Medicine. Commandos: Huh? Heh? Huh… Commando 2: Education. Commandos: Ohh… Reg: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough. Commando 1: And the wine. Commandos: Oh, yes. Yeah… Francis: Yeah. Yeah, that’s something we’d really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh. Commando: Public baths. Loretta: And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg. Francis: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s face it. They’re the only ones who could in a place like this! Commandos: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh. Reg: But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
What has America done for the rest of the world?
The Internet: Yeah, that was us, get over it CERN, you’re man may have created the web browser, but what in the hell would it run on without the network? Huh? Answer me that.
McDonald’s: Sure, it tastes like cardboard, and is riddled with grotesque fats, but for less than five clams and in less than five minutes, one can get a meal one their way to the next million dollar deal meeting.
MRI’s, CAT Scans and a myriad of other medical wonders that were a direct result of the umpteen billions spent on the US space program
Google
Yahoo
Apple
Microsoft
Microprocessor
CDs
John Wayne
Lauren Bacall
Hollywood: ok, some of the movies are real turds, but let’s face it, Lord of the Rings could not have been made in Baliwood, or by any other foreign film industry. It took Hollywood to create that
Star Trek: What would cell phones look like today if Capt. Kirk didn’t have the flip up communicator?
Microwave Oven: popcorn anyone?
The defeat of Nazi Germany, Tojo’s Japan and Communist Russia
All of this, and so much more that I don’t have time to list here.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone (especially those of who serving in this great nation’s armed forces – there are no group of people I have greater respect for).
Memorial superintendent admits giant crescent still present in memorial design
Memorial superintendent admits giant crescent still present in memorial design No comment from the Park Service yet on Congressman Tancredo’s request for a new Flight 93 Memorial. We did a little better with last week’s blogburst letters. Some emailers got a response from Memorial Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley, answering Mr. Tancredo’s contention that the original giant crescent is still present in the redesign. Interestingly, her description of the redesign actually admits that the giant crescent IS still present, both geometrically and thematically. In 2005, architect Paul Murdoch explained his original Crescent of Embrace design in terms of the flight path: as the hijacked airliner came over the ridgeline above the crash site, its flight path symbolically broke the circle, turning it into a giant crescent. In the original design, the broken off part of the circle was removed entirely:
Flight 93 came down from the Northwest (the upper left). The flight path breaks the circle at the upper crescent tip, says Paul Murdoch, then continues down to the crash site, which is located between the crescent tips (roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag). In describing the barely altered redesign, Superintendent Hanley uses the exact same “breaking the circle” language that Paul Murdoch used to describe the original design, only now the broken off part of the circle is not completely removed. A broken chunk of it remains, so that the design now includes “two breaks” instead of one:
The most prominent refinement was in the treatment of the naturally occurring bowl-shaped landscape feature. The design now surrounds that area with a circle of trees which is broken in two places – the location which marks the flight path as it breaks the circular continuity of the bowl edge, and the Sacred Ground where the crash occurred. The locations of the two breaks in the circle are based on the flight path and crash site of Flight 93.
The site plan graphic for the redesign was dramatically re-colored, making the crescent LOOK more like a circle. You have to examine closely to see that the original break in the crescent is still there, along with the new “second break.” But as Superintendent Hanley admits, the original break IS still there, and it is still intended to be seen as being there. Hanley is directly admitting what Congressman Tancredo is complaining about, that the original crescent has only been disguised. A side-by-side comparison of the Crescent of Embrace site-plan and the redesign site-plan confirms that the only change was to include a chunk of the symbolically broken off part of the imaginary full circle:
Ignoring the re-coloring of the image, the only change is the additional arc of trees to the left side of the crescent. (Click pic for larger view.) Including a chunk of the broken off part of the circle does nothing to remove the original crescent, but on the contrary is perfectly consistent with it, both geometrically and thematically. The terrorists are still depicted as breaking our humanitarian circle and turning it into a giant Islamic shaped crescent. Just to make sure people get it, Paul Murdoch has placed a huge glass block at the spot where this circle-breaking, crescent-creating feat takes place. It is the 44th translucent block emplaced along the flight path (matching the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists) and is inscribed: “a field of honor forever.” Earlier admissions that the redesign retains the crescent and star configuration of an Islamic flag An August 18th article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette quoted Superintendent Hanley denying the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent:
“The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site,” she said. Mr. Murdoch reinforced that idea. “It’s oriented toward the Sacred Ground,” he said. “It just couldn’t be clearer.” The symbolism of the memorial, he continued, is representative of the geography of the crash site, an idea that predates Islam or any other major religion.
They are not calling it a crescent and star configuration, but that is what they are describing, and what they are talking about here is the redesign. They are admitting that the design still has the arms of the crescent reaching out towards the crash site, which sits between the crescent tips, in the position of the star on an Islamic flag. “It just couldn’t be clearer.†Connect a line from the lower crescent tip to the thematic upper crescent tip (the 44th glass block, commemorating the spot where the flight path breaks the circle) and a perpendicular to this line (the direction of a person facing directly into the giant crescent) points exactly to Mecca. Thus does Paul Murdoch tie the Islamic features and the terrorist memorializing features of his design into a perfect bin Ladenist embrace. The 44th block defines the exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. Very simply, we hosted an open design competition in time of war. Of course the enemy would enter. The only thing that is hard to understand is why the Memorial Project is willfully blind to this ploy.
At first I thought this to be some “onionesque” form of satire. Surely this could not be true – but sadly it is. Political correctness has reached so far into people’s lives it is becoming downright ridiculous. It is beyond comprehension. Two versions of the story are floating, this one from SignOnSanDiego.com:
This year, there’s an Insanity Claus for Christmas
By Greg Gross
UNION-TRIBUNE BREAKING NEWS TEAM
2:50 p.m. November 15, 2007
SAN DIEGO – Ho ho. . . no?
It’s about as quintessentially Christmas as you can get, that jolly “ho ho ho!,†as universal a symbol of Santa Claus as his red suit and reindeer.
Until now.
A U.S.-based employment firm that provides department-store Santas throughout Australia has asked that they refrain from using “ho ho ho!†because it might offend women.
Santa trainees are being instructed to say “Ha ha ha!†instead.
Seriously.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney, which first broke the story, reported that at least some trainees were quitting in disgust.
A spokeswoman for Westaff, the Walnut Creek, Calif.-based employment firm whose Australian branch made the request of the Santa trainees at the request of an Australian store chain, said it only applies there.
The controversy over the term “ho†– a corrupted version of the word “whore†– began in the United States, where American rap/hip-hop artists spent years popularizing it as a generalized slang term characterizing women.
Since then, rap has gone global, and “ho†apparently has gone with it. The Aussie store chain apparently was concerned female customers might take Santa’s traditional laugh the wrong way.
So are feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women looking to pull St. Nick’s beard over this?
“Oh, no. . . or no no no, I should say,†said Latifa Lyles, NOW vice-president for membership in Washington, D.C. “We saw this and laughed.â€
A burst of mirth from a holiday figure hardly ranks with someone trying to verbally demean women, Lyles said.
“That’s a little literal,†she said, “just a tad.â€
Santa Claus banned from Ho Ho HoBy Renato Castello, Sue Hewitt and Andrea Burns
November 11, 2007 12:00am
Article from: Sunday Herald Sun
SANTAS working in shopping centres across Australia have been banned from bellowing “ho ho ho” because it might frighten children.
Recruitment firm Westaff, which supplies hundreds of Santas around the country, yesterday confirmed the edict.
Westaff national operations manager Glen Jansz said the company’s Santas had been urged to tone down their use of the “ho, ho, ho” phrase.
“The reason behind that is we find that in some cases the little kids can get a little bit scared of the deep ‘ho, ho, hos’ and we ask them to be mindful of keeping their voices to a lower level,” he said.
“And kids are probably more inclined to understand ‘ha, ha, ha’, than ‘ho, ho, ho’.”
Thirty trainees at a recent Santa course were instructed to replace the traditional Christmas greeting with “ha, ha, ha”.
A Santa veteran of 11 years told the Sunday Herald Sun the instructions were clear: “No ‘ho ho ho’.”
“We were told to say ‘ha ha ha Merry Christmas’,” he said.
Two Santa hopefuls reportedly left the course after the edict.
Family Council of Victoria spokesman Bill Muehlenberg described the ban as “nonsensical”.
“Potentially any big guy in a red suit with a white beard is scary but I don’t think him saying ‘ho ho ho’ would damage a child’s psyche.
“Let’s just concentrate on the kids having a good time.”
A survey of Melbourne children yesterday found universal support for Santa’s “ho ho ho”.
“It’s silly, we love hearing Santa’s laugh,” said Briony, 8, of Mitcham.
“It doesn’t frighten me at all. It’s what Santa is supposed to say,” said Byron, 9, of Melton.
Yesterday in the Bourke St Mall, Santas appeared to be ignoring orders to stop the ‘ho ho hos’.
David Jones’s bellowed to a delighted group of children and rival Myer’s Santa also kept up the jolly tradition.
Can anyone tell me what is so frightening to kids about “HO HO HO”? I just don’t get it. And are Aussies also supposed to come up with a different name for the garden implement that goes by the name ‘hoe’? Isn’t that offensive to the millions of female gardeners out there? Sheesh!
Support Tom Tancredo’s call to scrap the crescent memorial
The Park Service has a history of keeping the Secretary of the Interior in the dark about the decisions it makes in his name. It is likely that Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has never been told about the many warnings of Islamic symbolism in the planned Flight 93 Memorial. Please help bring Dirk into the loop by pasting the following letter (or one of your own) into an email for him. Text below the dotted line:
—————————————————
Dear Secretary Kempthorne:
Please heed Congressman Tom Tancredo’s call to completely scrap the present design for the Flight 93 Memorial. The original Crescent of Embrace design would have planted a bare naked crescent and star flag on the crash site:
The memorial plaza that sits roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic flag marks the crash site. (Click pics for larger images.)
All the redesign did was add some trees to the west of the original crescent:
Aside from the re-coloring of the site-plan image, the only actual change in the design is the additional arc of trees to the rear of a person facing into the original crescent.
The Park Service promised Congressman Tancredo in 2005 that Islamic iconography would be removed from the memorial. Instead, this iconography has only been very slightly disguised. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the redesign.
The giant crescent points to Mecca
In September 2005, a half dozen different bloggers verified that a person facing directly into the original Crescent of Embrace would be facing almost exactly at Mecca. That makes the crescent a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built.
Face into the crescent to face Mecca:
Left: mihrab from the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain. Right: Crescent of Embrace also faces Mecca. The green circle is from the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. When it is placed over the original Crescent of Embrace site plan, the Mecca-direction line (the “qibla”) almost exactly bisects the crescent.
You can plant as many trees around a mosque as you want and it will still be a mosque. But this isn’t just the world’s largest mosque. The planned memorial is also full of terrorist memorializing features.
Please hear my voice along with those of Congressman Tancredo and Tom Burnett Sr., who is refusing to allow Tom Jr.’s name to be used in the crescent design. The memorial to Flight 93 should not be a terrorist memorial mosque.
Sincerely
(Your name)
———————–
Secretary Kempthorne’s phone number is 202-208-7351.
Snail-mail: Hon. Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of Interior
Well, let’s just hope that this putz gets “the book” thrown at him. I’d personally like to see him get the maximum fine and prison time. Of course, with that much prison time, it is unlikely he would be able to pay the fine, but it would be nice for him to die in prison owing nearly $2 million in fines. But since he plead guilty instead of facing the music to a jury of his peers (or rather, normal folks like us), he is probably going to walk away with probably a few thousand dollar fine, and several years of probation only. The only way to get these people to stop stealing in this manner is to make the penalties of getting caught just not worth the crime.
John Schiefer, 26, agreed to plead guilty to four counts of fraud and wiretap charges that could lead to a $1.75 million fine and send him to prison for up to 60 years, the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s office said.
232 years ago today, the United States Marine Corps was founded. I wanted to just take a moment and wish all of our brave and honorable United States Marines a very heartfelt
Tancredo condemns continued use of giant crescent in Flight 93 Memorial
In September 2005, Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo said that he would not be happy so long as the Flight 93 Memorial still included the giant crescent. He has kept his promise. The crescent is still there, and Tom Tancredo is NOT HAPPY. Alec Rawls has just received from Representative Tancredo a letter of complaint that Mr. Tancredo sent to Park Service Director Mary Bomar this afternoon. It notes the continued presence of the crescent:
Unfortunately, it appears that little if any substantive changes to the most troubling aspect of the design – the crescent shape – have been made.
And it calls for scrapping the crescent design entire and starting anew:
And while I regret having to contact the Park Service again about this issue, I sincerely hope that you will direct the committee to scrap the crescent design entirely in favor of a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism.
Thank you Tom Tancredo! The full text of Mr. Tancredo’s letter is pasted below. G Gordon Liddy is on it Alec Rawls will be on G Gordon Liddy’s radio show tomorrow morning (Tuesday) from 11-12 EST, talking about the many Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned memorial. The show should be a blockbuster. Tom Burnett Sr. is going to call in. Tancredo may call in. And YOU can call in:
1 800 GGLiddy
Streaming audio and broadcast stations here. Podcasts here. For the full expose, see Alec’s Crescent of Betrayal book, available for free download until the print edition of the book comes out in February. A crescent and star flag on the crash site For those who are not familiar with the memorial debacle, the original Crescent of Embrace design would have planted a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag on the crash site:
Architect Paul Murdoch’s job is to work with symbols. He did not plant an Islamic flag on the crash site by accident. But even if this were somehow coincidence, it would still be wrong to build the memorial in a shape that the hijackers claimed as their own. Representative Tancredo was the only Congressman to state the obvious, that “the crescent’s prominent use as a symbol in Islam–and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists,” raises the possibility that “the design, if constructed, will in fact make the memorial a tribute to the hijackers.” (Tancredo Press release, 9/12/2005. See Crescent of Betrayal, download 1, page xiii.) Two days later, Tancredo’s press secretary laid out Tom’s conditions:
… that the congressman would be happy with the changes only if the crescent shape is removed.
Nothing was changed All the Memorial Project did was add some surrounding trees. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign. The crescent shape was NOT removed. It was only very slightly disguised:
The graphics were recolored, and a few trees were added outside of the mouth of the crescent (lower left). Every particle of the original crescent and star structure remains. (Click here for site plan view.) Representative Tancredo was right to demand removal of the crescent. It turns out that a person facing directly into the half mile wide crescent will be facing Mecca. That makes it a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built. You can plant as many trees around a mosque as you want and it will still be a mosque. This is the world’s largest mosque, by a factor of a hundred. If you want to thank Tom Tancredo for keeping his Flight 93 promise and standing up again for the honor of our murdered heroes, his phone numbers and online email form are here.
Full text of Representative Tancredo’s letter to Park Service Director Mary Bomar
November 5, 2007
The Honorable Mary A. Bomar
Director
National Park Service
U.S. Department of Interior
1849 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20240
Dear Director Bomar,
I am regrettably writing you in reference to the proposed memorial to commemorate the victims of Flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. As you may know, I contacted Director Mainella in late 2005 about my concerns with the design.
The appropriateness of the original design, dubbed the “Crescent of Embrace,†was questioned because of the crescent’s prominent use as a symbol in Islam – and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists. As I pointed out in my September 2005 letter, the use of the crescent has raised questions in some circles about whether the design would make the memorial a tribute to the hijackers rather than the victims whose mission the flights passengers helped to thwart.
When I received Director Mainella’s response to my letter on October 6, 2005, I was pleased to read her assurance that the advisory committee and the architect were amenable to “refinements in the design which will include negating any perceptions to the iconography.†I was also pleased to learn that the name of the memorial was to be changed.
Unfortunately, it appears that little if any substantive changes to the most troubling aspect of the design – the crescent shape – have been made. This deeply concerns me. As I told Director Mainella in 2005: Regardless of whether or not the invocation of a Muslim symbol by the memorial designer was intentional, I continue to believe that the use of this symbol is unsuitable for paying appropriate tribute to the heroes of Flight 93 or the ensuing American struggle against radical Islam that their historic last act has come to symbolize.
I remain committed to ensuring that this memorial is a powerful symbol for the whole nation and a testament to the courage and will of the passengers of the flight – as I am sure you are. And while I regret having to contact the Park Service again about this issue, I sincerely hope that you will direct the committee to scrap the crescent design entirely in favor of a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism.
Thank you in advance for your assistance.
Sincerely,
Tom Tancredo, M.C.
The phony redesign
To see clearly how the redesign leaves the original Mecca-oriented cescent fully intact, note that the orientation of the crescent is determined by connecting the most obtruding points of the crescent structure, then forming the perpendicular bisector to this line (red arrow):
The green circle shows the direction to Mecca (the “qibla” direction) from Somerset PA. It was generated using the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. Just place this qibla graphic over the original Crescent of Embrace site plan and the Mecca-direction line almost exactly bisects the crescent. Looking closely at the above graphic (click for larger image), you can see that the most obtruding tip at the bottom of the original crescent structure is the last red maple at the bottom. On top, the most obtruding tip of the crescent structure is the the end of the thousand foot long, fifty foot tall, Entry Portal Wall. Here is an artist’s rendering of the end of the Entry Portal Wall as seen in the Bowl of Embrace redesign. It shows how overtly this upper crescent tip remains intact in the redesign:
The redesign only added the extra row of trees on the left, behind the visitors in this graphic. Notice that these trees are not even visible to a person who is facing into the crescent. They do not even affect a visitor’s experience of the crescent, never mind affect the presence or integrity of the crescent itself.
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