The Bigsibling Blog

Senator Specter’s payoff for betraying his party: betrayal of his state

We now know one of the payoffs that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter received for being one of three Republican Senators who allowed President Obama’s trillion-dollar Spendulus bill to become law. WPXI in Pittsburgh reports that Specter has a 5.5 million dollar earmark for the crescent-shaped Flight 93 memorial in the omnibus spending bill just passed by the Senate.

Much as the people of Pennsylvania want to see a fitting memorial built, they yanked support for the crescent design in August 2007 after Tom Burnett Sr., father of Flight 93 hero Tom Jr., started warning the country that the memorial design is STILL packed to the gills with Islamic symbolism. Since that time the Memorial Project has hardly raised a dime, and a September 2007 interview with State Senator Jane Orie, who sponsors the Hearts of Steel memorial fund, makes clear that concerns about Islamic symbolism predominate. Here is her exchange with Pittsburgh talk-radio host Fred Honsberger:

Orie: "No matter who it is, and no matter where I went today for 9/11 events, everybody brought up this crescent. Whether it is intentional or not, it is disturbing to people."

Honsberger: "So everyone is bringing it up to you."

Orie: "Absolutely."

Orie is talking here about the so-called “redesign.” The people of Pennsylvania know that the giant crescent, which the redesign was supposed to remove, is still there. The Park Service calls it “Circle of Embrace” now, but the circle is still broken, and the unbroken part of the circle——what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11——remains exactly as it was in the original Crescent of Embrace (pictured above). Architect Paul Murdoch’s design is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

Pennsylvanians have voted with their pocketbooks to reject this memorial to the terrorists, but Arlen Specter is determined to cram it down their throats anyway, the same way he helped Obama cram a trillion dollars of socialist pork down America’s throat.

Specter knows better than any other politician not just that the giant Islamic-shaped crescent is still there, but that it points to Mecca

Our group was actually very hopeful back in 2007 that Senator Specter might put and end to the memorial debacle. After Mr. Burnett’s public appeal, Specter’s office wanted a briefing on the Islamic symbolism that we have found in the crescent design. One of our most knowledgeable people then spent 45 minutes with Stan Caldwell, Executive Director of Senator Specter’s Pittsburgh office, explaining in detail the Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism.

Caldwell had no trouble understanding our graphical proof that the giant crescent points almost exactly at Mecca:

A person standing between the tips of the Crescent of Embrace and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing within two degrees of the Muslim prayer direction (qibla), which is calculated as the great circle direction to Mecca. (Green qibla graphic produced by the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. Another calculator is available at QiblaLocator.com.)

Caldwell also had no trouble understanding that the giant crescent is still there. All the redesign did was place an extra arc of trees out behind the mouth of the crescent, an arc of trees that according to the Park Service’s own website explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle:

Animation starts with the bare naked Crescent of Embrace. The re-colored Circle of Embrace site plan is superimposed on top, then everything but the changes are removed. The only change is extra arc of trees (flashing) that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact.

Our man also explained the significance of the Mecca orientation: that it turns the giant Islamic-shaped crescent into a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The planned memorial is actually the world’s largest mosque, and Arlen Specter’s office is fully aware of it.

Do Specter and Caldwell have some explanation? The press will never ask, but we can:

DC Phone: 202-224-4254

DC Fax: 202-228-1229

Another Washington Post cover-up

Dan Eggen reports how Families of Flight 93 (an adjunct to the Memorial Project, representing only those families who are backing the crescent design) have been in Washington seeking federal money. He includes no mention of WHY the private fundraising effort has failed. But State Senator Orie’s discussion of her fundraising difficulties is not hard to find. Any reporter doing a story on the memorial’s fundraising problems would presumably start here:

The whole first page of search results is our blogburst post about Orie. (“Fundraising difficulties” yields the same result.)

Either Dan Eggen is completely incompetent, or the Post is taking sides, refusing to report the facts that don’t support the terrorist memorializing side.

Perhaps ombudsman Andrew Alexander should weigh in on this. The Post has NEVER reported on Mr. Burnett’s long battle to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic-shaped crescent atop his son’s grave. Mr. Burnett left a long comment on Dan Eggen’s article which Eggen simply ignored, along with private offers to talk.

So which is it Mr. Alexander? Is the Post incompetently ignorant of a controversy that has raged for years, or is it intentionally suppressing the facts about the giant Mecca-oriented crescent?

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Columnist Ralph Couey emails a clarification

Alec Rawls sends this update to last week’s post on the Flight 93 memorial, where columnist Ralph Couey was said to have described Tom Burnett Sr.’s objections to the crescent design as “hopeless intransigence.”

UPDATE: Columnist Ralph Couey emails a clarification

Mr. Couey insists that his reference to “hopeless intransigence” was not directed at Mr. Burnett’s opposition to the crescent design but “dealt solely with the parties involved in the land purchase.”

I’ll take his word for that. The way he sandwiched his mention of Mr. Burnett’s protest in between his comments about the land deal certainly made it look like he was drawing a parallel, which is how I interpreted him, but there have been plenty of times when my own writings have been open to readings that I did not intend. These things happen. Here is the relevant part of Mr. Couey’s column:

I have to admit that for awhile, I was worried. There was the uproar concerning the design, and the dispute over the land purchase seemed to be hopelessly mired in mutual intransigence.

In addition, I was concerned over the tendency of some Americans toward selective amnesia.

Would this thing drag on until public apathy buried the whole idea of a memorial?

As it turned out, my fears were largely groundless. The design issues have been settled, although there are voices, including Tom Burnett Sr. (father of Flight 93 passenger Tom Burnett Jr.), being raised in opposition.

And with the latest news about the land, it appears that even hopeless intransigence eventually can be bridged.

Given what still remains to be bridged (Mr. Burnett’s protest), and the forward looking sentence structure “eventually can be bridged,” I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to see a parallel being drawn between the end of the landowners opposition and a hoped for end to Mr. Burnett’s opposition. Indeed, this implied hope is hard to escape. Still, there is no reason to doubt that the resulting association of “hopeless intransigence” with Mr. Burnett was accidental, whereas I simply asserted that it had been made. I should have been clearer, and so should Mr. Couey.

In any case, how Mr. Couey’s refers to Tom Burnett’s opposition is a minor point. What the blogburst post focuses on is Mr. Couey’s apparent desire to see an end to that opposition, without any concern for whether our claims about the design are accurate or not. THAT is where Mr. Couey is untenable. If our claims are accurate (and it is easy to verify that they ARE accurate), then the crescent design is actually a memorial to the terrorists and it NEEDS to be opposed.

Thus our blogburst post goes to some length (in a pretty nice way I think), to urge Mr. Couey to please check a few facts before taking a stand. He says in his email that he prefers to defer to the families that are backing the crescent design. That is a nice sentiment, but it makes no sense. Why would he defer to ANYONE about very important matters of fact that he can check for himself in a few minutes?

The only reason for Couey to eschew the facts is if he doesn’t WANT to know the truth, which is how the Memorial Project got into this mess in the first place. The reason to point out the non-functionality of this truth-avoiding behavior is not make Mr. Couey look bad. It is to let him know about the opportunity he has to make himself look very good.

Couey can be a hero. He is in a great position to help stop a hijacking, if he will just look up from his presumptions for long enough to check a few facts. Who can turn down opportunity like that?

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