Newark Liberty Airport Kiss Blamed for Shutdown

Video cameras in Terminal C at Newark Liberty Airport show a man and woman embracing just before they separate and the woman enters the secure area. The man, not a passenger, then walks down a secure passageway - the wrong way. The woman lifts a rope intended to keep those who have not gone through security out, and those who have, in. The man ducks under and the two walk toward the boarding area and out of camera-view, holding hands. The man is seen on another security tape exiting the building. He has not been identified. Update 1-10-10 - The passenger is identified as Haisong Jiang. See details below.

Obviously, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was not where they should have been, or if they were, they were asleep or unconcerned. The TSA says an officer was not where he/she should have been.

The Newark Liberty International Airport is one of the busiest international airports in the country, was the departure point of the September 11, 2001 Flight 93 that went down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania - yet, apparently one absent TSA officer is all that stood between an unsecure person entering a secure area.

Update 1-10-10:
Haisong Jiang, 28, of Piscataway, New Jersey is identified as the passenger who shutdown the Newark Liberty airport to steal a kiss from his sweetie. Details here.

Related and Background:
Newark Liberty International Airport on Lockdown

Flight 93 Memorial Blogburst: Construction drawings released: Guess Where the Crescent Points.

The original Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 faced less than 2° from Mecca. That made it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed-arch shaped, but the classic mihrab is crescent shaped.)

The Park Service dismissed concern about the Mecca-oriented crescent on grounds that the construction drawings had not yet been finalized. “Those trees could move fifty feet, or three hundred feet,” said Project Manager Jeff Reinbold in the Spring of 2006, as if this kind of "tweaking" would make any difference (Crescent of Betrayal Ch.8 p.145-6).

The construction drawings have now been released, and yes, they moved the lower tip of the half-mile wide crescent about 300 feet, enough to change the orientation of the crescent by about 4.5°. Instead of pointing less than 2° north of Mecca, the giant Islamic-shaped crescent now points less than 3° south of Mecca.

Here is the original Crescent of Embrace:

"Qibla" is the direction to Mecca, which you can verify using any online Mecca-direction calculator (just type in Somerset PA). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) would be facing 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°.

Here is one of the new construction drawings:



Instead of facing a titch north of Mecca, the giant crescent now faces a titch south of Mecca (2.7° south ± 0.1°).

As with the original Crescent design, the upper crescent tip is the end of the 50’ tall Entry Portal Wall and the lower crescent tip is the last of the 50’ tall Maple trees on the bottom. The landscape overlays make the details hard to see in the thumbnail image above, but at full resolution they are fully legible. (Copy of source PDF, without the superimposed orientations lines here. Large file warning. Graphic is on p. 30 of 233.)

The Park Service was SUPPOSED to remove the Islamic symbol shapes

When architect Paul Murdoch’s winning Crescent of Embrace design was announced in September 2005, it appeared to show a bare naked Islamic crescent and star-flag planted atop the crash site:



Burned by the resulting firestorm of protest, the Park Service to agreed to get rid of the Islamic symbol shapes, but they never did. They added an extra arc of trees, and they call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent.

This is explained on the Park Service's own website, where the extra arc of trees is explicitly described as a broken off part of the circle:

In summary, the memorial is shaped in a circular fashion, and the circle is symbolically "broken" or missing trees in two places, depicting the flight path of the plane, and the crash site.

Those two breaks are the two ends of the extra arc of trees:



The extra arc of trees extends from blue circle to blue circle, marking the two “breaks” in the circle referred to in the Park Service’s official explanation of the broken-circle design. One is where the flight path breaks the circle (left), the other is near the crash site (center).

What is symbolically left standing (the unbroken part of the circle) is just this:



Remove the symbolically broken off parts, and you get the original Crescent of Embrace design.

The only change is that the crescent has now been rotated clockwise a few degrees. In the construction plans it faces slightly south of Mecca instead of slightly north of Mecca. For a parallel, imagine airline security discovering a terror bomber, then playing with the fit his suicide vest before escorting him to his plane.

They said they were going to remove the giant crescent. They claim they HAVE removed it, but they haven't. Symbolically, the design remains completely unchanged. The terrorists are still depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.


The giant crescent is actually a mihrab

Here is the mihrab at the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just like the crescent memorial to Flight 93:



Confronted with evidence that the Crescent of Embrace is actually designed to be the world's largest mosque, the Park Service sought advice from a pair of Muslim scholars. Both acknowledged the almost exact Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent and both offered overtly dishonest excuses for it. One said not to worry about the likeness to an Islamic mihrab because no one has ever seen a mihrab this BIG before:

...most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience.

Right. That's why everybody scratches their head at Mt. Rushmore. No one has ever seen Abraham Lincoln so BIG before. They just can't figure it out.

To be fooled by this excuse, you have to really really want to be fooled. The other Muslim scholar said not to worry, the crescent cannot be seen as mihrab unless it points exactly at the Kaaba:

Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

In fact, a mihrab does NOT have to point exactly at Mecca, for the simple reason that, throughout most of Islamic history, Muslims in far-flung parts of the world had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. As a result, it was established as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca. This was recently affirmed by Saudi religious authorities, after Meccans realized that even most of their local mosques do not face directly towards the Kaaba. “It does not affect the prayers” assured the Islamic Affairs Ministry.

Faced with evidence of an Islamic plot, why would the Park Service send this evidence exclusively to Muslims for appraisal? Have they forgotten who attacked us on 9/11?

The Service has long since been apprised of the patent dishonesties retailed by its two Muslim advisors but they don't care. They wanted to be lied to, they knew where to go to be lied to, and they got what they wanted.


Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey

So where are the patriotic stalwarts like Michelle Malkin whose objections were instrumental in getting the Park Service to agree to remove the Islamic symbol shapes in the first place? If they knew in 2005 that the symbolic outcome of 9/11 should not be a giant Islamic shaped crescent why are they silent about this exact same symbolism today, after THEY were promised that this perversion would be removed?

Ed Morrissey urged his readers "to tell the National Parks Service and the Secretary of the Interior to rethink their plans," promising for his own part that "as long as that crescent remains in the design, I’m not donating a red cent to the memorial." Well Ed, the crescent does remain in the design, so please rejoin the fight.

The desertion of Malkin et. al. makes a difficult gap to fill, but we had better fill it, or the Flight 93 crash-site will soon be home to the world’s largest mosque.

To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

Flight 93 Blogburst: Everyone Knows Crescent Points to Mecca

There is little I can add about the Flight 93 blogbursts and the information at Alec Rawls sends our way, except to say this man is dedicated to making absolutely certain that the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, PA in no way memorializes the terrorist on board with heroes of Flt. 93 took the plane down. If you do not know the circumstances behind the design of the Memorial, please send some time at the Error Theory Blog. The information you'll find there will jar your soul.

In 2007, Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird told Alec Rawls (the author of these blogburst posts) that everyone at the meetings he attended is fully aware that the giant crescent, originally named the Crescent of Embrace, really does point almost exactly at Mecca. Professor Baird says they all just assume (himself included) that the Mecca orientation must be an innocent coincidence. Pretty crazy, when they have also been told the meaning of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca. Every mosque is built around a Mecca-direction indicator called a mihrab, and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Geometrically, the Crescent of Embrace is the world’s largest mihrab. However honestly Project Partners believe that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence, this is not what they tell the public. When reporters asked Memorial Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley about the Mecca orientation, she denied it:

"The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site," she said.

Thinking that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence in no way justifies lying to the public about this explosive information. If Baird’s account is accurate—that the dozens of Memorial Project Partners all know that the giant crescent actually does point to Mecca—then the Memorial Project has a lot of explaining to do. Now an overlooked article from 2007 corroborates Professor Baird’s information. Dr. Glenn Kashurba It turns out that a Pennsylvania psychiatrist who has been intimately involved with the memorialization of Flight 93 (writing two books on the subject) argued to a reporter before the July 2007 Memorial Project meeting that the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent (which he took as a given) should be seen as coincidental:

“When you calculate angles to Mecca - I'm going to be in Washington, D.C., this week, and I'm sure if I calculate angles of the monuments, at least one points to Mecca,” Kashurba said. “I don't know if it will be the White House or the Lincoln Memorial, but at least one will. People looking for a way to support their way of looking at things will look at this in this way for ever and ever.”

If Dr. Kashurba was getting his information from the Memorial Project’s public statements, he would have denied that the crescent points to Mecca. Here is what Memorial Project Partner Patrick White told the press 9 days before the Kashurba story:

Rawls, of Palo Alto, Calif., contends that the centerpiece of the design points toward Mecca. 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.”

Kashurba knew better, as did Patrick White himself. The week after his public denial, a local woman asked White how he could be okay with the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. This time White did not deny the Mecca orientation, but argued that it cannot be seen as honoring Islam because the inexactness of the Mecca orientation would be "disrespectful" to Islam. Mecca orientation takes literally 2 minutes to verify, starting from source documents It is not surprising that these Memorial Project insiders would know that the giant crescent does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (1.8° north of Mecca to be precise, ± 0.1°). After all, they had by the summer of 2007 been examining Rawls’ report, and answering questions from the press about it, for over a year, and the near Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is trivially easy to verify. Just use any of the online Islamic prayer-direction calculators to print out the direction to Mecca from Somerset PA. Place this graphic over the Crescent site-plan on your computer screen, and you will see that the Mecca-direction line (which Muslims call “qibla”) almost exactly bisects the crescent: The green circle in this image is from the qibla calculator at Islam.com (down at the moment, but you can use the one at Qibla.com, or QiblaLocator.com). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca. Patrick White knows this and deceives the press and the public about it. Dr. Kashurba knows it and stands by as White and others deceive the press and the public about it. These deceptions have been blatant. Everything points to Mecca? The Project even went to far as to dig up an academic fraud from Texas, willing to deny that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round.

Was the reporter embarrassed to ask Muslims if they can really face any direction to face Mecca? Hard to blame her. Just to ask such a stupid question is to answer it, but the obviousness of the fraud is no excuse for letting it stand. According to Professor Baird, every Memorial Project member who saw these denials knew that they were fraudulent, yet not one of them has tried to tell the public about the Project’s dishonest cover-up. When the truth does get out to the broader public, Project members are going to have a lot to answer for, which is presumably why they are keeping their mouths shut now. They have done a very bad thing and they don’t want it exposed. What proves Islamic intent is the architect’s elaborate repetition of the Mecca orientation No one ever claimed that the almost exact Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace proves Islamic intent. Architect Paul Murdoch proves intent in a different way: by elaborate repetition of his Mecca orientations. His first confirmation of intent is to include an exact Mecca orientation. In Murdoch’s explanation, the flight path breaks the circle, turning it into the giant crescent. To find this thematically defined crescent, remove those parts of the full Crescent of Embrace that extend out past the point where the flight path breaks the circle. The resulting true or thematic crescent points EXACTLY at Mecca: At the upper tip of the crescent, the flight path comes down from the NNE and symbolically breaks the circle. What symbolically remains standing is the true or thematic Crescent of Embrace, pointing exactly at Mecca. Murdoch’s next confirmation of intent is to exactly repeat this entire multi-Mecca oriented geometry in the vast array of crescents of trees that surround the Tower of Voices part of the memorial. Setting aside the chance that an architect could in the first place design a memorial to Flight 93 out of nothing but crescents just by innocent coincidence (which must be close to zero), the odds that these crescents would by random chance manifest Murdoch’s repeated Mecca orientations are 1 in 131 billion: The only change was to include an explicitly broken off part of the circle The original Crescent of Embrace design included the symbolically broken off parts at the upper crescent tip. When the bare naked Islamic-crescent shape caused a public uproar, the Memorial Project added another broken off part of the circle, floating out in front of the mouth of the original crescent. They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, the symbolic result of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. That makes it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

Flight 93 Blogburst: Moral Muslims don't want a memorial to the terrorists on the Flight 93 crash site

by Findalis Thanks to Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims against Sharia--Islamic Reform Movement, for his press release in support of Tom Burnett Sr.'s efforts to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent atop his son's grave. Islamic Reform Movement is clear eyed on the problem:

We all know who the enemy is. It's Islamic radicals who are guided by the ideology of Islamic supremacy. Just as Nazis were guided by the ideology ofAryan supremacy. The only difference is that Gihadis consider it their religious duty to impose Islam all over the world and many of them yearn to die (and kill) for Allah. They use lines from the Koran such as "kill them [infidels] wherever you find them" or "slay the idolaters wherever you find them" as their guiding principles.

Islam needs to be reformed so that it rejects supremacism and violent conquest, but trying reform Islam is a difficult and dangerous business:

Islamic radicals murder more Muslims than Christians, Jews, Hindus and everybody else combined. Jihadis may hate you for being infidels. But they really hate us for not following their demented dogma.

In this struggle for the soul of Islam, the last thing that moral Muslims want is any kind of victory for the supremacists, never mind a mind-boggling symbolic victory over the heroes of Flight 93:

What possible reason could be there for including anything Islamic or anything even resembling an Islamic symbol into Flight 93 Memorial? Inclusion of Islamic symbols memorializes murderers who brought down the plane and is tantamount to spitting in the faces of victims and their families. United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked in 2001. Let's not allow hijacking of Flight 93 Memorial in 2008.

Muslims know all about facing Mecca for prayer

One of the difficulties in getting people to understand the significance of the Mecca-orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is that it all seems so esoteric, and if it is esoteric, how important can it be? Witness Allahpundit, who as Michelle Malkin's pointman on this issue ought to be one of our strongest allies. Instead, he dismisses all concern about Islamic symbolism (effectively dismissing Michelle's original concern about the giant crescent, which remains completely intact in the "broken circle" redesign), on the grounds that: "if you need a protractor to properly express your outrage, you've probably gone too far." We don't need a protractor to express our outrage. We need a protractor to explain what architect Paul Murdoch did. He built the world's largest mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial will be the world's largest mosque by a factor of a hundred. The gigantic Sacred Mosque in Mecca would fit four times over inside Murdoch's 3000 foot wide crescent, which is just the centerpiece of Murdoch's mosque. Orientation on Mecca is THE central symbol of Islam, together with the crescent shape. Unlike Allahpundit, Khalim knows these things:

The shape of the "broken circle" resembles a crescent moon. So does the shape of the tower. Crescent moon is the most recognizable Islamic symbol. When we pray, we face Mecca and Mosques are traditionally built to face Mecca. The case could be made that the proposed design is aligned in North-Easterly direction, which corresponds with Qiblah, a direction to Mecca. Conventional wisdom would dictate that since Mecca is located to the South-East of Somerset, Qiblah cannot possibly have a North-Easterly direction. This assumption would be correct if you're using a flat map. However, if you take a globe, place pins on locations of Somerset and Mecca, and connect those pins with a string, you'll see that the string at the base of the Somerset pin points North-East. This symbolism may not be noticeable to a non-Muslim, and it is also possible, but likely improbable that the designer is ignorant of its significance. The proposed design would be perfect for EgyptAir 990 memorial. But for United 93 memorial, it is simply unacceptable.

Allahpundit is just being careless, but the willful blindness of the Park Service is foundational

The Memorial Project is committed to the idea that Islam was also hijacked on 9/11. To them, blaming Islam would be as bad as blaming the hijacked passengers and crew. Thus the possibility of hostile Islamic intent cannot be contemplated, no matter how high the "coincidences" pile. According to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird, the Memorial Project participants all know that the Crescent of Embrace does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (despite the Memorial Project's many public denials). They just assume it has to be a coincidence, just as they assume it is a coincidence that the Sacred Ground Plaza sits almost exactly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent-and-star flag. (Both of these almost-exact Islamic symbol shapes also contain exact Islamic symbol shapes. Remove the symbolically broken-off parts of the giant crescent and what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11 is a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. In the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag is a separate upper section of Memorial Wall, centered on the center line of the giant crescent, that will be inscribed with the 9/11 date.) Backers of the crescent design chose it specifically as a symbol of healing and outreach, implicitly to the Islamic world. Having been so generous to Islam, they just can't believe that a hidden al Qaeda sympathizer could be so ungenerous as to take advantage of their outreach by sneaking a memorial to the terrorists past their noses. They just can't believe that anyone could actually want to hijack Flight 93! This refusal to acknowledge evidence of hostile Islamic intent stabs at the heart of what Islamic reformers like Khalim are trying to accomplish.

How to distinguish a moral Muslim from an Islamic supremacist

Being knowledgeable about Islam, moral Muslims recognize (as bin Laden's followers do) that Osama bin Laden is a perfectly orthodox Wahabbist, using traditional means of violence and deception to pursue the traditional Islamic objective of world domination. The difference is that moral Muslims reject the totalitarian methods and objectives of established Islam. Moral Muslims recognize that traditional Islamic orthodoxy needs to be reformed. Textually, the opportunities for reform are very propitious. The Koran contains both sweeping calls to violence (9.05, 9.29) , and sweeping calls for tolerance (2.256, 109). To turn these diverse commands into a religion of violent conquest, every major school of Islamic interpretation, both Sunni and Shiite, considers the peaceful verses of the Koran to be expunged via the doctrine of "abrogation." Where different verses can be seen to contradict each other, the doctrine of abrogation holds the earlier verses to be abrogated and replaced by the later verses. The peaceful verses are all early verses, so as far as traditional Islam is concerned, they don't even exist, except as a device for deceiving infidels into believing that Islam is a "religion of peace." This doctrine of abrogation flies in the face of the Koran's own insistence that it contains no contradictions (4.82), and that nothing is abrogated (2.106). Textually, traditional Islam does not have a leg to stand on, but anyone who points it out is subject to the traditional Sharia death penalty for blasphemy. Alternatively, in a Wahabbist specialty called "taking takfir," such heretical interpretations constitute apostasy, another death penalty crime in every major school of Islamic interpretation. The Koran repeats dozens of times over that those who forget the words of Moses will burn in Hell forever (e.g. 2.75, 3.187, 5.13, 13.25, 15.90, 16.63). This is repeated so many times because it is Muhammad's accusation against the Jews: that they twist the "allegorical parts" of the Torah (3.07). But the LEAST allegorical part of the Torah is the Ten Commandments. Thus according to the Koran, the 6th Commandment--Thou shalt not murder--is binding on Muslims. Murder is any killing that is not in defense against either a violent attack or a conspiracy to violent attack, and there is no clearer case of murder than the traditional Islamic death penalty for apostates, who only want to go their own way. The same goes for blasphemy. To kill someone for challenging doctrine is MURDER. If the Koran really is the word of God, then every traditional Muslim in the entire world who supports established Sharia law is "wood for the fire." Whether Islamic reformers are out to save the lives of those who would be murdered, or out to save the souls of the murderers, they are engaged in a great contest with perhaps the greatest evil the world has ever known: a RELIGION of evil. All they need to do to win is expose the truth: that traditional Islam is in systematic violation of the Koran's own most fundamental commandments, yet to expose this truth they must break through the teeth of traditional Islam's strength: its totalitarian repression of dissent. In short, all they have to do is bring truth to the most psychologically brutalized people in the history of the planet. What could be worse, in a battle like this, than to see the land of liberty--the great haven from which truth can be spoken--build a gigantic terrorist-memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site?

No helping hand from the land of the free

If this willful blindness prevails, it will be a clear signal that in the battle to wrest Islam from the grasp of evil, America will not help. By following the morally blind idea that goodwill to Islam means having a see-no-evil attitude toward Islam, America is refusing to witness what moral Muslims are trying to expose: that the worst evils--condemned to the fire many times over by the Koran itself--thrive at the heart of Islamic institutions. That evil heart is what throbs, a half-mile across, in the crescent memorial to Flight 93, and the refusal of our own Park Service, fully alert to all the facts, to witness this evil is the worst possible betrayal, not just of America, but of the good people in the Islamic world as well. A see-no-evil attitude towards Islam is NOT goodwill. It emboldens the worst in Islam at the expense of the best. To help the good against the bad, we have to distinguish the good from the bad. The good are those who are trying to reform Islam. The bad are those who pretend that traditional Islam orthodoxy is already peaceful, and deny that reform is necessary. Muslims against Sharia has a facebook group, if anyone wants to join. Check out the Islamic Reform Movement website here. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

Flight 93 Blogburst: Crescent Video, Part 2

"The terrorist memorializing features all point to each other" Crescent video, Part 2, set to everybody's favorite gunslinger music: If you have a fast connection, there is a high quality viewing option at the lower right of the viewing screen here. Part 1 focused on the blatant Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial, and on Tom Burnett's efforts to stop this desecration of his son's grave. Part 2 is about the terrorist memorializing features. On first examination, the Islamic symbol shapes in the Flight 93 memorial are found to be slightly imprecise:

The giant crescent does not point quite exactly at Mecca. The Sacred Ground Plaza that sits roughly in the position of the star on a crescent and star flag does not sit exactly in the position of an Islamic star.

But additional features turn these imprecise Islamic shapes into precise Islamic symbol shapes:

Inside the Sacred Ground Plaza sits a separate section of Memorial Wall, inscribed with the 9/11 date, that IS placed in the exact position of an Islamic star. Remove the symbolically "broken off" parts of the crescent of Embrace (now called a broken circle) and the remaining crescent structure--what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11--points EXACTLY at Mecca.

To find these additional features, just follow the terrorist brick road: the 44 inscribed translucent memorial blocks on the flight path (matching the number of passengers, crew, AND TERRORISTS). No need to have seen Part 1 before seeing Part 2. All of the parts of this video series will stand on their own, with only a small amount of overlap. There is a brief review of the Mecca orientation, because that is what leads to the discovery of the 44 blocks, but the blocks then lead to this whole further array of terrorist memorializing features. If there is a group that you want to show this to--conservative campus group, church group, poker group, or just a little half-time patriotism--ask Alec Rawls about getting the video in full resolution, or in television viewing format. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url. Blogroll 1389 Blog - Antijihadist Tech A Defending Crusader A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever A Liberal's Worst Nightmare ACT Golden Gate Al Salibiyyah All American Blogger Almost Midnight in the West American Commentaries And Rightly So Anne Arundel Maryland Politics apocryphal EVIDENCE ! ARRA News Service Atlas Shrugs Battle Dress U Because I'm Right Best Destiny Big Dog's Weblog Big Sibling blogito, ergo, sum Boston Maggie Cao2's Weblog Cao's Blog Chaotic Synaptic Activity Chester Street Chicago Ray Christmas Ghost Clay Ritter Clay's Rants and Musings Colonel Robert Neville Always Dresses for Dinner Common Sense Junction Concrete Bob Covertress Creeping Sharia DC Protest Warrior Democrat = Socialist Dr. Bulldog and Ronin Error Theory EW1’s Intercept Log Faultline USA Flanders Fields Flopping Aces Four Pointer Francase Place Freedom's Enemies From My Position On the Way! Ft. Hard Knox Garbanzo Toons General Rachel's weblog GM's Corner Green Country Values Gunservatively Haid Dasalami Hoosier Army Mom Ironic Surrealism II Ivy League Conservatives Jack Lewis Jihad Press Jim-Rose - the Libertarian Popinjay Judge Right Just Barking Mad kae's bloodnut blog Kender's Musings Lemur King's Folly Maggie's Notebook MELAMPUS'S MENAGERIE!!!! Miss Beth's Victory Dance Monkey in the Middle Muslims Against Sharia My Own Thoughts Neoconstant Nice Deb No Apology No Compromises When It Comes To Being Right! Not A Sheep Ogre's Politics and Views Papa Mike's blog Part-Time Pundit Political Islam Protest The Church Protest The Left Publius' Forum Rayra.net Republican Attack Machine Right on the Right Right Truth Ron's Musings Rosemary's Thoughts Seattle Express Sharia Finance Watch Shot in the Dark Smooth Stone Space 4 Commerce by Brian Dunbar Stix Blog Stop the ACLU Teen Pundit the Avid Editor The Conservative Guy The Gadfly The Great Lie of Islam The Grid The Hinge of Fate The Loyal Eagles The Midnight Sun The Mountain The Paradigm Shift The Political Octagon The Renaissance Biologist The Sanity Sentinel The Sisyphus Files The Strata-Sphere The Truth of Islam The View From the Turret The Wide Awakes Thunder Run Tizona's Weblog Tough Girl 101 United Conservatives War of 2 Worlds We Have Some Planes Yes, but can I dance to it?

Flight 93 Memorial: What if it Really is an Islamic Symbol?

I am a recent participant in the Flight 93 Memorial blogbursts. United Flight 93 crashed into a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. It was the fourth passenger jet to go down, first the two World Trade Towers were hit, then the Pentagon and then the field in Shanksville. Controversy and emotion have tracked this Memorial design. Some feel the design includes significant Islamic symbolism. The hijackers were Islamic terrorists. If I understand correctly, with the exception of one family, all other families currently believe the Memorial plans are a fitting tribute to their loved ones (although there were additional dissenters earlier on). So why would one family feel passionately that their son will be buried at the foot of an Islamic Mosque paying tribute to the 9/11 hijackers? Is it even reasonable to believe that this family has valid objections to the design? (See the video of Tom Burnett at the end of this post). That question, and two others are the reason for this post. Why would the architect, chosen out of some 1500 designs, include Islamic symbolism, and if there is any doubt about its presence, why would the plan not be scrapped in favor of a plan that clearly does not include such symbolism? The following is a list of seemingly verifiable facts. If it is assumed the following are correct, and there are links within the post, and at the end, for your own research, are we just assuming this is coincidence? Are we just assuming that the dissenters are theory or truther conspiracists? Are we just choosing to ignore what we see? Are we just ignoring what we know? According to Alec Rawls, at Error Theory, who has done the huge work of explaining and verifying his claims, the Memorial Project [U.S. Parks] admits to the following:

...that the Mecca orientation claim is accurate. They know that ALL of our factual claims are accurate and admit it in private conversation, but have decided that the very outlandishness of all somehow implies that it has to be a coincidence.

Here's the pertinent, culled-through list from my perspective: 1) The Memorial site is filled with "crescents." The architect first named the Memorial the Crescent of Embrace. The name has now been changed to the Circle of Embrace. The architect, Paul Murdoch, says that he subsequently changed the design from a crescent to a circle by adding trees to fill in the gap and close the circle. The links I've provided below, and the discussion by Alec Rawls, shows clearly that trees were added, but they do not close the crescent assuming Mr. Rawls' evidence is correct. From Alec Rawls on the "broken circle":

The Memorial Project claims to have an innocent explanation for why the central feature of the Flight 93 memorial is a giant Islamic shaped crescent. As architect Paul Murdoch has been saying since September 2005, the flight path breaks the circle, turning it into what was originally called the Crescent of Embrace. But this isn't a memorial to an airliner. It is a memorial to human beings. So just who is it that architect Paul Murdoch is depicting as breaking the circle? As a secular symbol, the circle signifies peace and harmony. There is no way that the heroic passengers and crew can be charged with breaking the circle. It is the terrorists who broke the peace. Think what that means thematically. The terrorists broke our peaceful circle and turned it into a giant Islamic shaped crescent that just happens to point to Mecca. You could not come up with a more blatant depiction of al Qaeda victory.

2) The Crescent of trees is an arc to be filled with red maple trees. The crescent is in the exact shape of the Islamic crescent and star. The "Sacred Ground" within the Memorial is in the exact place of the Islamic star. The Tower of Voices is also in the shape of a crescent. It is also a "year round accurate Islamic sundial." The short story of this confusing detail is that the dial's shadow falls perfectly for Islamic afternoon prayers - the same as the shadow of the Tower of Voices. The Tower of Voices is also in the shape of a crescent.

The symbolic lives of the forty heroes literally dangle [wind chimes] down below the symbolic Islamic heavens, projected against the sky above. Not a lot of different possible meanings here.

Dissenters see this as symbolic "damnation" - the infidel passengers dangling forever below an Islamic heaven. 3) There are two Memorial tree groves. Both contain nineteen nested crescents, for a total of thirty-eight nested crescents. Why thirty-eight, when the Memorial advertised forty groves. There were forty heroes that day and a total of nineteen hijackers. The plans clearly show two clusters of nineteen nested crescents. 4) If the orientation of the Crescent/Circle of Embrace were coincidentally and unintentionally oriented toward the spiritual center of Islam, as the architect asserts, wouldn't we want it changed?

The exact direction to Mecca from the crash-site (about ten miles east of Somerset) is 55.19° clockwise from north. Thus the Crescent of Embrace is oriented about 1.8° north of the exact Mecca line.

Advocates for the design say that to be Islamic, the center of the crescent must be exactly pointing to Mecca, not 1.8 degrees off, but Rawls offers example of other Mosques oriented at varying degrees off of dead center. 5) There are forty-four translucent memorial blocks, forty of which are inscribed with the name of a passenger. There were forty passengers and crew and four terrorists. Forty of the inscribed blocks are positioned below the Islamic star - "symbolically cast out of the symbolic Islamic heavens," ...implying damnation. Three blocks are inscribed with 911 and placed in the Sacred Ground area (where the star is located in the Islamic crescent and star symbol), and one at the upper crescent tip. According to dissenters, the extra four blocks are located withing the Islamic heavens. If the Memorial actually memorialized the forty heroes, it could not be a mosque, as Islam believes all non-Islamics to be infidels. Adding four additional blocks and placing only the four "within the Islamic heavens," places the Muslim above the damned infidels. The three blocks inscribed with 911 will be on a section of the Memorial Wall, centered on the bisector of the crescent, which is the exact position of the star on an Islamic flag, set in the exact position of the star on the Islamic crescent and star flag. 6) The central feature of a mosque is a "crescent." The crescent is faced-into at prayer time. A visitor to the Memorial, when facing into the Crescent of Embrace, is facing toward Mecca, whether they want to or not. 7) In a mosque, the crescent is know as a "mihrab." The "mihrab" is similar in meaning to a Muslim worshipper, as the alter is to a Christian worshipper.

In 1981, Ayatollah Khomeini explained the meaning of a Mecca-direction indicator (called a mihrab), like the one now being planted on the Flight 93 crash site:

Mehrab means the place of war, the place of fighting. Out of the mehrabs, wars should proceed, just as all the wars of Islam used to proceeded out of the mehrabs. [Hat tip Yoel Natan, Moon-o-theism, p. 30]

The I-ah-told-you-so wasn't just speaking allegorically either. The University of Chicago's Francis Joseph Steinglass Comprehensive Persian-English dictionary lists amongst its definitions for mihrab: "warlike," and "a field of battle." (Hat tip Czechmade.)

Why would the architect, Paul Murdoch, wanted to introduce Islamic symbolism into the design, if he did do so? The Flight 93 Memorial Project consulted experts on the question of Islamic symbolism. It seems from my reading of the report that Rawl's mathematical arguments are correct but that Rawls is not considering the landscape of the crash site - which is a crescent-shape. Nassar Rabbat, who graduated UCLA in 1984 and was a classmate of Robert Murdoch, scoffed at the idea of any Islamic symbolism. You can read his comments here, along with those of the other experts. Dr. Rabbat makes several statements that have been disputed by Alec Rawls, such as the crescent and star are not often used in Islam, Mosques are not in the shape of an arc, etc. Rawls' Error Theory blog discusses this at length.

A check of Rabbat's background shows that he was a classmate of Paul Murdoch, both getting masters degrees in architecture from UCLA in 1984 and both doing their masters work on Middle Eastern subjects. Murdoch wrote a “masters project” titled: “A museum for Haifa, Israel.” Rabbat did a masters thesis titled: “House-form, climactic response and lifestyle: a study of the 17-19th century courthouse houses in Cairo and Damascus.” This connection between Murdoch and Rabbat raises the possibility that Murdoch himself orchestrated the Park Service investigation into warnings about his own design. Rabbat denies knowing Murdoch, but given the blatant dishonesty of what he told the Park Service, that denial cannot be trusted.

One of the experts, Dr. Kevin Jacques of Indiana University School of Law "sponsored a forum on the likely legal fallout from the attacks: consequences for immigration law, civil rights, etcetera. As the university’s resident expert on Islamic (sharia) law, Jaques was invited to say something about our looming engagement with the Islamic world and their systems of law. He chose to write a prescriptive article, urging the United States to frame its response in conformity with traditional sharia requirements:"

In formulating an American response to the acts of terror, it is necessary to define them according to the provisions of Islamic law.

So, is it possible that there's far too many connections to Islam? Is it possible that Rabbat and Murdoch conspired to come up with a design that actually honors Islam and shows Islam as victorious over the infidels? Well that's the short story. I'm not in a position to prove anything, but it I find it hard to believe that the Project will go ahead with this design, although that appears to be exactly what is going to happen if we cannot get the media interested, or Congress interested in investigating. I know the families are exhausted with emotion and weary of the controversy. Maybe it's just easier to get it over with, but after it is all over with, won't these families go to bed at night wondering if Alec Rawls is right? What if he is right? Why would we as a Nation take that risk. A Flight 93 family member was quoted in the New York Times as saying:

The land speaks for itself,” she said. “It’s in the shape of an embrace.”

Were all of the designs submitted in a crescent shape; were other architects restricted to only a crescent design because of the lay of the land? Sources: When looking for the chronological story of the Flight 93 Memorial, I like to use Cao's Blog as a chronological database. Or...the real authority on the Memorial - Alec Rawls at Error Theory Blog documents everything. Check out the links in his sidebar. Rawls has also written a book, Crescent of Betrayal. A link is available at Error Theory Blog and the download is free until the 2009 print date. Pertinent links from the above discussion: A statement from Muslims Against Sharia Families Divided A video put together by Muslims Against Sharia Is this a "truther" or "theory" conspiracy? The Sacred Ground To close, here's a video of Tom Burnett, Sr., the father of Flight 93 passenger, Tom Burnett. The video is featured in the latest blogburst. Listening to Mr. Burnett, a retired school teacher, makes me wonder if I could stand up under this battle. Mr. Burnett and Mr. Rawls are true heroes. Here's the question again: what if Alec Rawls and Tom Burnett are right?