Monday, October 1, 2007

Flight 93 Memorial: There's a Bad Smell Here

I honestly don't know what to make of this.

The memorial for the passengers and crew of Flight 93, the airliner in the 9/11 attack which was brought down in a Pennsylvania field, has some extremely unusual features.

For starters, it involves a crescent of trees. In today's tolerant, sensitive, and multicultural America, I'm not very surprised.

It would be unthinkable for a memorial to victims of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, to involve a burning cross.

However, using a crescent as a major, even defining, element in a memorial to people who died as a result of an attack by Muslims, seems to be a non-issue.

I've run into a few blogs on this topic, like "Error Theory" don't seem on a cursory examination, to be the work of raving maniacs.

The Flight 93 memorial even seems to be aligned toward Mecca.

A memorial to people who died in an attack by jihadists using a huge Islamic symbol aligned toward Mecca seems to be carrying multiculturalism rather far.

What impresses as much as anything about these allegations is the remarkable degree to which traditional news media is ignoring a story involving explosive current events, the pathos of bereaved relatives, and astronomical/spiritual alignments.

Normally, the news seems to live juicy stories like that. It's like noticing paparazzi studiously ignoring a celebutant

I'm not a conspiracy theorist: but when a group of people stop acting the way they usually do, I start wondering why.

[UPDATE October 2, 2007. Thanks to American Interests, for the following URL: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/blog_9_8_05_1045.html ("IS THE "CRESCENT OF EMBRACE" AN OUTRAGE?" The first paragraph reads, "Perhaps I'm being oversensitive, but is anyone else struck by the fact that the design for the memorial unveiled yesterday in Pennsylvania to commemorate the crash of UAL Flight 93 on 9/11 bears a striking resemblance to one of the major symbols of Islam? Take a look:" with an overhead rendering of the proposed memorial design, as unveiled in 2005. This cluster of coincidences, or whatever it is, has been around for 2 years. This might be a good time for the rest of us to get interested: and maybe involvled.]
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2 comments:

Ottavio (Otto) Marasco said...

I know symbolism is important in memorials but this is odd to say the least. Is it generating any controversy over there? An Islamic crescent, a tower pointing in the direction of Mecca and 44 glass blocks on the flight path that appears to be directed at the White House. I mean really…Some may argue that we are all misinterpreting it but who could blame us. Said one news report on the matter, “Who would want to replace the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor with a Japanese flag”? “Who would place a Nazi swastika at Normandy”? Frankly, I am not happy with it, has tolerance gone too far?

See also: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/blog_9_8_05_1045.html

October 2, 2007 at 7:18 AM
Brian H. Gill said...

It's generating controversy, only in the sense that a few bloggers and at least one bereaved father have noticed the peculiarities, and discussed it publicly.

The crescent, and all the other details, could be a set of peculiar coincidences.

But there are a great many 'coincidences' here.

In my part of the country, believing that there isn't Islamic symbolism in that memorial design is a little like assuming that pile s of I-beams and corrugated metal just happened to get formed into a pole barn by accident.

The identification of the Flight 93 memorial as, in effect, the biggest mosque in America may be "misinterpretation," but I doubt it.

My own 'gut feeling' is that this is tolerance and multiculturalism run amok.

Aside from the possibility that an Islamic attack, conducted by Muslims, may be memorialized by building a King-Kong-size mosque, what concerns me about this is the monumentally low-key approach taken by every one of the tiny number of news articles on the matter.

And, thanks for the URL.

October 2, 2007 at 10:23 AM

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Note! Although I believe that these websites and blogs are useful resources for understanding the War on Terror, I do not necessarily agree with their opinions. 1 1 Given a recent misunderstanding of the phrase "useful resources," a clarification: I do not limit my reading to resources which support my views, or even to those which appear to be accurate. Reading opinions contrary to what I believed has been very useful at times: sometimes verifying my previous assumptions, sometimes encouraging me to change them.

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In short, It is my opinion that some of the resources in this blogroll are neither accurate, nor unbiased. I do, however, believe that they are useful in understanding the War on Terror, the many versions of Islam, terrorism, and related topics.