Burnett Radio Interview about 9/11 and the Flight 93 Memorial

 

Tom Burnett Sr. and his wife Beverly did some 9/11 interviews the last couple of days, remembering their son Tom Jr., who was murdered by Islamic terrorists aboard Flight 93. Mr. Burnett has been trying for several years to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic-shaped crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. In their interview with WSAU radio in Wisconsin, the Burnetts were joined half-way through the hour by Alec Rawls (the author of this blogburst post), who has written a book about the terrorist memorializing Crescent of Embrace design.

Mr. Burnett’s words are always heartfelt, yet marked by a constant scrupulousness. Emotion never carries him to utter a word beyond what he actually has grounds to assert. Highly recommended listening, perhaps especially for those who are better at judging people than facts. Let’s face it, show some people the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, and they just aren’t sure what they are looking at. Point out that the central feature of every mosque is a Mecca-direction indicator, and somehow the pieces don’t fall together in their brains:

What is that? Just a mysterious diagram to some.

Yet these folks can still be good judges of character. So judge the Burnetts. The WSAU interview begins with host Pat Snyder asking Mr. Burnett if America is doing enough as a nation to remember 9/11. Most of us, on being asked any question, will try to answer it, but Mr. Burnett immediately defers, and in the most polite way:

Well, I’m not a very good judge of that. We are tucked away here in the southeast corner of Minnesota…

But if he isn’t interested in passing judgment on how much America should do to remember 9/11, he is very concerned that we don’t honor the wrong people, and starts right in on the Flight 93 memorial (which Mr. Snyder puts off to later).

Both the Burnetts have a sophisticated understanding of American liberty. Talking about the generosity of Americans towards each other and the world, Beverly notes the change that has taken place in her lifetime, where assistance used to be all private, but now the government has gotten involved. She passes no explicit judgment on this development, but just notes what should remain constant (at 17:22):

I think about all the programs we have in the government. I come from a different generation, and my mother and father, and Tom’s, that we never really looked to the government all the time. We looked to our neighbors and churches and friends for things. But our government should be there to make sure we’re SAFE.

Instead, as Tom and Bev both note, our elites don’t even want to acknowledge that it was Muslim terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

It is these same elites who don’t want to acknowledge the Islamic symbol-shapes in the Flight 93 memorial. To witness this symbolism would be to tie Islam to 9/11, which to these people is some unconscionable bigotry, regardless of the truth. There is the rub. As Mr. Burnett put it (at 25:16):

All we want–Alec, and the thousands of Americans who back us–we want the truth. What happened? [How did we end up with an Islamist design?] And we want to honor the 40 people. I don’t want anything to do with the Islamic fanatics, anything at all.

Mr. and Mrs. Burnett are very thoughtful, careful, rational people. So who is it who is “too far out”? People like the Burnetts, who are skeptical that the architect of a memorial to Flight 93 could plant a giant crescent and star flag on the crash site by mistake? Or is it the people who somehow convince themselves that a crescent and star flag is just fine, so long as we can’t prove that it is intentional?

Actually, we CAN prove that the Islamic symbolism is intentional. Architect Paul Murdoch does not want history to be able to deny his achievement, so he included extensive redundant proofs of intent, such as the following. Murdoch says the crescent comes from the terror attacks breaking the circle (leaving only the giant Islamic-shaped crescent still standing, hmmm). Remove the parts of the crescent that stick out past the point where the flight path (coming down from the upper left) symbolically breaks the circle, and what symbolically remains standing is a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca.

The full Crescent of Embrace points 1.8° north of Mecca ± 0.1°. Remove the parts of the Entry Portal walls that extend past the flight path at the upper crescent tip and the remaining “true” or thematic crescent points exactly at Mecca, ± 0.1°.

All the supposed redesign did was add an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle, leaving Murdoch’s circle-breaking crescent-creating theme completely intact. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a precisely Mecca-oriented crescent, the centerpiece for the world’s largest mosque.

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Cash for Clunkers: Two Crimes, Justified by a Lie

A guest post from Alec Rawls.

Crime 1: Another multi-billion dollar subsidy for Government Motors.

When Obama stole Chrysler from its stockholders and gave it to his union cronies, we knew he would take every opportunity to waste taxpayer dollars trying to keep this lead balloon afloat. The Cash for Clunkers subsidy is just particularly egregious, since it works by subsidizing the last people in the world who need a subsidy: those who are well off enough to be buying new cars in the midst of a deep recession. Talk about a middle class welfare program!

Crime 2: Eliminating Government Motors’ competition by gratuitously slagging an expected 750,000 perfectly good used cars in the sub-$4500 price range.

The Obamacrats aren’t just subsidizing cars for the well-to-do. They are destroying the cars that the less well-off are in the market for, driving up used car prices as part of their effort to make new cars more attractive:

Some parts may be kept but the engine and drive-train must be destroyed. Specifically the engine will be injected with a liquid glass solution to permanently disable the engine and it will be the responsibility of the dealer to make sure this is done to the engine.

Injected with liquid glass? Sounds like a Quentin Tarentino murder fantasy, and the reality isn’t any prettier. Witness Obama’s procedure for destroying the would-be cars of the non-wealthy:

Here is another one, a spiffy-looking Volvo that holds out for 4-plus minutes. Some clunker, and check out the row of semi-new cars lined up to go next:

Take THAT all you graduate students, newlyweds, store clerks, aspiring actors, single moms, non-deadbeat dads, warehouse workers, journalists, hippies, and other assorted poor relations. You want a car, you can scrape together your savings for a down payment on the privilege of paying hundreds of dollars a month to Government Motors for FIVE YEARS, just like everybody else.

How big is this crime?

A very substantial portion of the population NEVER buys a new car. I, for instance, have never bought a new car, and I never expect to. Why would I, when California has the best used car market in the world? In the last 10 years I have bought two 1984 Toyota Vans, one with 45,000 miles, one with 115,000 miles, each for $1500. Both still run great. One is set up as a work vehicle. One converts from passenger van to camper. No new vehicles would serve as well, or look as sharp.

My two uber-vans, one extra-dirty from its recent 2000 mile trek to Seattle and back. (Shasta, Crater Lake, Boeing Museum of Flight, Blue Angels, Olympic Peninsula, Fort Stevens, Oregon Dunes, North Coast, and back across the Golden Gate. Ain’t that America?)

The vehicles that are being gratuitously destroyed are newer than my two vans (which are just outside the 25 year age limit) and they are up to three times the price. For instance, the immensely popular Toyota Previa vans (1990-96) all qualify.

A good California Previa with a hundred thousand miles left on it sells for two to three thousand dollars. The government’s offer of 35-45 hundred is outbidding the market even on these top quality used vehicles. Cash for Clunkers is a misnomer. Some bottom-of-the-barrel cars will be turned in, but the rules insure that most will not be these “clunkers.”

To qualify, a car must have been registered the name of the new car buyer for the last 12 months and it must have been insured for the last 12 months. These actively-used cars of people who buy new cars are the quality core of the used car market. Most “clunkers” will be perfectly good cars that would be prize possessions for a half million less well-off Americans, wantonly destroyed only because the Obamacrats prefer that they be destroyed. Dollar for dollar, this is the equivalent of trying to solve the glut of housing foreclosures by purchasing the houses with taxpayer money then burning them down.

Any Obama supporter who claims to be motivated by distributional justice, go soak your head. You want to subsidize the better off? Be as stupid as you want. But don’t go destroying en masse what the less well-off need to survive.

All justified by a lie

Obama’s excuse for decimating the last two generations of used vans, SUV’s, pick-up trucks and full size cars is the global warming hoax. The ascendancy of Obama is, in his own narcissistic vision:

…the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

Energy consumption must be curtailed in the extreme:

…under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.

It is all about CO2 and the phony global warming industry that Vice President Al Gore created with $10b of seed money when he pioneered and administered the executive branch’s global warming portfolio (now called “climate change,” since the earth stopped warming 10 years ago). Gore’s appointees have directed almost all of the full $79b that the U.S. has spent on climate science since 1989, and they don’t care at all whether CO2 is actually warming the planet. Their real motivation is an eco-religious belief that economic activity is gobbling up the natural world, so that for the natural world to survive, economic activity must contract.

To these high priests of green religion, CO2 is the perfect fall guy, no matter how insignificant its actual impact on climate. If the CO2 released by fossil fuel burning can be framed as a threat to the planet, that provides a rationale for drastically curtailing human economic activity, thereby stopping economic activity from gobbling up the natural world, whether or not CO2 itself actually has any harmful effects.

CO2 alarmists reject the scientific method

We can say with nearly complete certainty that the bulk of 20th century warming was NOT caused by CO2. This is because we know what DID cause the warming: the “grand maximum” levels of solar-magnetic activity that obtained for most solar cycles between 1930 and 2003.

Numerous studies have found a high degree of correlation (.6 to .8) between solar-magnetic activity and global temperature. That is, solar-magnetic activity “explains” statistically 60-80% of global temperature change on all time scales. That degree of correlation, observed over thousands and millions of years, HAS to be causal, and the causation can only go one way. It is not the temperature of the earth that is causing sunspots.

What is not well understood is HOW solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature. We just know that it does, just as before Einstein we did not know what mechanism causes massive objects to fall towards each other, we just knew that they do.

We actually have some pretty good theories of how solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature but set that aside. The eco-religionists, who thanks to Al Gore control ALL of the research funds for the “climate change” industry, use uncertainty about HOW solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature as an excuse for completely omitting the solar-magnetic variable from their models. They explicitly put theory over data, exactly the opposite of the scientific method, which says that data is always supposed to trump theory.

This anti-scientific method misattributes to CO2 the warming caused by high 20th century levels of solar-magnetic activity. Put solar-magnetic activity back into the equation, attributing to it what warming has historically been correlated with high levels of solar-magnetic activity, and the levels of warming that could possibly be attributable to CO2 become small. In particular, they become benign.

Warming in general is good. When Greenland was green, civilization prospered, as did plants and other living things. Nothing gobbles up the natural world like ice. It is only by claiming that CO2 could cause some unprecedented “runaway warming” that the alarmists have been able to present CO2 as dangerous. Stop misattributing solar-magnetic warming to CO2 and that possibility is off the table.

The dominant driver of global climate is solar-magnetic activity and any modicum of warming we can get out CO2 is all to the good. If our fossil fuel burning has the side effect of making our warm times a little warmer and our cold times a little less cold, that is a happy bit of luck for a world that ALWAYS seems to be colder than the optimum, with the next glacial period due any Millennia.

Proof that the IPCC completely omits the solar-magnetic variable

Just look at any of the IPCC assessment reports. They all include the following graphic (slightly updated over the years):

From the 4th Assessment Report (figure 2.4 on page 39 of the Synthesis Report).

The only “natural” climate influence accounted by the IPCC is “solar irradiance,” which means visible light and other electro-magnetic radiation. It does in any way include the solar-magnetic flux, which is completely omitted from all IPCC models, even though every climate scientists knows full well that, according to the raw data, magnetic effects are the primary driver of global temperature.

EVERY educated person who accepts CO2 alarmism on the authority of the global warming anti-scientists is failing the most basic due diligence.

Technically, the alarmists’ anti-scientific inversion of theory and evidence takes the form of what is called “omitted variable fraud,” where the omission of any important explanatory variable causes its explanatory effect to be misattributed to whatever correlated variables are included (in this case CO2 which, like solar activity, also went up in the 20th century). This is the most basic, the most common, the most familiar form of statistical fraud. Everyone who has ever studied not just any physical science but any social science at any moderately high level is fully competent recognize for themselves the statistical fraud that is being committed by the CO2 alarmists.

The educated Democrat-voting elites who are pushing to unplug industrial capitalism on the authority of alarmist anti-scientists have an obligation of due diligence to check for themselves whether the facts of the matter are beyond their own competence, and they are ALL failing this basic obligation. They are just assuming that they have to accept on authority that the survival of the planet requires the radical curtailment of CO2, when even a quick look at the facts reveals that the statistically most important variable is omitted from the alarmist models.

Why this willingness uncritically enlist as foot-soldiers for the destruction of modernity? Because like the CO2 anti-scientists themselves, these Democrat elites also don’t care whether CO2 is actually a threat. They too are eco-religionists who are glad for any excuse to curtail the economic growth that according to their presumptions is gobbling up the natural world.

Wrong about economics too

Of course the eco-religionists are also wrong about economic growth being bad for the environment. Economic growth creates and is created by technological advance, and it is technological advance that is allowing mankind and the natural world to both thrive at once. Economic activity is not the enemy of the natural world. It is the salvation of the natural world.

Having dedicated their intellectual resources to maintaining their religious presumptions instead of following reason and evidence, our Democrat elites have become pure political animals in the lowest sense, driven entirely by their lust for power. Every excuse, be it phony concern for distributive justice or phony concern for the environment, is wielded with complete dishonesty, utterly heedless of how distributive justice or the environment are actually affected, until all that is left is their ultimate presumption: that the one thing most necessary is that THEY have power.

This pathology finds its epitome in President Obama. Cash for Clunkers is just one paltry multi-billion dollar program, but the same coming-and-going perversity is manifest in Obama’s larger jihad against CO2—his push for cap and trade legislation. If we would uncork energy, the economy would rebound tomorrow, but Obama is determined to close the energy spigot down, not open it up.

Anybody who thinks this recession is ending is out of their minds. Obama is draining the oil and pouring in the silica slurry. If you want to hear where the economy is headed, listen to the “squirk” from the end of the Obama-car-death video, when the engine jerks at the end of the hangman’s rope.

This is the sound of a valuable helper being sacrificed by government to the false idols of green religion. It isn’t just barbarous. It is a clear violation of the establishment clause. Execute the worst human criminals, yes, but Mission Solano has it right: “No Death Penalty for Cars!”

Everyone involved with the Flight 93 Memorial knows that the Crescent of Embrace points to Mecca

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.

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False AP report: Obama did NOT say that Iran must respect voters’ choice

Obama’s comments were mushy, yes, but at least he said the most important thing, according to AP:

He said it’s up to Iran to determine its own leaders but that the country must respect voters’ choice.

Why then have reputable people continued to pass harsh judgment? And why would AP paraphrase what would have been Obama’s key statement?

Turns out Obama said no such thing. What he actually said is that the VOICES of the Iranian people should be heard and respected, not their votes:

And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.

This is consistent with the rest of Obama’s remarks. He never said a word about respecting votes. Obama did mention “the democratic process,” but far from saying anything about this process having to meet any standards of integrity, he instead implied strongly that he will accept whatever result the “process” followed by the Mullahs produces:

I want to start off by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be; that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes the United States can be a handy political football…

Democracy means that Iranian sovereignty lies with the Iranian people and that a regime that rigs an election is NOT sovereign. Yet Obama is explicit that he will continue to treat the mullahs as the Iranian sovereign no matter how they judge the election. He even goes so far as to suggest that the only reason he is bothering to comment on the competing claim to sovereignty at all is because it would be unseemly for him not to:

We will continue to pursue a tough, direct dialogue between our two countries, and we’ll see where it takes us. But even as we do so, I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we’ve seen on the television over the last few days.

The only operative concerns that he mentions are for: “free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent.” When he talks about the “democratic process” going forward, all he urges is that the process be peaceful and that dissent be allowed. He says nothing about the process being honest:

…there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it’s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.

It is no accident that Obama ended with the statement that AP paraphrased so egregiously (equating his call for bloodless suppression with a demand for legitimate elections). This was his theme throughout. He views the honesty of Iran’s democratic process as something to be judged by the mullahs, who he clearly accepts to be the sovereign power, regardless of the merits of competing claims.

AP covers its tracks, just like they did with the Flight 93 memorial

AP’s fraudulent report about Obama demanding respect for voters’ choice was the primary print report on Obama’s comments. Now that it has already misled millions of people, AP has covered its tracks by filing an update that overwrites the errant statement. This is what AP does when it gets caught putting out misinformation. To avoid issuing a correction, they flush the misleading story down the memory hole by using the same url for a completely different story. (Google only finds AP’s original article still posted at Fox News.)

AP did the same thing last year after it was taken to task for failing to check the most basic facts in a story about the controversy over possible Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial. Ramesh Santanam reported a number of conflicting factual assertions, like the 44 blocks:

Opponents also claim there is a plan to have 44 glass blocks, for the 40 victims and four hijackers, in the design.

“That’s an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as fact,” said Edward Felt’s brother, Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93. “It’s misleading and helps drive the conspiracy theory.”

When it was pointed out that Santanam could have found the four extra blocks just by opening up the design drawings and counting, AP quickly filed a completely different story (about fundraising for the memorial), under the same url.

It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with AP using subject feeds that automatically update with their latest offering. It is that AP is systematically using this system to dodge corrections. This is actually their official policy:

For corrections on live, online stories, we overwrite the previous version. We send separate corrective stories online as warranted.

Except AP virtually never issue corrective stories, for the simple reason that AP has no established correction procedure. They just do the overwrite thing and say “too bad.”

Well this time the overwrite thing is not good enough.

Demand a corrective story about AP’s false paraphrase of Obama’s words

Associated Press obviously understands the importance of Obama saying that Iran must respect voters’ choice or they wouldn’t have bothered to pretend that he said it when he didn’t. They don’t just fail to mention Obama’s glaring omission on this crucial point, but actually tell the public via false paraphrase that he did say what he glaringly omitted. This cannot stand. Faced with our new president’s key statement on a historic crisis, AP reports a photo negative of what Obama actually said.

There may be no established procedure for AP corrections, but anyone can still send a pre-written email to AP CEO Tom Curley, Editor Kathleen Carroll, the reporters who worked on the story (the egregious Jennifer Loven, along with Anne Gearan and Robert Burns), plus a smattering of other AP editors and bureaucrats. Who knows. There may even be a limit to how disingenuous some of these people are willing to be.

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Flight 93 blogburst: Two Memorial Project commissioners quit over the Project’s bad behavior

From the Error Theory Blog:

Two Pennsylvanian’s quit the Flight 93 Memorial Commission last week, protesting Park Service plans to condemn five crash-site properties that it never negotiated for in good faith. Consider the case of the Lambert family, who have been on their land for three generations:

“It’s absolutely a surprise. I’m shocked by it. I’m disappointed by it,” said Tim Lambert, who owns nearly 164 acres that his grandfather bought in the 1930s. The park service plans to condemn two parcels totaling about five acres – land, he said, he had always intended to donate for the memorial.

“To the best of my knowledge and my lawyer, absolutely no negotiations have taken place with the park service where we’ve sat down and discussed this,” Lambert said.

Lambert said he had mainly dealt with the Families of Flight 93 and said he’s provided the group all the information it’s asked for, including an appraisal.

They are condemning land that he was trying to GIVE to them, just because he had the gall to expect the Park Service to actually do its part.

Project members have embraced the “absolute moral authority” conceit

How dare anyone not rush to give these grieving 9/11 family members whatever they want? Didn’t they hear Maureen Dowd’s proclamation that “the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq [or on 9/11] is absolute”?

When crash-site owner Mike Svonavec put up a donation box to try to cover some of the cost of hiring security guards for the hugely popular Temporary Memorial, Patrick White, cousin of Flight 93 hero Louis Nacke, told the press:

That land has been paid for with 40 lives … the donation box is an insult to that cost.

When Svonavec insisted that the Park Service follow its own legally required procedures for assessing property values (procedures that, as it happens, take into account current property values, not just pre-crash property values), White accused Svonavec of trying to profit from the blood of his cousin:

“I think Svonavec believes his land, because it has the blood of my cousin and 39 other people, it’s worth more,” he said.

Using the flag of victim-hood to defend Paul Murdoch’s terrorist memorial mosque

Project members use the same trick to deflect criticism of the giant Islamic-shaped crescent that is now being built on the crash-site. When people point out the hidden terrorist memorializing features-things that no
one knew about when the Crescent of Embrace design was chosen-like the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, or the 44 glass blocks emplaced along the flight path, Project members not only deny these easy to verify facts, but they pretend that they are being accused of intending to honor the errorists:

“That’s an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as fact,” said Edward Felt’s brother, Gordon Felt [about the 44 blocks claim].

He says he is insulted people would believe he would participate in anything that honored his brother’s killers.

In The Church of Liberalism, Ann Coulter slammed the media for granting the Jersey Girls an “absolute moral authority” card, not questioning the Girls’ practice of blaming the Bush administration instead of al Qaeda for their husband’s deaths on 9/11.

The Jersey Girls were bad enough, but nowhere is the flag of victim-hood being used to cover up more bad behavior than at the Memorial Project.

Active cover-up of an ongoing Islamic supremacist plot

Like the Jersey Girls, the Memorial Project gives Islam a pass for 9/11. Project members might not have known about the Mecca-orientation of the Crescent of Embrace, but they DID know that it was a giant Islamic-shaped crescent. Now they are doing far worse. Now they DO know that the giant crescent points almost exactly at Mecca, and are consistently misleading the press about it.

Their own Muslim consultant told them not to worry about the Mecca-oriented crescent, claiming that it can’t be seen as a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built) unless it points EXACTLY at Mecca (a claim that was contradicted earlier this month by Saudi religious authorities).

So what does Project Supervisor Joanne Hanley say when asked about the Mecca-orientation claim?

The only thing that orients
the memorial is the crash site.

They are actively and knowingly covering up clear evidence of an ongoing al Qaeda sympathizing plot. Bad behavior indeed.

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Saudi authorities contradict U.S. Park Service: mihrabs do NOT have to point exactly at Mecca

A Muslim consultant told the Park Service in 2006 that the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 cannot be seen as a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), because the giant Islamic-shaped crescent does not point exactly at Mecca:

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

Saudi religious authorities recently had to address this question when observers noted that some 200 mosques in Mecca itself do not point directly at the Kaaba (the “Sacred Mosque” that all Muslims are supposed to face for prayer). Meccans who worried that their prayers might not count were assured by the Islamic Affairs Ministry that “it does not affect the prayers.”

The necessity for such a rule is obvious. Throughout most of Islam’s 1400 year history, Muslims who were any significant distance from Mecca had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it became established religious principle that what matters is intent. It is the mind of the believer that needs to face directly towards the Kaaba, and directly towards God. This principle applies in Mecca the same as anywhere else.

All the great mosques of the ancient world point well away from Mecca

Older mosques often point 10, 20, 30 or more degrees away from Mecca. The most famous mihrab in the world, the mihrab of the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain, points more than 45° off of Mecca:

The Cordoba mihrab points south, while Mecca is east-southeast of Spain.

In contrast, the Crescent of Embrace points a mere 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°, which is highly accurate by Islamic standards.

The Muslim consultant who lied to the Park Service was a classmate of architect Paul Murdoch

Who told the Park Service that a mihrab has to point exactly at Mecca to be legitimate? It was Nasser Rabbat, a professor of Islamic architecture at MIT and an expert in the history of mosque design. No one knows better than Professor Rabbat that mihrab orientation does NOT have to be exact.

There is only one reason why Rabbat would lie to the Park Service about such a basic fact. He recognizes that the giant Mecca-oriented crescent at the heart of the Flight 93 memorial IS a legitimate mihrab, and he wants this al Qaeda sympathizing plot to succeed.

A look at Rabbat’s background shows that he was a classmate of Crescent of Embrace architect Paul Murdoch, both getting masters degrees in architecture from UCLA in 1984 and both doing their masters work on Middle Easter subjects. (Murdoch wrote a “masters project” titled: “A museum for Haifa, Israel.” Rabbat wrote a master thesis on house design in Cairo and Damascus.)

This prior connection between Murdoch and Rabbat raises the possibility that Murdoch himself was able to orchestrate the Park Service investigation into warnings about his own design. By the same token, having the two classmates both show up in the Flight 93 memorial raises the possibility that Rabbat was Murdoch’s source of expertise on how to incorporate the full complement of typical mosque features into his Crescent design. (For the dozen typical mosque features, see Crescent of Embrace, chapter 5.)

The Crescent of Embrace also includes an exact Mecca-orientation

While exact orientation on Mecca is not a traditional requirement, modern mosque designers do generally employ now-available techniques for orienting their mihrabs more precisely on Mecca than was previously possible. Murdoch satisfies this modern norm (and provides hidden proof of intent) by including a true thematically-defined crescent that does point exactly at Mecca.

Murdoch’s thematic explanation for his crescent design is that the circle was broken on 9/11 by the path of Flight 93. The terrorist-piloted airplane smashes our peaceful circle, turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent (that just happens to point to Mecca). The terrorist-memorializing implications of this theme are hardly less overt than the Islamic symbol shapes themselves. Nothing particularly subtle here folks.

The symbolic breaking of the circle occurs at the upper crescent tip, where the fifty-foot tall, thousand-foot long Entry Portal Wall is parted by the Entry Portal Walkway, which follows the flight path through the wall:

The section of wall to the right of the walkway in this image is symbolically “broken off” by the flight path. Remove this symbolically broken off part, and the remaining crescent structure points EXACTLY at Mecca, ± 0.1°:

What symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11: a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca.

Rabbat knew about this too, since the original report that Rabbat was commenting on detailed both the slightly inexact Mecca-orientation of the full Crescent of Embrace, and the exact-Mecca-orientation that results when the symbolically broken-off parts are removed. Same for the Park Service. As the original recipient of Alec Rawls‘ report, the Park Service knew about both orientations. They also knew, because it was also in the original report, that a mihrab does NOT have to point exactly at Mecca. Yet they still publicly touted Rabbat’s claim that the crescent can’t be seen as a mihrab because it doesn’t point exactly at Mecca. A veritable web of self-conscious lies by Rabbat AND the Park Service.

The design is called a broken circle now, but the circle is still broken in the same place as before (where the flight path crosses the upper crescent tip). The unbroken part of the circle, what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11, remains completely unchanged. It is still a giant-Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing exactly at Mecca.

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Press refuses again to check and report the facts, this time in BART shooting

The crescent memorial to Flight 93 would have been stopped long ago if the media was willing to check and report simple facts like the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent. The same thing happens whenever the facts of a case are not congenial to our left-wing elites.

Another extreme example is now taking place in Oakland California, where inflammatory reports of police criminality in the New Year’s Day shooting of Oscar Grant are held up by the Oakland street mob as justication for last week’s murder of four police officers. Even after this massacre of Oakland police, the press still refuses to publish dramatic exculpatory evidence in the Oscar Grant case.

Video proof that Oscar Grant swung his own arm up onto his own back AFTER he was shot by BART officer Johannes Mehserle

Oscar Grant was lying face down on the ground when he was shot in the back by BART officer Johannes Mehserle, who seems to have thought he was firing his newly issued Taser. (Fellow officer Tony Pirone told investigators that Mehserle said he was going to Tase Grant, then warned him to get clear just before firing.)

If Mehserle did experience Taser confusion then he is not guilty of ANY crime. This is what the DA asserted in an earlier California case of Taser confusion:

Wyatt explained that without the intent of criminal negligence, criminal charges against Noriega could not be sustained.

“The required aggravation … did not occur in this case,” he said.

Criminal negligence is based on foreseeable consequences. If Mehserle thought he was firing his Taser, he can only be liable for the foreseeable consequences of firing his Taser, not his gun. The shooting at that point is just an accident, and the only person who is responsible for creating the dangerous situation in which that accident occurred is Oscar Grant, with his reckless and criminal decision to fight with the police for 30 seconds.

Alameda District Attorney Tom Orloff set aside the Noriega precedent on the grounds that:

… both of Grant’s hands were behind his back, a position hands are commonly placed in by police officers in order to handcuff individuals, when the shot was fired into his body.

Orloff somehow decided that the fact that Grant’s hands seemed to be in a compliance position made the shooting “an intentional act” that calls for a charge of murder.

This makes little sense. We already know that Mehserle intended to pull the trigger. His claim is that he thought he was pulling the trigger on his Taser, a point which is unaffected by the position of Grant’s hands. Nevertheless, this is the weak reed upon which Orloff decided to hang murder charges, and it turns out to be verifiably false. Grant’s hands were NOT both on his back when the shot was fired, as can be seen when the video is slowed down.

Here is an animation of the fatal second:

 

37;05 – 37;29 of KTVU’s highlighted cell phone video of the shooting, slowed to 1/2 second a frame. Red circle (added) shows the first appearance of officer Mehserle’s muzzle flash.

At the start of the animation (after the black frame), Officer Pirone (kneeling on Grant’s shoulder and neck) has just gotten control of Grant’s right hand, pulling it up behind Grant’s back. As the action starts, Pirone lets go and draws back (presumably in response to Mehserle’s Taser warning). Look at the spot where Pirone’s arm pulls back behind his own body. From about this same spot in the image, Grant’s left arm then appears, as Grant starts to swing his own arm up towards his own back. One frame after Grant’s left arm first appears (1/15th of a second later), Mehserle’s muzzle-flash first appears (red circle). Then Grant finishes swinging his own arm up onto his own back.

Here is a frame grab of the fatal instant (37;17):

 

When Mehserle’s muzzle flash first appears (red circle) Grant has just started to swing his own left arm (circled in blue) around behind his own back (presumably in a belated attempt to avoid getting Tased).

Grant’s left hand was NEVER under either officer’s control, after they both fought for 30 seconds to get control of it, with Mehserle telling Pirone from the beginning that he thought Grant was “going for his waistband”. Thus Mehserle was certainly justified in trying to Tase Grant, and the clear evidence that he WAS trying to Tase Grant makes this almost certainly an accidental shooting, in which case Mehserle is innocent of ANY crime.

Alec Rawls (the author of these blobgurst posts) has been trying for six weeks to get Bay Area print and television news to let the public know about about this video proof that Orloff’s stated grounds for charging officer Mehserle with murder is FALSE. This isn’t just news. It vitiates the state’s own accusations of criminal behavior, now being used to justify acts of war against the Oakland Police, yet despite repeated outreach to most of the reporters who have been covering this story, the local press still won’t report it.

The press also refuses to fact-check Pirone’s claim that the video shows Grant kneeing him multiple times in the groin

Oakland is also inflamed by another portion of the Oscar Grant video, about a minute and a half before the shooting, where Officer Pirone knocks Grant to the ground with a forearm to his head. KTVU interviewed two law professors who both interpreted the blow as an unprovoked criminal assault. Professor Peter Keane, of UC Hastings was the most emphatic:

That officer is committing a crime. … There’s no question in my mind that that’s vivid powerful evidence that he committed a vicious physical assault, unprovoked, upon a citizen, for absolutely no reason.

UC Boalt Professor Franklin Zimring added an important qualification, but unless the public learns that the qualification does in fact apply, the effect is the same:

Unless there’s something more that we don’t see, then the degree of force that was use, and the way it was used, are not justified.

Officer Pirone’s lawyer Bill Rapoport told the press that a frame by frame analysis of the video shows that Pirone was responding to multiple knees to the groin by Grant, but again, our biased media is refusing to fact-check and reported on the accuracy of this easy to verify claim. All they have to do is slow down the video and take a look. Immediately before Pirone strikes Grant, Grant can be seen driving his knees up above 90° into Pirone’s groin. Here is a frame grab of one of the knees:

 

9;05 from KTVU’s raw cell phone video. Surrounding frames show the denim “7” shape in this frame to be Oscar Grant’s right knee, coming up above 90° as Grant tries to knee Pirone in the groin. Full segment here:

 

The accusations of criminal assault by Pirone are FALSE. He was defending himself against a criminal assault, as anyone can verify just by looking.

KTVU actually slowed the video down for professors Keane and Zimring, but obviously not enough. All KTVU has to do to verify the accuracy of Pirone’s claims is open up their laptop again and slow the video down a bit more, but they have yet to report this video proof that Pirone was defending himself against a vicious assault by Oscar Grant.

If prosecutors claimed that frame by frame analysis showed some previously undetected evidence of police criminality, the frame by frame video would be prime time news for a week. Since it proves Pirone’s innocence, the press is not interested. Even with the murder of four policemen being justified as retaliation for the alleged criminal behavior of Mehserle and Pirone, the entire bay area media remains silent.

So let’s us break the story. The innocence of Pirone and the almost certain innocence of Mehserle are major unreported news. Shout it at the top of your blogs!

If we can break this story, not only might we save some lives in blue, but we can direct the resulting attention to other explosive facts that the media refuses to examine and report, like the terrorist memorial mosque now being built on the Flight 93 crash site.

The Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent makes it a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built. They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, remains exactly as it was in the original Crescent of Embrace design. It is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

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Mother of Flight 93 hero calls for “a full and transparent review” of the crescent-shaped memorial

For two years, Tom Burnett Sr. has been speaking out against the crescent-shaped memorial to Flight 93. This week Beverly Burnett (mother of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Jr.) stepped into the public eye to support her husband, and to make her own appeal for a full investigation:

Today, I am adding my voice for a full and transparent review of the National Park Service and Flight 93 design selection process that produced Crescent of Embrace. Does it have Islamic symbols or doesn’t it? Let’s settle this once and for all.

Why do you think Tom Sr. opposed this design? It is pretty simple; Tom Sr. saw the Islamic symbols and knew those symbols did not belong at the crash site of Flight 93.

Tom Burnett Sr. traveled to Pennsylvania last August to attend the Task Force Meeting to voice his opposition to the memorial design. A Family Board member as well as a commissioner accused Tom Sr. being “just like the Islamic terrorists” that killed our son.

Why didn’t someone speak up and defend Tom Sr.’s right to voice his opinion?

Thanks to The Somerset Daily American for publishing Mrs. Burnett’s complete statement, which she also entered into the record of the most recent Memorial Project meeting. Read the whole thing.

Two other mentions of the memorial controversy in the local PA press this week

In a letter to the editor, a local woman echoed Mrs. Burnett’s sentiment in favor of preserving the site as it is, instead of demolishing the highly regarded Temporary Memorial and radically transforming the landscape, as the Memorial Project intends.

At present the Temporary Memorial looks down over the “field of honor.” Because this temporary memorial is located roughly in the center of the planned half-mile wide crescent, it will be eliminated. Visitors who stand at the location of the Temporary Memorial will no longer look out over the original landscape, but will instead see the crash-site framed between the pincer tips of the giant Islamic-shaped crescent.

They call the crescent a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11 (originally called the Crescent of Embrace) remains completely unchanged.

Nice words from a local columnist, but no fact-checking

In the area’s second local paper, The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat, columnist Ralph Couey offers a very nice tribute to the heroes of Flight 93 in which he mentions Mr. Burnett’s opposition to the planned memorial. Unfortunately, Mr. Couey goes on to describes Mr. Burnett’s opposition as “hopeless intransigence,” and expresses his optimism that it can be gotten past.

Given that newspapers are supposed to get to the truth, one would hope that those who gain the privilege of this public platform would bother to check the facts. If Mr. Burnett is correct in his warnings about Islamic symbolism, then finding a way to get past these objections is like finding a way to sneak a hijacker past gate security. It is a bad thing, not a good thing.

The petition that Mr. Burnett sponsored along with our blogburst group lists four damning facts about the approved design that can all be verified in a matter of minutes. Can Mr. Couey check just one: that a person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing within 2° of Mecca?

The Muslim prayer direction in this animation (qibla) is from the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. (If you have trouble getting their calculator to work–your Java has to be configured correctly–there is another Mecca direction calculator at QiblaLocator.com.)

This Mecca-orientation makes the giant crescent a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. Does Mr. Couey really want to see the world’s largest mosque planted on the Flight 93 crash site? It is fine to speak highly of the heroes of Flight 93, but it would be a lot more meaningful if he would honor the Burnett’s urgent appeal for fact-checking by stepping over to a globe and checking this one simple factual claim.

Mr. Couey is not the only one who wants the crescent controversy to go away without caring to know the truth. Sorry, but that is insufficient. Planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent on the crash-site will dishonor the heroes of Flight 93, and it fails to follow their example. They didn’t just have good intentions. They got the job done, and we have to get the job done too. We can’t be asleep at the wheel while an al Qaeda sympathizing architect hijacks our memorial.

What? Is it just too outlandish to think that the enemy might try to hijack one of our memorials? The same way that it is just too outlandish to think that the enemy might dare to hijack our commercial airliners? Do these people even know what they are memorializing?

But they CAN wake up. All they have to do is actually check the facts. Then they will know. So please Mr. Couey, take the time to check a few facts, then write a second column, reporting your findings. Somebody out there in Somerset needs to start telling the truth. It might as well be you.

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Memorial Project officials insist that it was the passengers and crew, not the terrorists, who broke the peace on 9/11

The official explanation for the Crescent of Embrace design is that the path of Flight 93 breaks the circle, turning it into the giant crescent. They call it the Circle of Embrace now, but the Memorial Project’s own website acknowledges that the circle is still broken:

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…

The fact that the Circle of Embrace is really a broken circle means two things. First, it means that the giant crescent is still there. Architect Paul Murdoch always described the Crescent of Embrace as a broken circle. Our circle of peace was broken on 9/11, with the unbroken part of the circle, what was symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11, being the giant Islamic shaped crescent.

Adding an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle leaves the unbroken part unchanged. What is symbolically left standing on the Flight 93 crash site is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

This prompts the question of WHO is being depicted as breaking the circle of peace on 9/11. Of course it can only be the terrorists. Who else can be charged with breaking the peace? The murdered passengers and crew?

Once you realize that it can only be the terrorists who are being depicted as turning the circle into a crescent, it is obvious that this is actually a memorial to the terrorists (if that wasn’t obvious enough already from the Crescent name and the crescent and star flag configuration).

The Memorial Project finally answers our question: insists that it was the passengers and crew who broke the circle

Last spring a couple hundred emailers (thanks!) demanded to know “Who broke the circle?” The Memorial Project issued a boiler-plate response that never got around to answering the question. At the Memorial Project meeting last summer, however, Alec Rawls was able to pigeon-hole Memorial Project Manager Jeff Reinbold and Deputy Superintendent Keith Newlin.

“You can’t just say it was ‘the flight path’ that broke the circle” Rawls admonished. “This is a story of human action. So who did it? In your depiction, who is breaking the circle?”

“The passengers and crew,” said Reinbold.

“But the circle is a symbol of peace,” Rawls continued. “Who broke the peace? It was the TERRORISTS who broke the peace on 9/11.”

Reinbold countered that that the circle is also a Druid symbol, and a Christian symbol.

“But it is still a symbol of peace,” said Rawls, especially as the Memorial Project is using it, with the circle being broken on 9/11, “so who breaks it?”

“It was the passengers and crew,” Newlin repeated, elaborating that: “They are the one’s who brought the plane down.”

“You don’t think it was the terrorists who broke the peace?” Rawls asked.

“They TRIED to break the peace,” said Newlin, “but they failed.”

“Really?” asked Rawls: “They failed to break the peace? What about the 40 murdered heroes?” But Reinbold and Newlin were done talking.

Trying to give credit to the passengers and crew for the outcome of Flight 93 is a perfectly creditable motive on the part of Reinbold and Newlin. They aren’t actually trying to blame the passengers and crew for 9/11. What is shameful is their absolute determination not to admit what they perfectly well understand: that it was the terrorists that broke the peace on 9/11.

If they admit this, then they have to acknowledge that Murdoch’s design can only be a memorial to the terrorists, who are depicted as breaking our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent. The depth of Reinbold’s and Newlin’s determination not to admit that it was the terrorists who broke the peace is a measure of how clearly they understand the terrorist-memorializing implications.

They KNOW that this is a memorial to the terrorists, and are twisting themselves into knots to try to cover it up.

Not just a memorial to the terrorists, but victory for the terrorists

If the crescent/broken-circle design is built, it will turn Flight 93 into a victory for the 9/11 terrorists. They will actually have succeeded (with the help of architect Paul Murdoch) in planting a giant Mecca-direction indicator (the central feature of a mosque) on the Flight 93 crash site.

This is how Islam claims territory: by building mosques. Saudi Arabia spent over a seventy-five billion dollars in the last forty years funding mosques and madrassas to spread its murder-cult brand of Islam around the globe. That’s where our present conflict with the Islamic world comes from: Saudi Arabia spreading the violent orthodoxy of Wahabbi Islam around the world.

Now we are poised to build the world’s largest mosque for them, a terrorist memorial mosque, dedicated to the Saudi terrorists who mass-murdered our own countrymen on 9/11, and the Memorial Project KNOWS it. They have to be exposed and stopped.

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Caught on video: shameful cover-up of the crescent-topped Tower of Voices

Background

For three years, the Flight 93 Memorial Project has been relentlessly dishonest, publicly denying damning facts like the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent while making excuses for these facts in private.

Example:
Before the 2007 Memorial Project meeting, Project Partner and Flight 93 family member Patrick White was asked by the press about claims that the giant Crescent of Embrace points to Mecca. He said that all of the claims about what is in the design had been thoroughly investigated and been found to be untrue and “preposterous.”

In private conversation at the meeting itself, White acknowledged the Mecca-orientation of the crescent and made excuses for it, arguing that the almost-exact Mecca orientation cannot be seen as a tribute to Islam because the in-exactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.”

It is difficult enough to comprehend how Flight 93 family members can know that the giant crescent does indeed point almost exactly at Mecca, as critics are claiming, and still be okay with it. But White and the other Project Partners are going even further. They are knowingly covering up this damning information, and even flat lying to the public about it.

Whatever the explanation, this is what we are up against. Memorial Project participants know that the press will only cover our denunciations of the crescent design in those rare instances where we are able to mount a substantial public protest. Since the press never checks the facts, Project partners just issue whatever denials will get them through that news cycle, no matter how dishonest.

The above video

An example of this shameless misdirection was caught on video at last summer’s Memorial Project meeting. Alec Rawls, who made the trip to Somerset PA along with Tom Burnett Sr. (father of Flight 93 hero Tom Jr.), directed public attention to the crescent-topped Tower of Voices. A full-color advertisement in the Somerset newspaper showed the public what the Memorial Project and the press would not: that the Tower of Voices is topped with an Islamic shaped crescent, soaring in the sky above the symbolic lives of the 40 heroes:

At the meeting, Patrick White castigated Rawls for showing the meeting this artist’s rendering of the crescent topped tower, even as this very same graphic was on display by the Memorial Project itself just outside of the courtroom where the meeting was taking place.

White angrily denounced any suggestion that the approved plans for the memorial were indicative of what would actually be built, clearly implying that the crescent topped tower is no longer part of the planned memorial. Yet White had asserted exactly the opposite just three months earlier, when he and other family members involved with the Memorial Project declared that they would fight to build the design as approved:

Commission Chairman John Reynolds said he anticipated that people who opposed the memorial design would present a petition to throw it out.

But family members yesterday said they will work tirelessly to have the monument completed according to the design by the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

“We’re standing up and saying, ‘Enough.’ We’re proponents of the winning design,” said Patrick White, whose cousin, Louis “Joey” Nacke II, died on Flight 93.

…

Mr. White said his group rejected any wholesale change to the design but allowed that it would have to be modified as it shifts from paper to reality.

However, Mr. White added, “They’re not going to be changed based upon the idea that someone sees crescents everywhere.”

This was shortly after our blogburst group started hitting hard on the crescent-topped tower, which the Project Partners are known to have been angry about. In effect, White was directly insisting that the Tower would not be changed just because people were upset about its crescent shape.

The press ignored White’s implied denial that the crescent shaped tower will be built

If the crescent shaped tower is actually to be removed, or changed to some other shape, that is a significant concession, and should have been widely reported, at least by the western Pennsylvania press, but it was not mentioned in any newspaper.

Has the blatant Islamic-Supremacist symbolism of the crescent-topped tower actually penetrated the thick skulls of Patrick White and his cohorts? That is doubtful. When they only faced blogosphere pressure over the crescent-topped tower, their response was angry insistence that the design would NOT be altered. The difference in August was that everyone they had to deal with face-to-face had just seen the crescent topped tower in the local newspaper. The difference was exposure.

Since the press went on to cover up what we worked so hard to expose, there is no reason to think that the Memorial Project will change the design at all. They managed to sneak their cover-up through one more news cycle, which is all they have ever cared about.

Not that any tweaking of the design could ever make it anything but a terrorist memorial mosque in any case. The Tower, for instance, will still be a year round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial, regardless of any change to the Tower’s profile. (The Memorial Project knows about this too, and makes utterly dishonest excuses for it.)

Better stand up and fight America, or there WILL be a terrorist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site.

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Flight 93 blogburst: 1 in 131 billion, the movie

 

Set to another Ennio Morricone masterpiece.

Synopsis

Architect Paul Murdoch split his giant Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 into two separate arcs at the top, in effect creating two separate crescents:

Detail view shows the pair of thousand foot long, fifty foot tall, Entry Portal walls. Both walls roughly follow the line of the circle that is symbolically broken by the flight path (seen coming down from the NNE).

The crescent defined by the end of the inner Entry Portal Wall points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± a tenth of a degree. The crescent defined by the end of the outer Entry Portal Wall points exactly at Mecca (± 0.1°):

The hidden exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent is only one of the ways that Murdoch proves he pointed the crescent towards Mecca on purpose (making it a mihrab, the Mecca direction indicator around which every mosque is built). He also proves intent by exactly repeating both of the Mecca orientations of his giant central crescent in the crescents of trees that surround the Tower of Voices part of the memorial.

That two different crescent structures would by chance turn out to have this exact same multi-Mecca oriented geometry is 1 in 131 billion. Just run the numbers (with some help from Mr. Morricone):

The previous two parts of this video series here and here.

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