If ye break faith we shall not sleep
BTW, according to Michelle Malkin, quoting AP, the Flight 93 Crescent of Embrace memorial is history. The interesting thing about this episode is how illustrates that that leftist meme machine isn't irresistible. It has its limits. Once the inappropriateness of the design had been pointed out, whether the result of an unintentional oversight or not, it ran into opposition. Resistance is not futile.
posted by wretchardthecat at 11/30/2005 08:53:00 PM
28 Comments:
Check the latest on LGF though--the islamic elements seem to have survived the redesign.
9/11 memorial changed:
The original design was selected by a jury of 15 made up of design professionals and family and community members and was narrowed down from a pool of 1,011. A date for the opening has not been set.
A smaller memorial is planned for the U.S. Capitol. Advocates have said a Washington tribute is appropriate because the terrorists who hijacked the plane were likely headed for either the Capitol or the White House.
9/11 Memorial
This is a phony surrender. Watch out for the grenade behind his back. See LGF!!!!
I think one should be proud to maintain a sincerely held viewpoint. But it strikes me as somewhat sneaky to go around under false colors because it conveys both a need to hide one's true beliefs and a contempt for the symbols one dons as camouflage. If people wanted to memoralize the hijackers of 93, why not build one outright?
Remember those Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq? Consider these links which describe their activities in Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/30/AR2005113001016.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/30/AR2005113001009.html
Then look at this link from their own website:
http://cpt.org/hebron/hebron.php
and this:
http://www.ngo-monitor.org/editions/v4n01/CPTPoliticalAgenda.htm
then this:
http://loneharanguer.blogspot.com/2005/11/olympia-activist-joe-carr-returns-to.html
This guy Joe Carr was with both the CPT and the International Solidarity Movement.
Now for Joe Carr's homepage:
http://lovinrevolution.org/
What is so shameful about saying "I'm for Palestine, I'm for the insurgents. Here I stand. Ich nan anders?
From LGF:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=18430_Flight_93_Memorial_Still_an_Islamofascist_Shrine, mainstream media (aka the New York Times and Associated Press) told us that the Flight 93 “Crescent of Embrace” memorial had been (grudgingly) redesigned to remove its incredibly offensive inclusion of the religious symbol of the 9/11 hijackers.
At Error Theory, Alec Rawls says it’s a trick: http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2005/11/redesigned-flight-93-memorial-still_30.html Flight 93 memorial still an Islamo-fascist shrine.
"The redesigned flight 93 memorial, announced today, still contains all of the features that made it a terrorist memorial. Architect Paul Murdoch’s infamous red crescent is still there, still planted with red maple trees, still inscribed in the exact same circle as before, and with the same two crescent tips still intact. Thus the crescent bisector defined by these crescent tips is also the same as before. It still points almost exactly to Mecca, making the crescent a Mihrab (an Islamic prayer station, where the believer faces into a crescent, towards Mecca, to perform his ritual prostrations). The design still incorporates a separate upper terrorist-memorial wall, centered precisely on the red-maple crescent. There are still 44 translucent blocks on the flight path to the crash site, matching the total number of dead, instead of just the forty translucent blocks that are dedicated to the forty murdered Americans. Lastly, the Tower of Voices part of the memorial is still an Islamic prayer-timeundial."
"I think one should be proud to maintain a sincerely held viewpoint"
nonsense...
childmolesters are sincere in their beliefs...
as are islamic jihadist sucide bombers...
as was hitler.... (and c4)
being "sincere" is nothing...
This memorial is built around a foundation of red maple trees. Unless there's some special variety of Japanese maples that I'm not familiar with, what this means is that for 6 months out of the year, the trees will be green, for two months they will indeed be red, and for four months they'll be bare and scraggly looking.
I would *love* to see an artist's conception of this memorial surrounded by bare tree branches, looking like bony fingers reaching up to the sky. I'm thinking it probably will neither be lovely, nor awe-inspiring.
Why red maples? Why red anything? Other than the red crescent analogy, of course.
sweet Jeebus! Check out Joe Carr's Statement of Identity:
http://lovinrevolution.org/Bio.htm
I am a white, middle class, queer American male. I am an anti-racist & anti-sexist; I seek to dismantle my racist patriarchal privilege & end my oppressive behaviors. I was raised Catholic, but I consider myself independently spiritual because organized religion was designed to divide & oppress. I am an anarchist; I seek to tear down hierarchies in my personal interactions, organizing structures, & society at large. I am a revolutionary; this US-dominated global capitalist system is inherently flawed & I aim to help accelerate its inevitable collapse & create a truly sustainable & egalitarian society. I work for peace in my personal interactions and I oppose all wars waged by governments to ensure their dominance, but I am NOT a pacifist;I find nonviolent tactics powerful and effective, but violence & property destruction have always been an essential part of revolutionary movements & I support everyone's right to self defense. I am a political vegan; I try not to create economic demand for products that are violent & exploitative to people, animals, or the earth but I'll eat anything I find in a dumpster or is offered by a host.
I call on everyone benefiting from unearned privileges to stand along side poor people of color around the world and demand an end to oppression! Unite for global justice!
in peace, love, & anarchy
-joe carr
http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2005/11/redesigned-flight-93-memorial-still_30.html
It's still a monument to Islam.
Say it ain't so, Joe:
"I completely affirm Palestinians right to resist Israeli colonial occupation. Palestinians have the right to do much more than throw rocks at soldiers committing colonial genocide, and they must if they are to survive."
The formulation "have a right to..." always interests me, predominantly because it is used so loosely and haphazardly by people who usually have no idea what they are talking about. When these people talk of rights, they don't realize the ex nihilo assertiveness of their comment. Instead, they feel their statement has the force of empirical fact, a teleological truth of nature that, because of the stupidity of their strategic competitors, they must demean by saying aloud.
Questions that go unanswered:
What is a right? Is a right based in law, nature, or morality? Where do they come from?
How is the "right to resist" different from mere "ableness"? How is it different from a natural, or instinctive, imperative?
Is it always good to exercise a right? Is it always good to resist?
Are rights and responsibilities mutually exclusive?
Do Israelis have the same rights of resistance as the Palestinians, or does ability indirectly correlate with "rightness"?
If both have a right to resist and survive, how is it meaningful to speak of rights in the first place?
And finally, if it is not always a good to exercise a right (either it conflicts with other virtues, or causes a bad result), how should one approach the question of whether or not to do so? Should one look at the situation entire and make a rational, result-oriented decision (roll-back), or should one follow the passions and be guided by the lesser spirits of vengeance, self-gratification, and pride? (Would our friend Joe agree that there is a right of self-gratification? That is, in a sense, what he advocates for the Palestinians. Is this right universal, or only for the downtrodden?)
The Palestinians are not operating in a vacuum. Exercising a right, insofar as it exists, is not free of cost (it never is, just ask Hollywood). One of the effects of the Palestinian blind exercise of their right to violence has been to remove rationalism as an option for engagement. By doing this, Palestinians have forced the Israelis to treat them as reactionary units of a certain set program, instead of as human beings with which to negotiate for peace. Basically, the Palestinians have become mechanical automatons in their interaction with Israel, an input/output system of peculiar characteristics. The input of this tragic system is the reality of Israel--the precise state of its existence at a unit t of time--and the output is the Palestinian response, which is stuck on a singular value: the exercise of the Palestinian right to resist.
The latter changes the input value insofar as it changes the defensive posture of Israel, but the interesting part of this dynamic is the static nature of the output. Israel has tried on several occasions to redefine its reality in regards to the Palestinians, but the output of violence did not diminish. In fact, it increased.
The fact that Israeli concessions (redefinitions) have done nothing to stem the exercise of the Palestinian "right to violence" has left the Israelis with only three options: they can eliminate the input (Israel), eliminate the output, or eliminate the effectiveness of the output on the input. The first option means suicide, the second means genocide, and the last means withdrawal and a fence. I hope the last one works, because Israel is not going to commit suicide. That leaves option number two, and if it comes to that perhaps our friend Joe will lament that the Palestinian bag of rights will have killed its carrier.
Using the language of "rights", this is what the Palestinian issue comes down to:
If there is a wall between a man and his objective, the man has a right to push the wall as hard as he can.
He does not have a right to have the wall fall down.
This is an even better example, now, of betrayal by our elites. It also illustrates why it is so difficult to stop them.
It reminds me of The Eiger Sanction- about how difficult the (anti)heroes found the mountain Aconcagua because climbing it did not require moments of great courage and skill, but rather a plodding stubborn tenacity. There's little glory in that kind of victory.
Who wants to whine and whine and whine? Liberals. But liberals LIKE the site. The artists who made the site know this, and know conservatives will probably let it go, rather than fight a battle they find distasteful and probably can't win anyway.
Well, we could handle it like they did the Vietnam Memorial.
There were those who believed that the low wall etched with names of dead evoked shame and sorrow rather than pride and honor.
So opposite the wall they put statues of U.S soldiers depicted as they would have been in Vietnam.
Leave it the way it is described now - and in the center put statuary of Flight 93 passengers beating the ever lovin' crap out of the hijackers. Depict the heroes with determined faces and gritted teeth and the terrorists screaming in terror.
Even if it is a red crescent no one will notice with that statue there. Those who do notice the Red Crescent will be given something to ponder.
Don't treat this event as a moment of civilian sorrow.
Treat it like the raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima: as a moment of military victory.
Let it say: "WE BEAT THEM!"
This design is a rape of memory.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
There needs to be a "Let's Roll" statue. Some airline seats, populated with men and women of various emotional states, and guys charging up the aisle. The whole thing could be put in the entry. To get to the 'sacred ground', you have to walk up the plane's aisle and past the chargers. Every now and then, a recording of the "Let's roll" cry would play.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1490006/posts
Jeebus JROD,
This Joe Carr guy is at least true to his principles. As I have said before, when so called peace activists start rising up and demonstrating against Chinese tyranny, genocide in Sudan and other crimes against humanity, then they are not anti-war they are simply anti-western anarchists. Although I would gladly let Mr. Carr eat out of my trash can, my first notion would be to apply the counter-anarchist principle of reorganizing Mr. Carr’s molecules. Let entropy convert Mr. Carr’s mass into heat.
Art V: "I've never bought this 'islamic elements' stuff... Something about conspiracy theories makes them attractive - resist this one!"
Rawls' post (errortheory.blogspot.com) posits that the architect has consciously evoked themes and designs of Islamic prayer architecture.
This may or may not be true, but is subject to analysis of its many details and statistical significance.
Perhaps ArtV is overwhelmed by geometry. He could suppose instead that the trees were arranged in lines whose groupings could be read as Morse code (e.g., 1 tree for dot, 2 in close succession for dash) and that this Morse code would then read "Allahu Akhbar." The proper response to refute the post's claim wouldn't be to scream about "numerology" or "conspiracy theories," it would be to show that either:
1) The post got Morse code wrong, or made an error in "reading" the positions of the trees in the map.
2) There were many other ways of reading the trees, which would produce nonsense, and this fact, or the length of the message relative to the amount of garbled "text" means it's likely a coicidence, and not the architect's deliberate invoking of Islamic clogans.
In my example, coincidence is quite plausible if it's "Allah" in 100 letters of garble, less plausible if it's "Alahu Akhbar" among 30 nonsense characters, not at all plausible if it's "there is no god but allah and muhammad is his prophet" with no nonsense text.
So the question is, ArtV, can anyone show that there are errors in Rawl's analysis, or that the number of possible data points swamps his data,which he has cherry-picked? Such a debunking might be done, but to my knowledge no one has done it yet. And in the absence of such an analysis on anyone's part, how can Rawls' skeptics claim that his very detailed article is self-debunking, and how can they not at least admit that their skepticism is tentative?
Aristides: Key point you might add to the "rights" issue:
They do not merely want those rights.
They want IMMUNITY from the consequences of exercising those rights.
Throw rocks, but don't have soliders throw grenades back.
Speak out, but don't have anyone speak back and call you crazy, stupid, evil etc. (Hollywood types are especially good at this).
Anyway, back on toipic, read my post and find I am in rare almost-agreement with Cederford.
The basic problem with the Flight 93 memorial is that it is focused on victimhood, not the heroism that occurred that day.
The airplane did not come apart in a thunderstorm for God's sake, or have an engine blow up - some brave passengers that had the stuff of Omaha Beach in their spines forced the terrorists to put it into the ground rather than into the Capitol.
It was a brave response to an act of war, not a natural disaster.
The memorial should reflect that.
The new Memorial design does appear to concede many of the points raised by we the critics. The heinous name "Crescent of Embrace" is gone and the band trees surrounding the elipse seems to be of uniform thickness. Previously the band of trees was thickest 180 degrees away from the opening of the elipse and tapered to a point at the opening, clearly defining a crescent shape. Whether the design which is implemented is the one shown now or the one shown previously can (and will) be ascertained by over-flight after construction is finished. If there crescent has returned, I predict there will be a major uproar and hell to pay.
RWE
we could handle it like they did the Vietnam Memorial.
There were those who believed that the low wall etched with names of dead evoked shame and sorrow rather than pride and honor. So opposite the wall they put statues of U.S soldiers depicted as they would have been in Vietnam.
You are describing the Korean War Memorial. You know the forgotten war.
art v
I estimate that around half the comments on these 'flight 93 islamic crescent' blog entries are satirical trolling from people amused by the nonsensical nature of the subject, and wanting to encourage other posters into more ludicrous comments.
Yeah those neo-cons are so stupid it's easy to make them look like idiots. [/sarcasm] WRT the 'Islamist Elements' in the Flight 93 design, a red crescent and a minaret look pretty Islamist to me. It doesn't take a conspiracy, just the unconscious actions that flow from the multi-culturist creed. All cultures are of equal worth, except the dominant white, Judeo-Chrisian Western Liberal culture which oppresses all other cultures. Therefore the monument should honor both the Islamic terrorists as victims of US Imperialism, and the passengers and crew who were victims of their government's mistaken policies.
There was a small group of families of the plane's victims who had bought into the Crescent inthe first design. I can't imagine why they approved it. But I have to wonder and keep wondering why all the families of those victims of terrorists aren't screaming to high heaven about this silliness.
For myself, I'm thinking the analysis of the second design is being a little bit excrutiating, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But I just don't see anything uplifting or awesome or ANYthing good about this whole stupid bowl/crescent idea. If you look at the Park Service web-site, what the hell are those ditches of water supposed to be all about?
It looks like a Communist duck wildlife refuge, not a scream of anger and defiance like it should be. WHY would the architects even be aiming for calm and meditative water blobs???
art v
I think you miss the point. Why is it that someone can even make a plausible argument that his design has elements tying it to Islam? After all of the uproar couldn't they have completely modified all of the troubling elements enough to eliminate legitimate public concerns? After all, the public is paying for it.
Why are they wedded to the design and the architect - who clearly could not get it right the first time?
Is it really that difficult to produce a simple and unabashadly patriotic monument to some of this country's greatest heros (think Iwo Jima) that cannot be interpreted as a memorial to those who murdered them?
I don't think we should settle for this design just because the evidence of the Islamic elements is not perfect.
Re: Cedarford's 4:20 post
C4 for once I am in complete agreement with one of your posts. You didn't even have to mention jews or walmart dollars to make an excellent point.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
I like this memorial better. It's an old-fashioned, highly symbolized memorial to inspire hatred of the murderous enemy and love and patriotism for the US.
Frame the site in lines of trees forming a square aligned to the cardinal directions. Four flagstone-paved roads lead in/out from the square, making it a crossroads and a meeting place.
At each entrance, on a granite pedestal, place a large, realistically carved granite statue of an eagle eating a crying, bawling, whimpering, humiliated hijacker's liver as a terrorist leader kneels prostrate before the eagle, begging for mercy. OBL, big Z and little Z, and Khomeini would make excellent terrorist leaders for this part of the memorial. Each hijacker would get their own shameful statue. Title each statue "The Wages of Terror are Paid in Hell's Coin."
Inside, 40 pure white marble holy symbols (crosses for Christians, ankhs for new-agers, stars of david for jews, busts of darwin for atheists, question marks for agnostics, even crescent and stars if there were moslims among the heroes) with appropriate hagiographical text for each hero on the flight. Posthumously induct all forty heroes in the US Army and award them the US Army Medal of Honor. At the center of each holy symbol, embedded in clear, unbreakable resin, place the medal. Shelter each holy symbol beneath the branches of a sturdy oak tree.
Summing up, an old fashioned memorial to inspire the struggle against the most old fashioned of all possible enemies.
ed
He metaphorically already has.
Stoutfello: Nope, the Vietnam Memorial has the statues of soldiers overlooking the wall - one big piece of statuary, actually.
No one ever mentions that part of the memorial. Monogram even put out a model kit of that statue. And that is where I went when I visited the memorial, not the wall itself.
The Korean War Memoial has statues too, but completely different
RWE
Nope, the Vietnam Memorial has the statues of soldiers overlooking the wall - one big piece of statuary, actually.
No one ever mentions that part of the memorial.
I stand corrected. Obviously that part of the Vietnam War memorial didn't make a big impression on me when I was there a few years back, since I had totally forgotten about it.
Post a Comment
<< Home