MDA’s Full Circle-in-Circle Crescent Geometry Used On Several Jihadist Insignias

Flopping Aces ^ | 02-25-10 | Alec Rawls

[Starman417]

Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, insists that the striking similarity between MDA's website logo and Obama's campaign logo is just coincidence. He says the MDA logo was created for a recruiting campaign that preceded the 2008 election, which is confirmed by an October 2008 recruiting ad in MIT's campus newspaper. There it is on page 17 (large PDF warning), MDA's Obama-esque configuration of circles and crescents, complete with waves of grain:

MDA logo, left. Circles, crescents, and red-and-white waves of grain (or rocket exhaust), just like Obama's logo.

The MIT ad means that the MDA logo is not a product of the Obama administration, but that doesn't mean it is not an offshoot of the Obama logo, which was introduced in early 2007. Unless the MDA recruiting campaign goes back that far, the MDA design could still have been influenced by Obama's design, or directly created by an Obama supporter. It's hard to believe it wasn't, but unless Obama's own people had some inside influence with the logo designers at TMPgovernment (not an impossibility) any intentional similarity would be a product of the designers' own initiative, not the Obama team's orchestration. Big deal. Obama can't help what his supporters do.

More worrisome is how a branch of the Department of Defense can overlook the overt Islamic symbol shape

The classic Islamic crescent (based on later flags of the Ottoman Empire) is defined by its circular inner and outer arcs. Contrast this to a crescent moon, which has an elliptical inner arc (when projected onto two dimensions). Several jihadist organizations use a full circle-in-circle crescent in their insignias, just like the one in the MDA logo.

Here is the insignia of The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine:

Read more at floppingaces.net...

[piasa]

The artist goofed if he was trying to represent space-- the rocket plume should trail off and disappear behind the earth, not behind "space," as if the night sky is a solid object dense enough to cover the trail. That the artist didn't do this could indicate the artist was not thinking of this region as being negative space but rather, an object, a crescent. Or it could mean the artist wasn't thinking at all.

Modern logo design, like everything else impactred by rampant political correctness, is so bland, abstract and devoid of meaning that it all looks the same and can be interpreted any way people want.

They could solve the problem by simply making the outer boundary of the logo in some other shape than a circle and by having the trail disappear where it logically should- behind the planet. An outer boundary shaped like a traditional heraldic shield would be appropriate and the crescent effect would disappear.

[SmartInsight]

Key question: WHY adopt this new logo for MDA NOW?

This was a recent change.

[livius]

The artist didn’t goof, because he was representing exactly what he was told (even covertly) to represent. Well, on second thought, maybe he goofed by being too obvious about it...