Posted on 07/25/2007 8:14:17 AM PDT by Bladerunnuh
I suggest the memorial be a giant finger pointed at Mecca.
And we don’t bother rebuilding the WTC.
“If you face into the crescent”.
You know, you can walk to any place in the world, look at any building, and if I THEN get to tell you which direction to look at the building, you’ll be looking at Mecca.
Why not “looking OUT of the crescent”? Why not “on a line joining the two end points of the crescent?” Or “if you picture the crescent as a clock with 12-o’clock facing out, and turn to where the minute hand would be at the time the plane crashed, you are looking right at Mecca”?
My point is that no matter HOW the thing was laid out, someone could have provided a direction that would have it “pointing to Mecca”.
Lord Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts, incorporated the use of the swastika as a good luck symbol or a reward for doing well. Of course, that got dropped late in the ‘30s.
The swastika was also an Indian symbol for friendship.
“Pick a personality and stick with it, you know? Are you Christians or snake-oil salesmen?”
Please note that WND.com is supported by ads and sales.
While I wish it, FR.com and others were endowed, they are not. UI agree that WND would benefit from no ads. BArring a benefactor, I choose the ads over no WND.
Farah is going a wonderful job of reaching many millions of people. I suggest that you discount his positive influence becasue of mere esthetics.
Ads may be obnoxious, but no WND would be far worse. Why? Because WND has numbers like Rush.
First, the crescent is an islamic symbol. The architect, as an artist familiar with the use of symbolism to achieve an overall message, was well aware of the religious connection. Also, the design is not simply a crescent, but a crescent with a small cluster of trees between its points; the trees serve no stated purpose in the design, yet they are located in precisely the same poistion as the star used in the Islamic flag.
Second, the entrance building is a tower-shaped structure called the “Tower of Voices”, analagous to a minaret (”tower of calling” of a mosque) with a color scheme similar to those favored by mesopotamian and other mosques.
Lastly, that the memorial is geometrically aligned so as to face Mecca is mathematically demonstrable. Given the wide range of other directions the architect could have chosen, many with traditional Western symbolic values, this cannot be an accident. You can check this out for yourself. The orientation of the believer to Mecca is the Qibla. There are several Quibla calculators on the web. According to this site, the latitude/longitude coordinates of Mecca are 21.4234, 39.8262 and the coordinates of the Flight 93 crash site are 40.052, -78.8963. Using the calculator from this site, you can determine that the azimuth between the two points is 124.80°.
Next, go to the Flight 93 National Memorial website and get the biggest overhead view of the memorial you can find with north oriented up. A measurement of the distance from tip-to-tip of the crescent shows 64px east-west and 90px north-south. The arctangent of 64/90 is the angle between north and a line drawn between the tips, which works out to 35.42°. Adding 90° to this angle gives the direction the crescent faces as 125.42°. Conclusion: the crescent points towards Mecca with an error of 0.62°, or 0.17%.
Trying to equate the fact that you can walk into any building and face Mecca with the FACTS surrounding the design of this memorial is an excercise in absurdity. Moreover, the statements made by the architect that the “Crescent of Embrace” was purposefully designed to be a place of reconciliation between America and Islam show this entire excercise at face value... liberal pacifism by the blame-America-first crowd.
Did they change the number of glass sculptures to represent just the passengers and not the terrorists?
Since someone else said there was a WALL where the star would be, I have to wonder about the “trees” argument.
A semi-circle is a semi-circle. Did the original design meet some precise measurement of arc that matched the crescent, and do you know what that angle is?
Why would someone wanting the crescent to “face mecca” actually put it so it faces AWAY from mecca? And .62 degrees isn’t a very exact match, not that you’d really know one way or the other given it’s an artist rendering, and the semi-circle is formed by trees so unless you measure the trunk you don’t know how many degrees will be covered by the branch outgrowths.
No matter what direction it faced, I could give you a way to measure the crescent that would point to mecca. That was my point, not that you can “always face mecca”. Unless you can find a verse in the Koran that implies significance of a crescent facing away from mecca, it’s just another fascinating but irrelevant piece of information to me.
The concerns of those who thought it was too much like a crescent had effect, as it now is clearly a semi-circle (although I think the prior design was more inviting, the semi-circle gives me a feeling of claustrophobia).
There are several ways of dealing with this:
The woman on the right with green scarf over her head looks a lot like Karen Hughes.
Yep. In fact Kipling's use of it as a good luck symbol, led to allegations that he had been a nazi symp.
I have a mother-of-pearl stickpin that I inherited from my grandfather with a swastika on it. He wore it at his wedding in 1911. I keep it in the same box as the Nazi party button my uncle took from a dead German in WWII.
It’s also a pretty common symbol in Bhuddism; you see it all over Korea.
actually the diagrams which showed the orientation to mecca to be so perfect as to be impossible to have been done in error.
It is an intentional and contumacious effort to dis the united states and celebrate those who are attempting to kill the USA.
From the more recent stories the chances are mere fluff and lip service.
the fact that the story came from WND is irrelevant (broken clock and all that) since the alegations were so EASILY confirmed.
Where’s the hammer?
The Memorial should be in the shape of a U.S. star, not a Muslim symbol.
Americans need to get mad - VERY MAD and STAY MAD. We need to kindle the fire that brought down Harriet Miers, the Dubai Port Deal and the Amnesty bill to DEMAND and INSIST that this politically correct crap be stopped, that western civillization NOT be placed in cultural equivalency to any other, that the “Peaceful Religion” be acknowledged as the death cult it is, and that our borders be protected against illegal invaders.
What I can’t believe is the sheer arogance fo the oversight committee.
It is like the WTC rebuild is basically all the headuptherectum artsy types who did not like the original WTC towers trying to get revenge.
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