EPA comment period closes Tues: tell ‘em no state-establishment of CO2-phobic religion

Only a couple more days to let the EPA know what you think of its proposed war against CO2. Just click on the little yellow “add comments” balloon. The following is a comment (ending at “sincerely”) that you can copy and paste. (If you choose to roll your own, feel free to leave it here too.)

Dear EPA:

There is overwhelming statistical evidence that the primary driver of natural temperature change is solar-magnetic activity, yet the solar flux is completely omitted as an influence on climate in all four IPCC assessments and in the Obama administration’s new “Climate Change Impacts in the United Sates” report. This omission is rationalized on grounds that the existing theories of how solar activity affects climate are still formative. The scientific method rejects this rationalization. Observational evidence is supposed to trump theory, not vice versa, but IPCC is using theory (its distrust of existing theories of the mechanism by which solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature), as an excuse for ignoring the overwhelming evidence that solar-magnetic DOES drive global temperature. Not all religions are anti-scientific, but the demonstrably anti-scientific nature of CO2 alarmism proves that it IS religion, not science.

EPA regulations are supposed to be science based. Imposing restrictions based on an anti-scientific religious doctrine would not just violate the EPA’s mandate, but would violate the constitutional prohibition on state establishment of religion.

Solar-magnetic warming: theory and evidence

The sunspot-temperature theory is actually looking pretty solid. A strong solar-magnetic flux is known to shield the earth from high energy cosmic rays which otherwise, according to the theory of Henrik Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, would ionize the atmosphere, seeding cloud formation. Thus the solar wind in effect blows the clouds away, giving the earth a sunburn.

Whatever the precise mechanism, researchers have found that solar-magnetic activity “explains” statistically about 60-80 percent of global temperature change on all time scales going back hundreds of millions of years. On the millennial time scale, see the seminal 1991 paper by Christensen and Lassen (“Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate”) and the 2003 isotope study by Usoskin et al (“Solar activity over the last 1150 yrs: does it correlate with climate?”), which found: “a correlation coefficient of about .7 - .8 at a 94% - 98% confidence level.”

For longer time scales, see the 2003 paper by Shaviv and Veiser (“Celestial driver of Phranerozoic climate?”), which found that found that the cosmic ray flux explains statistically about 75% of global temperature variation over the last 550 million years.

Omitted variable fraud

Solar activity was at “grand maximum” levels from 1940 and 2000 which, given the historical correlation between solar activity and temperature, could easily explain most or all late 20th century warming. When the IPCC and others omit the solar-magnetic variable from their models, any warming effect of solar activity gets misattributed to whatever correlated variables ARE included in their models.

By sheer coincidence, CO2 reached its own “grand maximum” levels (at least compared to the rest of the Holocene) in the second half of the 20th century. Thus in the alarmist models, whatever warming effect the omitted solar-magnetic variable is responsible for gets misattributed to CO2.

You can find rationalizations for this omitted-variable fraud in every IPCC report. For instance, section 6.11.2.2 of the Third Assessment Report does not question the correlation between solar activity and climate, but dismisses the cosmic-ray cloud THEORY as too speculative to include in their climate models:

At present there is insufficient evidence to confirm that cloud cover responds to solar variability.

But they don’t just leave solar-magnetic activity out of their models. Because their forecasts are based entirely on their climate models, they also leave solar magnetic effects completely out of their climate forecasts, despite knowing that there is SOME mechanism (even if the cosmic-ray/cloud theory turns out to be wrong) by which solar-magnetic activity is the primary driver of global temperature.

The only solar variable they do include is solar output or Total Solar Insolation (from long to short-wave radiation), which does not include the solar-magnetic flux. The Fourth Assessment Report does the same thing, looking only at TSI, as do all of the analyses that follow from these reports. For instance, if you look at he “Natural Influences” subsection of the Obama administration’s new report, you will see on page 16 that the only natural influence listed is “solar output’ (or TSI), which is why it is shown graphically to be so tiny.

Solar output is close to constant over the solar cycle (less than 0.1% variation), which is why it is called “the solar constant.” Because TSI is nearly constant, it cannot account for the many thousands of years of close correlation between solar activity and temperature. That must be coming from the one solar variable that DOES vary with solar activity: the solar magnetic flux. Every IPCC climate scientist knows this, yet they still omit the solar-magnetic variable.

Proof of omission: page 16 graphic from the June 2009 report by U.S. Global Change Research Program (in effect, the NOAA). The only natural warming effect listed is total solar output, which does not include the solar-magnetic flux. Similar graphics can be found in each of the IPCC’s assessment reports, where this analysis originates.

Religion, not science

When the alarmists omit solar-magnetic effects on the grounds that they are not satisfied with with existing theories of HOW these effects work, they are not just committing statistical fraud, but they are contradicting the very definition of science. Observation (the overwhelming correlation between solar activity and global temperature) is supposed to trump theory, not vice versa.

Consider an analogy. Until Einstein developed his theory of general relativity there was no good theory of gravity. Newton had a description of the gravitational force (that it diminishes by the inverse of the square of the distance) but nobody had any sensible account for the mechanism by which massive objects were drawn to each other. Applying the standards of the IPCC, a pre-Einsteinian or pre-Newtonian scientist should have forecast that when a stone is released in the air, it would waft away on the breeze. After all, we understand the force that the breeze imparts on the stone, but we don’t understand this thing called gravity, so we should not include it, even though we observe that heavy objects fall.

That is not science, and neither is CO2 alarmism. Data is supposed to trump Theory. By using theory (the proclaimed insufficiency of solar-magnetic theory) as an excuse to ignore the evidence (where solar activity is known to somehow warm the climate), warming alarmism perverts the scientific method.

That makes it religion in the constitutionally barred sense. Not only is this belief system embraced by millions of people WITHOUT EVIDENCE, but it is embraced in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Alarmism about CO2 is not just a religion, it is a demonstrably irrational religion, equivilant to believing that rocks will waft away on the breeze.

EPA is supposed to make science-based rulings. If you regulate CO2 based on demonstrably anti-scientific ideology, it will be an unconstitutional state establishment of religion.

The current cooling trend fits the solar-magnetic theory, not the CO2 theory

All of the major temperature records show that the earth’s average temperature has been falling for ten years now (with the 21 year smoothed temperature falling for five). In this period, CO2 has continued to increase, while the sun has descended into a prolonged solar minimum. This turn in the sun (breaking the coincidental correlation between solar activity and CO2 that existed for the previous 70 years), is rapidly unmasking the hoax of anthropogenic global warming.

It should not take a rare astrological event to unmask an obvious statistical and scientific fraud. Will the EPA now destroy its reputation by codifying the “green” religion at the very moment when the heavens themselves are exposing its dishonesty? If you choose this course, you will be destroying the nation’s economy and the lives of your countrymen in the service of your own anti-scientific religious beliefs, in violation of your oath of office.

Sincerely,

On the subject of state established religion

This is also the subject of our blogbursts, trying to stop the Flight 93 Memorial Project from stamping a giant Mecca-oriented crescent on the graves our murdered heroes:

A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed arch shape, but the architypical mihrab is crescent shaped.)

The Crescent of Embrace memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque, replete with a full complement of typical mosque features, like the minaret-like Tower of Voices that has an Islamic shaped crescent on top and turns out to be a year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial.

Outcry over the apparent Islamic symbolism forced the Park Service to make changes. They promised that they would remove the Islamic symbol shapes, but they never did. They call it a broken circle now, but the circle is broken in the exact same places as before.

The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

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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, Chairman Burl Osborne, 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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Obama’s filing against 9/11 families: so bad it’s good

Bizarre amicus brief totally demolishes the Second Circuit’s dismissal of the families’ suit, then replaces it with the most mendacious stupidity imaginable. Now the Supreme Court will HAVE to hear the case, just to avoid the implication that it accepted this garbage.

9/11 families were stunned this week to learn that President Obama is asking the Supreme Court NOT to review their effort to recover damages from the government of Saudia Arabia and from several Saudi princes for funding al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on America. That the defendants did funnel vast sums of money to al Qaeda was accepted as a given by the appellate court, as was the fact that al Qaeda was known to be dedicated to and engaged in violent attacks against America. So what was the Obama administration’s reason for siding with the Saudis?

Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s amicus brief to the Supreme Court had to admit that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals erred in its grounds for denying the suit against the Saudi princes. No, the fact that the princes did not actually direct the al Qaeda attack on the United States does not relieve them of liability for attacks that they funded. The precedent on this is clear. As long as the defendant knew “that the brunt of the injury” from his tortious act would be felt in America, then:

… he must ‘reasonably anticipate being haled into court there’ to answer for his actions. [Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 790. Cited on Kagan’s p. 18.]

Nevertheless, said Kagan, she could think of a way around the appellate court’s utter failure to get the heart of the case right. The families’ suit falls under the 1976 FSIA law that establishes exceptions to the principle of sovereign immunity. This law does not allow jury trials. Thus while the appellate court was clearly wrong to say that the suit should not be heard, Kagan suggests that there are snippets in the ruling that can be read as the appellate court acting in its role of trier of fact, and thus ruling against the families for providing insufficient evidence.

In other words, instead of seeing the Second Circuit as rejecting the basis of the suit, we should see them as accepting the suit, and ruling against it on the substance. To make her argument that the appellate court actually did try the facts, she quotes the Second Circuit’s statement that:

Conclusory allegations that [Prince Turki] donated money to charities, without specific factual allegations that he knew they were funneling money to terrorists, do not suffice.

But of course the families DID marshal reasons why Turki could be expected to know that his donations were going to al Qaeda, as indicated by the appellate court’s further statements that there was no personal jurisdiction even if the defendants did “know that their money would be diverted to al Qaeda,” or were “aware of Osama bin Laden’s public announcements of jihad against the United States.” (Cited in the families’ reply brief, p.8, and in Kagan’s brief, p. 19, respectively.)

For Kagan to pretend that the Second Circuit acted as a sufficient trier of fact, when it explicitly asserted that the facts don’t matter, is just an attempt to mislead the Court. The evidence that the Saudi Princes knew they were funding al Qaeda has yet to be considered by U.S. courts, even though Kagan herself admits that if they did know, they should be held liable.

The families respond

Of course the families are angry that Obama is blocking their access to the courts, despite their legitimate claims under U.S. law:

The Administration’s filing mocks our system of justice and strikes a blow against the public’s right to know the facts about who financed and supported the murder of 3,000 innocent people. It undermines our fight against terrorism and suggests a green light to terrorist sympathizers the world over that they can send money to al Qaeda without having to worry that they will be held accountable in the U.S. Courts for the atrocities that result. …

The Administration’s filing is all the more troubling in that it expressly acknowledges that the courts below applied incorrect legal standards in dismissing the Saudi defendants, but nonetheless argues that the case — one that seeks to account for the terrorist attacks against America and the murder of our family members — does not warrant the Supreme Court’s time.

This at the same time as Obama insists that al Qaeda operatives held at Guantanamo Bay must be granted access to U.S. courts. Concocted rights for terrorists, yes. Following the law for the victims of terrorism, no.

On Saudi state liability, Kagan again misleads to the point of outright dishonesty

Here too, Kagan is forced to start out by noting that the grounds on which the Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the families’ claims is not valid. The circuit court held that damages for terrorist acts have to be brought under the FSIA law’s special exception for terrorist acts, which requires that the state defendant be designated by the State Department as a terror supporting state. Since Saudi Arabia has not been so designated, suit cannot be brought under this provision, end of case.

Wrong, as Kagan herself explains:

Congress’s concern was not to impose new limits on the domestic tort exception, but instead to expand jurisdiction to cover a narrow class of claims based on conduct abroad. See, e.g., H.R. Rep. No. 702, 103d Cong., 2d Sess. 3, 5 (1994) (explaining that the bill would “expand” jurisdiction to include claims by an American who is grievously mistreated abroad by a foreign government”).

This was necessary because the domestic tort exception only applies to injuries that occur on U.S. territory. Specifically, the domestic exception allows suit when:

1605(a)(5) - money damages are sought against a foreign state for personal injury or death, or damage to or loss of property, occurring in the United States and caused by the tortious act or omission of that foreign state.

In the wake of the Iranian hostage taking in Tehran, Congress wanted designated terror-supporting states to be liable for harms that they inflict on Americans even on their own territory, but this in no way was supposed to limit suit over harms that occur within the United States, such as the 9/11 murders.

Confronted with this obviously wrong ruling by the Second Circuit, Kagan again tries to cobble together an alternative grounds for granting Saudi immunity. To fullfill this improbable command from above, she decides to flat-out lie about precedent, big bald astounding lies.

Torturing “tortious”

Notice that the language of the domestic tort exception is perfectly clear that what has to occur inside the United States is the personal injury or death, not the decision that leads to the personal injury or death. Suppose that the home office of a state owned shipping company decides to scrimp on safety equipment for its cargo vessels, leading to loss of American lives when cargo is offloaded in an American port. This is exactly the kind of thing that FSIA was intended to cover, but Kagan pretends otherwise, arguing that not only the tort (the harm), but also the “tortious act or omission” that creates the harm, have to take place inside the United States.

In many cases there is no separation between the harm and the act that creates it. They both occupy the same time and place. Neither does the language of torts typically distinguish between the tort and the tortious act. Instead, the tortious act is seen as being realized when the tort (the harm) actually occurs. Kagan’s ploy is to try to make a distinction between the tort and the “tortious act” that leads to it, and she is able to come up with some out-of-context references to make it sound as if precedent demands that both the harm and the decision-making that leads to the harm have to occur here in America.

She claims, for instance, that:

In Amerada Hess, the Court considered and rejected the argument that domestic effects of a foreign state’s conduct abroad satisfy the exception. 488 U.S. at 441.

Applied to the current case, she is clearly suggesting that the “domestic effect” corresponds to the 9/11 attacks, and that the “conduct abroad” corresponds to the statutorily required “tortuous act or omission” that in both cases took place outside of U.S. territory. A look at the actual Supreme Court ruling, however, shows this to be a gross misrepresentation of Ameranda Hess.

Looking up Argentine Republic v. Amerada Hess Shipping Corp. and turning to p. 441 we find what the case was actually about:

In this case, the injury to respondents’ ship occurred on the high seas some 5,000 miles off the nearest shores of the United States. Despite these telling facts, respondents nonetheless claim that the tortious attack on the Hercules occurred “in the United States.”

In other words, it was the harm itself that in this case did not occur within U.S. territory. Contrary to Kagan’s representation, the Court was NOT making a distinction between the harm and decision that led to it and claiming that both had to occur within the United States.

This kind of blatant misrepresentation of precedent is lawlessness! Is this how the Obama administration treats precedent? As fodder for utterly dishonest word games? YES.

To preserve its own reputation, SCOTUS will have to hear the families’ case

The Supreme Court asked the Obama administration to submit this brief. It cannot be ignored. If SCOTUS accepts guidance from this contemptuous document, then it is implicated in the Obama administration’s contempt for the law.

If the sheer perversity of Kagan’s filing does force the Court to hear the families’ case, that would be a great outcome, but the downside risk is equally amplified. If the Court DOES accept Kagan’s guidance, it is a black black day for America.

Meretricious cites and arguments dominate every paragraph of Kagan’s brief, except in two place: where she shoots down the Second Circuit’s patently errant grounds for dismissal. It almost seems like she started with a brief in support of the families’ suit before getting the order from Obama to side with the Saudis. Apparently she decided that it was fruitless to try to support the Second Circuit’s reasoning, so she let the demolition of the Second Circuit’s ruling stand, then supplied her own just as bad case for Saudi immunity.

However it came about, Kagan’s destruction of the Second Circuit ruling is so competent, and her substitute arguments for immunity so incompetent, that the whole almost seems designed to force a Supreme Court hearing. Could she have intentionally sabotaged her own brief? Doubtful, given that the Obama DOJ just overruled its own career lawyers in order to drop an already won case against three New Black Panthers who were caught on tape using weapons to intimidate voters. Apparently the Obama administration just really is this stupid and malicious.

In any case, it seems unlikely that Kagan’s shenanigans will get past the justices. Antonin Scalia is unlikely to forget the FISA case opinion he wrote in 1992, addressing the very question of harms resulting in the United States from decisions made by foreign entities in their home countries. His conclusion? In a breach of contract case where the only tie to the United States was the option of receiving payment in dollars in New York City, the Court denied immunity. Only the harm itself had to take place on U.S. territory, not the decisions that led to the harm, and the opinion was unanimous.

Obama’s imperial presidency: he does not want to be bound by the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, and says so

The family group states directly that:

The filing was political in nature and stands as a betrayal of everyone who lost a loved one or was injured on September 11, 2001.

Indeed, the entire first section of Kagan’s brief is replete with claims that exceptions to sovereign immunity should be determined politically.

That is the way it used to be, before Congress passed the FSIA act specifically in order to take these determinations out of the political realm. The United States only started granting any exceptions to the legal tradition of sovereign immunity in the 1950’s, after some nation-states started getting heavily involved in commerce. If state enterprises could not be held liable in U.S. courts, they would have a competitive advantage over private industry. Not smart policy during the cold-war contest between capitalism and communism.

Exceptions were at first made on a case by case basis by the executive, but such arbitrariness does not suit the needs of commerce, so Congress made an explicit decision to take this power away from the executive. Even so, Kagan’s brief hints over and over (p. 4-10) that executive prerogative should still hold sway, but without ever making an explicit case that FSIA intrudes on the inherent powers of the presidency, and without ever stating what the president would want to do with those powers in the present case if the court were to recognize them as pre-eminent.

The reason Kagan doesn’t make these things explicit is because they are damning. Obama knows that the Saudi’s are liable under U.S. law, but for his own political reasons he does not want them to be held liable, but neither does want the nation to understand that he considers currying favor with the people who attacked us on 9/11 to be more important than justice for his own murdered countrymen.

The president does indeed have some inherent power here, just as President Bush had inherent power to wiretap conversations with al Qaeda operatives both at home and abroad, regardless of what Congress put in the FISA wiretapping law. Bush did abide by FISA, but he didn’t have to.*

Obama is going further. He does not want to abide by FSIA, but is unwilling to make the case that the particular exemption from FSIA that he is asking for is a legitimate exercise of his inherent powers, or even assert what he would do with that power. He just wants the courts to do his dirty work for him, asking them to grant immunity to the Saudis based on bogus claims about FSIA law and precedent.

Conservative justices might be tempted to recognize the president’s inherent powers in the area of foreign policy, but they should not let him exercise this power on false pretenses. If he wants to claim that he has the inherent power to grant immunity to the Saudis and that this is how he wants to exercise that power, he can do it publicly, but he should not be allowed to overrule Congress on the pretense that he is doing the will of Congress.

To allow this subterfuge would destroy fundamental FSIA precedents while failing to attain the virtue of the pre-FSIA regime, where the president had to stand or fall by his explicitly political decision-making. If Obama wants to invoke the inherent power of the presidency here, he at the very least has to be willing to admit it.

* FISA court precedent on inherent powers

The powers of Congress to regulate in an area where the president has his own inherent authority was addressed by the FISA court in September 2002:

The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. It was incumbent upon the court, therefore, to determine the boundaries of that constitutional authority in the case before it. We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.

The contrast to the present case is instructive. Bush’s Solicitor General Ted Olson did not hide the fact that President Bush wanted the court to recognize his inherent authority to conduct signals intelligence. With that power duly recognized, Bush still went the last mile to conform to the law as enacted by Congress. That is what it means to “uphold our fundamental principles and values,” while Obama, who keeps accusing President Bush of failing to uphold our values, engages in legal subterfuge, showing as much contempt for the law as for our 9/11 families.

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Two Memorial Project Commission members quit over the Project’s bad behavior

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 whateve rhey 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.

Whe 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 terrorists:

“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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Moral Muslims don’t want a memorial to the terrorists on the Flight 93 crash site

Thanks to Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims against Sharia–Islamic Reform Movement, for his press release in support of Tom Burnett Sr.’s efforts to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent atop his son’s grave.

Islamic Reform Movement is clear eyed on the problem:

We all know who the enemy is. It’s Islamic radicals who are guided by the ideology of Islamic supremacy. Just as Nazis were guided by the ideology of Aryan supremacy. The only difference is that Gihadis consider it their religious duty to impose Islam all over the world and many of them yearn to die (and kill) for Allah. They use lines from the Koran such as “kill them [infidels] wherever you find them” or “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” as their guiding principles.

Islam needs to be reformed so that it rejects supremacism and violent conquest, but trying reform Islam is a difficult and dangerous business:

Islamic radicals murder more Muslims than Christians, Jews, Hindus and everybody else combined. Gihadis may hate you for being infidels. But they really hate us for not following their demented dogma.

In this struggle for the soul of Islam, the last thing that moral Muslims want is any kind of victory for the supremacists, never mind a mind-boggling symbolic victory over the heroes of Flight 93:

What possible reason could be there for including anything Islamic or anything even resembling an Islamic symbol into Flight 93 Memorial? Inclusion of Islamic symbols memorializes murderers who brought down the plane and is tantamount to spitting in the faces of victims and their families. United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked in 2001. Let’s not allow hijacking of Flight 93 Memorial in 2008.

Muslims know all about facing Mecca for prayer

One of the difficulties in getting people to understand the significance of the Mecca-orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is that it all seems so esoteric, and if it is esoteric, how important can it be?

Witness Allahpundit, who as Michelle Malkin’s pointman on this issue ought to be one of our strongest allies. Instead, he dismisses all concern about Islamic symbolism (effectively dismissing Michelle’s original concern about the giant crescent, which remains completely intact in the “broken circle” redesign), on the grounds that: “if you need a protractor to properly express your outrage, you’ve probably gone too far.”

We don’t need a protractor to express our outrage. We need a protractor to explain what architect Paul Murdoch did. He built the world’s largest mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial will be the world’s largest mosque by a factor of a hundred. The gigantic Sacred Mosque in Mecca would fit four times over inside Murdoch’s 3000 foot wide crescent, which is just the centerpiece of Murdoch’s mosque.

Orientation on Mecca is THE central symbol of Islam, together with the crescent shape. Unlike Allahpundit, Khalim knows these things:

The shape of the “broken circle” resembles a crescent moon. So does the shape of the tower. Crescent moon is the most recognizable Islamic symbol. When we pray, we face Mecca and Mosques are traditionally built to face Mecca. The case could be made that the proposed design is aligned in North-Easterly direction, which corresponds with Qiblah, a direction to Mecca. Conventional wisdom would dictate that since Mecca is located to the South-East of Somerset, Qiblah cannot possibly have a North-Easterly direction. This assumption would be correct if you’re using a flat map. However, if you take a globe, place pins on locations of Somerset and Mecca, and connect those pins with a string, you’ll see that the string at the base of the Somerset pin points North-East. This symbolism may not be noticeable to a non-Muslim, and it is also possible, but likely improbable that the designer is ignorant of its significance. The proposed design would be perfect for EgyptAir 990 memorial. But for United 93 memorial, it is simply unacceptable.

Allahpundit is just being careless, but the willful blindness of the Park Service is foundational

The Memorial Project is committed to the idea that Islam was also hijacked on 9/11. To them, blaming Islam would be as bad as blaming the hijacked passengers and crew. Thus the possibility of hostile Islamic intent cannot be contemplated, no matter how high the “coincidences” pile.

According to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird, the Memorial Project participants all know that the Crescent of Embrace does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (despite the Memorial Project’s many public denials). They just assume it has to be a coincidence, just as they assume it is a coincidence that the Sacred Ground Plaza sits almost exactly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent-and-star flag.

(Both of these almost-exact Islamic symbol shapes also contain exact Islamic symbol shapes. Remove the symbolically broken-off parts of the giant crescent and what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11 is a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. In the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag is a separate upper section of Memorial Wall, centered on the centerline of the giant crescent, that will be inscribed with the 9/11 date.)

Backers of the crescent design chose it specifically as a symbol of healing and outreach, implicitly to the Islamic world. Having been so generous to Islam, they just can’t believe that a hidden al Qaeda sympathizer could be so ungenerous as to take advantage of their outreach by sneaking a memorial to the terrorists past their noses. They just can’t believe that anyone could actually want to hijack Flight 93!

This refusal to acknowledge evidence of hostile Islamic intent stabs at the heart of what Islamic reformers like Khalim are trying to accomplish.

How to distinguish a moral Muslim from an Islamic supremacist

Being knowledgeable about Islam, moral Muslims recognize (as bin Laden’s followers do) that Osama bin Laden is a perfectly orthodox Wahabbist, using traditional means of violence and deception to pursue the traditional Islamic objective of world domination. The difference is that moral Muslims reject the totalitarian methods and objectives of established Islam. Moral Muslims recognize that traditional Islamic orthodoxy needs to be reformed.

Textually, the opportunities for reform are very propitious. The Koran contains both sweeping calls to violence (9.05, 9.29) , and sweeping calls for tolerance (2.256, 109). To turn these diverse commands into a religion of violent conquest, every major school of Islamic interpretation, both Sunni and Shiite, considers the peaceful verses of the Koran to be expunged via the doctrine of “abrogation.” Where different verses can be seen to contradict each other, the doctrine of abrogation holds the earlier verses to be abrogated and replaced by the later verses.

The peaceful verses are all early verses, so as far as traditional Islam is concerned, they don’t even exist, except as a device for deceiving infidels into believing that Islam is a “religion of peace.”

This doctrine of abrogation flies in the face of the Koran’s own insistence that it contains no contradictions (4.82), and that nothing is abrogated (2.106). Textually, traditional Islam does not have a leg to stand on, but anyone who points it out is subject to the traditional Sharia death penalty for blasphemy. Alternatively, in a Wahabbist specialty called “taking takfir,” such heretical interpretations constitute apostasy, another death penalty crime in every major school of Islamic interpretation.

The Koran repeats dozens of times over that those who forget the words of Moses will burn in Hell forever (e.g. 2.75, 3.187, 5.13, 13.25, 15.90, 16.63). This is repeated so many times because it is Muhammad’s accusation against the Jews: that they twist the “allegorical parts” of the Torah (3.07). But the LEAST allegorical part of the Torah is the Ten Commandments. Thus according to the Koran, the 6th Commandment–Thou shalt not murder–is binding on Muslims.

Murder is any killing that is not in defense against either a violent attack or a conspiracy to violent attack, and there is no clearer case of murder than the traditional Islamic death penalty for apostates, who only want to go their own way. The same goes for blasphemy. To kill someone for challenging doctrine is MURDER. If the Koran really is the word of God, then every traditional Muslim in the entire world who supports established Sharia law is “wood for the fire.”

Whether Islamic reformers are out to save the lives of those who would be murdered, or out to save the souls of the murderers, they are engaged in a great contest with perhaps the greatest evil the world has ever known: a RELIGION of evil. All they need to do to win is expose the truth: that traditional Islam is in systematic violation of the Koran’s own most fundamental commandments, yet to expose this truth they must break through the teeth of traditional Islam’s strength: its totalitarian repression of dissent. In short, all they have to do is bring truth to the most psychologically brutalized people in the history of the planet.

What could be worse, in a battle like this, than to see the land of liberty–the great haven from which truth can be spoken–build a gigantic terrorist-memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site?

No helping hand from the land of the free

If this willful blindness prevails, it will be a clear signal that in the battle to wrest Islam from the grasp of evil, America will not help. By following the morally blind idea that goodwill to Islam means having a see-no-evil attitude toward Islam, America is refusing to witness what moral Muslims are trying to expose: that the worst evils–condemned to the fire many times over by the Koran itself–thrive at the heart of Islamic institutions.

That evil heart is what throbs, a half-mile across, in the crescent memorial to Flight 93, and the refusal of our own Park Service, fully alert to all the facts, to witness this evil is the worst possible betrayal, not just of America, but of the good people in the Islamic world as well. A see-no-evil attitude towards Islam is NOT goodwill. It emboldens the worst in Islam at the expense of the best. To help the good against the bad, we have to distinguish the good from the bad.

The good are those who are trying to reform Islam. The bad are those who pretend that traditional Islam orthodoxy is already peaceful, and deny that reform is necessary.

Muslims against Sharia has a facebook group, if anyone wants to join. Check out the Islamic Reform Movement website here.

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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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Written by Alec Rawls from Error Theory, the author of “Crescent of Betrayal”.

Senator Specter’s payoff for betraying his party: betrayal of his state

We now know one of the payoffs that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter received for being one of three Republican Senators who allowed President Obama’s trillion-dollar Spendulus bill to become law. WPXI in Pittsburgh reports that Specter has a 5.5 million dollar earmark for the crescent-shaped Flight 93 memorial in the omnibus spending bill just passed by the Senate.

Much as the people of Pennsylvania want to see a fitting memorial built, they yanked support for the crescent design in August 2007 after Tom Burnett Sr., father of Flight 93 hero Tom Jr., started warning the country that the memorial design is STILL packed to the gills with Islamic symbolism. Since that time the Memorial Project has hardly raised a dime, and a September 2007 interview with State Senator Jane Orie, who sponsors the Hearts of Steel memorial fund, makes clear that concerns about Islamic symbolism predominate. Here is her exchange with Pittsburgh talk-radio host Fred Honsberger:

Orie: “No matter who it is, and no matter where I went today for 9/11 events, everybody brought up this crescent. Whether it is intentional or not, it is disturbing to people.”

Honsberger: “So everyone is bringing it up to you.”

Orie: “Absolutely.”

Orie is talking here about the so-called “redesign.” The people of Pennsylvania know that the giant crescent, which the redesign was supposed to remove, is still there. The Park Service calls it “Circle of Embrace” now, but the circle is still broken, and the unbroken part of the circle——what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11——remains exactly as it was in the original Crescent of Embrace (pictured above). Architect Paul Murdoch’s design is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

Pennsylvanians have voted with their pocketbooks to reject this memorial to the terrorists, but Arlen Specter is determined to cram it down their throats anyway, the same way he helped Obama cram a trillion dollars of socialist pork down America’s throat.

Specter knows better than any other politician not just that the giant Islamic-shaped crescent is still there, but that it points to Mecca

Our group was actually very hopeful back in 2007 that Senator Specter might put and end to the memorial debacle. After Mr. Burnett’s public appeal, Specter’s office wanted a briefing on the Islamic symbolism that we have found in the crescent design. One of our most knowledgeable people then spent 45 minutes with Stan Caldwell, Executive Director of Senator Specter’s Pittsburgh office, explaining in detail the Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism.

Caldwell had no trouble understanding our graphical proof that the giant crescent points almost exactly at Mecca:

A person standing between the tips of the Crescent of Embrace and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing within two degrees of the Muslim prayer direction (qibla), which is calculated as the great circle direction to Mecca. (Green qibla graphic produced by the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. Another calculator is available at QiblaLocator.com.)

Caldwell also had no trouble understanding that the giant crescent is still there. All the redesign did was place an extra arc of trees out behind the mouth of the crescent, an arc of trees that according to the Park Service’s own website explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle:

Animation starts with the bare naked Crescent of Embrace. The re-colored Circle of Embrace site plan is superimposed on top, then everything but the changes are removed. The only change is extra arc of trees (flashing) that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact.

Our man also explained the significance of the Mecca orientation: that it turns the giant Islamic-shaped crescent into a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The planned memorial is actually the world’s largest mosque, and Arlen Specter’s office is fully aware of it.

Do Specter and Caldwell have some explanation? The press will never ask, but we can:

DC Phone: 202-224-4254

DC Fax: 202-228-1229

Another Washington Post cover-up

Dan Eggen reports how Families of Flight 93 (an adjunct to the Memorial Project, representing only those families who are backing the crescent design) have been in Washington seeking federal money. He includes no mention of WHY the private fundraising effort has failed. But State Senator Orie’s discussion of her fundraising difficulties is not hard to find. Any reporter doing a story on the memorial’s fundraising problems would presumably start here:

The whole first page of search results is our blogburst post about Orie. (“Fundraising difficulties” yields the same result.)

Either Dan Eggen is completely incompetent, or the Post is taking sides, refusing to report the facts that don’t support the terrorist memorializing side.

Perhaps ombudsman Andrew Alexander should weigh in on this. The Post has NEVER reported on Mr. Burnett’s long battle to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic-shaped crescent atop his son’s grave. Mr. Burnett left a long comment on Dan Eggen’s article which Eggen simply ignored, along with private offers to talk.

So which is it Mr. Alexander? Is the Post incompetently ignorant of a controversy that has raged for years, or is it intentionally suppressing the facts about the giant Mecca-oriented crescent?

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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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Columnist Ralph Couey emails a clarification

Alec Rawls sends this update to last week’s post on the Flight 93 memorial, where columnist Ralph Couey was said to have described Tom Burnett Sr.’s objections to the crescent design as “hopeless intransigence.”

UPDATE: Columnist Ralph Couey emails a clarification

Mr. Couey insists that his reference to “hopeless intransigence” was not directed at Mr. Burnett’s opposition to the crescent design but “dealt solely with the parties involved in the land purchase.”

I’ll take his word for that. The way he sandwiched his mention of Mr. Burnett’s protest in between his comments about the land deal certainly made it look like he was drawing a parallel, which is how I interpreted him, but there have been plenty of times when my own writings have been open to readings that I did not intend. These things happen. Here is the relevant part of Mr. Couey’s column:

I have to admit that for awhile, I was worried. There was the uproar concerning the design, and the dispute over the land purchase seemed to be hopelessly mired in mutual intransigence.

In addition, I was concerned over the tendency of some Americans toward selective amnesia.

Would this thing drag on until public apathy buried the whole idea of a memorial?

As it turned out, my fears were largely groundless. The design issues have been settled, although there are voices, including Tom Burnett Sr. (father of Flight 93 passenger Tom Burnett Jr.), being raised in opposition.

And with the latest news about the land, it appears that even hopeless intransigence eventually can be bridged.

Given what still remains to be bridged (Mr. Burnett’s protest), and the forward looking sentence structure “eventually can be bridged,” I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to see a parallel being drawn between the end of the landowners opposition and a hoped for end to Mr. Burnett’s opposition. Indeed, this implied hope is hard to escape. Still, there is no reason to doubt that the resulting association of “hopeless intransigence” with Mr. Burnett was accidental, whereas I simply asserted that it had been made. I should have been clearer, and so should Mr. Couey.

In any case, how Mr. Couey’s refers to Tom Burnett’s opposition is a minor point. What the blogburst post focuses on is Mr. Couey’s apparent desire to see an end to that opposition, without any concern for whether our claims about the design are accurate or not. THAT is where Mr. Couey is untenable. If our claims are accurate (and it is easy to verify that they ARE accurate), then the crescent design is actually a memorial to the terrorists and it NEEDS to be opposed.

Thus our blogburst post goes to some length (in a pretty nice way I think), to urge Mr. Couey to please check a few facts before taking a stand. He says in his email that he prefers to defer to the families that are backing the crescent design. That is a nice sentiment, but it makes no sense. Why would he defer to ANYONE about very important matters of fact that he can check for himself in a few minutes?

The only reason for Couey to eschew the facts is if he doesn’t WANT to know the truth, which is how the Memorial Project got into this mess in the first place. The reason to point out the non-functionality of this truth-avoiding behavior is not make Mr. Couey look bad. It is to let him know about the opportunity he has to make himself look very good.

Couey can be a hero. He is in a great position to help stop a hijacking, if he will just look up from his presumptions for long enough to check a few facts. Who can turn down opportunity like that?

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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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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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Another stealth jihadist plants another evil hidden Islamic message

What could be as evil as sneaking a memorial to the 9/11 terrorists onto the Flight 93 crash site? How about sneaking a hidden message of Islamic indoctrination into the soundtrack if an adorable baby doll, repeated every 30 seconds to thousands of 2-5 year old girls without parental knowledge?

If you haven’t heard it before, check out this AP video from October:

If Mattel wants to sell a doll that Muslim parents can use to brainwash their own toddlers, they need to label the doll as Islamic. Instead, Mattel has been engaged in outright cover-up for three months now, claiming that they “did a lot of tests” and found that the doll “just coos and says ‘mama’.”

Liars. If they even listened to the sound track they are fully aware that the suspicious segment is completely unlike the rest of the recording. In contrast to the inarticulate coos and burbles of the otherwise quite compelling baby sounds, the offending part is very clearly a sentence, almost staccato in its articulation.

The AP video above only contains the offending sentence itself. Here is the full sound track (five inserted indoctrinations in 2 minutes):

How many thousands of two year old girls are right now having their hearts opened by this doll’s repeated love cries, only to have a jihadist jab in his poison needle a hundred times an hour? This is the Islam of al Qaeda: a self proclaimed religion of deceit, using deceit to snake its tendrils around the most vulnerable members of our society.

Release the uncompressed audio file

Mattel’s claim that the injected sentence contains no Islamic message is just as fraudulent as its claim that there is no sentence. Here is a slowed down version of the sound-track:

The exact intonation is either “Islam is the light,” or “Iglam is the light.” Since “iglam” is not a word, and since the full segment is clearly spoken as a sentence, the intended word has to be Islam.

Mattel says that the doll’s audio “may be imprecise or distorted” because “the original sound track is compressed.” So why don’t they release the uncompressed file?

No one is hearing things that are not there. Mattel suggests that people are being influenced by “the power of suggestion,” but we can test that hypothesis.

If people can hear whatever they want, then they should also be able to hear a superficially similar Christian message: “Aslan is the light.” Yet even in compressed form, the recording very clearly does NOT say Aslan. The vowels and consonants are distinct. Mattel is in effect denying that there is such a thing as language.

This too is very similar to the Memorial Project. Defenders of the giant Mecca-oriented crescent fantasize in the newspaper that anyone can see Mecca-oriented crescents wherever they want, if they just look for them. No. The only reason anyone can see a half-mile wide Mecca-oriented crescent in the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 is because architect Paul Murdoch put one there.

Mattel needs to conduct a real investigation and it needs to be transparent

Why should anyone ever buy a Mattel toy again when Mattel’s response to clear evidence that their toys are being used in a plot against children is an obviously dishonest cover up? It would make a lot more sense, if they want to stay in business, to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation of how the clearly out-of-place and apparently subversive segment of the sound track got included. The forensic history is on their hard drives. Mattel should uncover the jihadist plotters in their employ, or in the employ of their sub-contractors, then refer them to the FBI and sue them for fraud.

There is even reason to think that the plot goes beyond just the sound track, and involves the entire the Cuddle and Coo doll project. According to the Muslim ex-Marine who blogs as 5-Pillar Column, Mattel’s doll is also wearing a “hijab” (used by fundamentalist Muslim women to hide their hair).

Like the Islamic symbol shapes in the Flight 93 memorial, this is something that western society is not attuned to, so we don’t notice it, but Muslims immediately do. That doll has its hair covered:

5 Pillar speculates that it is the hijab that is causing “bigots” to take offense, but he seems to be the first one to have noticed that the doll can be seen as wearing a hijab.

Some versions of the doll show a wisp of hair, as Sharia law allows for girls, but all have the look of a proper hijab.

Pink version, shows wisp if hair. The hijab-like hair covering remains. (From MAMA’s Label That Doll home page.)

By itself, the possible hijab would be nothing, but together with the clearly articulated message of Islamic indoctrination, it suggests that the entire Cuddle and Coo team needs to be investigated. If Mattel is not forthcoming, the recourse is obvious.

Duped parents should sue Mattel into bankruptcy

Company officers evidently think that denial is the least damaging strategy for Mattel’s reputation and profitability. They need to be proved wrong. By covering up clear evidence that its product is being used as the vehicle for a jihadist plot against the children of its customers, Mattel has opened itself to tremendous liability. If they get sued into oblivion for the harm to children that their fraudulent denials are enabling, it will let other companies know that cover-up is not a good business decision.

Mattel did stop including the suspicious portion of the sound track in new production of their “Cuddle & Coo” doll, but instead of issuing a recall of the original dolls, the company is assuring the public that the warnings of Islamic intent have been investigated and been found to be without merit. That leaves untold thousands of these assault-toys preying on the minds of toddlers whose parents have been given false assurances, which continue to this day.

Here is Mattel’s October 17th statement:

The power of suggestion has a lot to do with it. Our department did a lot of tests. It just coos and says ‘mama.’ We will not be pulling the doll.

On Christmas eve Mattel reposted a dismissive statement that earlier had been withdrawn from their website without explanation:

The Little Mommy Cuddle ‘n Coo dolls feature realistic baby sounds including cooing, giggling, and baby babble with no real sentence structure. The only scripted word the doll says is “mama.”

There is a sound that may resemble something close to the word “night, right, or light.” To avoid any potential misinterpretation, we have eliminated that segment of the sound file from future production.

Because the original sound track is compressed into a file that can be played through an inexpensive toy speaker, actual sounds may be imprecise or distorted.

We remain confident in the high quality standards of our Little Mommy Cuddle ‘n Coo dolls.

By persisting in its dishonest denials, Mattel may have sealed its legal doom. Any lied-to parents out there who want to get rich in the service of a most important cause?

The Memorial Project is also headed for legal trouble. The Mecca orientation of the giant Crescent of Embrace makes it a mihrab—the central feature around which every mosque is built—and it is unconstitutional to build a mosque as a national memorial.

Anti-vigilance

Like the memorial project, Mattel got duped by a stealth jihadist. In the middle of our ongoing hot and cold wars against Islamic supremacism, such things are going to happen. 9/11 exposed the nature of our terror war enemies: that they hide amongst us, pretending to be trustworthy friends while plotting acts of war. There is no shame in being the victim of Islamic deception.

What is inexcusable is to be willfully blind to Islamic plots once they are uncovered. Flight 93 is supposed to be the symbol of our woken vigilance, yet time and again we see this anti-spirit of Flight 93: a determined refusal to be vigilant, enabling even discovered plots to proceed.

All who have learned about the hidden Islamic messages in either the jihadist baby doll or the Flight 93 memorial, please learn about the other. Maybe together we can stop them both.

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Crescent video, Part 2: “The terrorist memorializing features all point to each other”

Set to everybody’s favorite gunslinger music:

If you have a fast connection, there is a high quality viewing option at the lower right of the viewing screen here.

Part 1 focused on the blatant Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial, and on Tom Burnett’s efforts to stop this desecration of his son’s grave. Part 2 is about the terrorist memorializing features.

On first examination, the Islamic symbol shapes in the Flight 93 memorial are found to be slightly imprecise:

The giant crescent does not point quite exactly at Mecca.

The Sacred Ground Plaza that sits roughly in the position of the star on a crescent and star flag does not sit exactly in the position of an Islamic star.

But additional features turn these imprecise Islamic shapes into precise Islamic symbol shapes:

Inside the Sacred Ground Plaza sits a separate section of Memorial Wall, inscribed with the 9/11 date, that IS placed in the exact position of an Islamic star.

Remove the symbolically “broken off” parts of the crescent of Embrace (now called a broken circle) and the remaining crescent structure–what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11–points EXACTLY at Mecca.

To find these additional features, just follow the terrorist brick road: the 44 inscribed translucent memorial blocks on the flight path (matching the number of passengers, crew, AND TERRORISTS).

No need to have seen Part 1 before seeing Part 2. All of the parts of this video series will stand on their own, with only a small amount of overlap. There is a brief review of the Mecca orientation, because that is what leads to the discovery of the 44 blocks, but the blocks then lead to this whole further array of terrorist memorializing features.

If there is a group that you want to show this to–conservative campus group, church group, poker group, or just a little half-time patriotism–ask Alec Rawls about getting the video in full resolution, or in television viewing format.

No, the Mecca-orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is NOT a product of the landform

Defenders of the Flight 93 memorial repeatedly insist that the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent HAS to be a coincidence. It is completely determined, they insist, by the landform, the path of Flight 93, and the impact point, leaving no room for intent to enter.

Of course it is crazy to think that, so long as it is just an unfortunate coincidence, there is nothing wrong with planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent (the central feature of a mosque) on the graves of our murdered heroes. About as crazy, actually, as thinking that the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent could really be a coincidence. First architect Paul Murdoch just innocently comes up with a half mile wide Islamic-shaped crescent to honor the victims of Islamic terrorism, then he innocently places the Sacred Ground Plaza between the tips of the giant crescent, in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag, then he innocently just happens to point this entire crescent-and-star-flag configuration at Mecca (and on and on and on).

When the nation saw the second airliner hit the Trade Towers, everyone immediately knew that the first impact was no accident. The more airplanes that Paul Murdoch flies into the Flight 93 memorial, the more the Memorial Project thinks it HAS to be an accident. Its just TOO OUTLANDISH to think that an Islamic enemy could attack us out of the blue and unawares in such a henious way. What precedent is there for thinking that such a thing could even be possible? (Knock, knock, knock.) And so the more evidence they are confronted with, the more impossible it seems, and the more they insist that Murdoch HAS to be innocent.

Okay, so they are WILLFULLY blind. Even so, they still need an excuse to hang their willful blindness on, and part of Murdoch’s evil genius is to supply these excuses. That is where this trope about the crescent design being dictated by the landscape comes from. It comes from Murdoch, and is actually one of his most brilliant deceptions.

Murdoch’ PRELIMINARY DESIGN actually can be seen as dictated by the landform, the flight-path, and the point of impact

Before any designs were submitted, the Memorial Project gave all the design contestants a site organization map that labeled the “the ridgeline,” “the bowl,” “the crash site,” and “the flight path.” Architect Paul Murdoch claims that all he did was combine these elements by having the flight path symbolically “break” the circular bowl shape, creating the giant Crescent of Embrace design. If you start a crescent at the point where the flight path crosses the ridgeline, and follow the rim of “the bowl” around the ridgeline to create a crescent that “embraces” the Sacred Ground where Flight 93 crashed, then you get the Crescent of Embrace design. Since this procedure uniquely determines the orientation of the crescent, there is no room for the orientation to be determined by anyone’s intent. If it faces Mecca, it HAS to be a coincidence.

This argument actually works, but only when applied to Paul Murdoch’s ORIGINAL Crescent of Embrace design, which did NOT point to Mecca. Take a look:

Click for larger image.

The site organization map (left), shows “the bowl,” bordered by “the ridge,” along with the flight path and the crash site. Murdoch’s preliminary Crescent of Embrace design (right), uses the point where the flight path crosses the ridge/bowl as the end point for a crescent that has the Sacred Ground centered between its crescent tips. Resulting orientation: 11.1°. clockwise from north, which is 44.1° north of Mecca.

The explanatory notes in the preliminary design are perfectly accurate when they describe the crescent as focused on the Sacred Ground:

A curving arc of maple trees along a walkway unites the ridge and forms an edge to the bowl, with a focus on the Sacred Ground.

It is also correct to say that this crescent and its orientation are uniquely determined (to within 5° or so) by the landform, the flight path and the crash site. If the crescent arc were extended much further then it would no longer point to the Sacred Ground. (The amount of curve between the end points of the crescent does not matter. Murdoch established the curve of his original crescent by smoothing the curved shape of the ridge line.)

If THIS crescent is uniquely determined by the combination of landform, flight path and crash site, then the final Crescent of Embrace design, rotated 42.3° further to the east, obviously CANNOT be determined by these factors. By extending the crescent in his final design to match the full Islamic crescent shape (covering about 2/3rds of a circle of arc), Murdoch created a crescent that no longer points to the Sacred Ground:

The bisector of the crescent in Murdoch’s final Crescent of Embrace design points approximately 1.8 ° north of Mecca (marked “qibla”). Notice that the bisector of this Mecca-oriented crescent does not even touch the Sacred Ground, but crosses through the upper portion of the Sacred Ground Plaza that sits up the flight path from the Sacred Ground.

While the crescent no longer points to the Sacred Ground, Murdoch still PRETENDS that it does. Asked last summer about the orientation of the crescent, Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley and architect Paul Murdoch both claimed that it points to the Sacred Ground:

Further, [Hanley] added, it is still unclear exactly where on the landscape the memorial will even be situated. It could move as much as 200 yards, she said, discounting the idea that it faces Mecca.

“The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site,” she said.

Mr. Murdoch reinforced that idea.

“It’s oriented toward the Sacred Ground,” he said. “It just couldn’t be clearer.”

Hanley may be honestly duped, but Murdoch knows full well that the crescent does not point to the Sacred Ground. Such an orientation would ruin his mosque design, not just because a Sacred Ground oriented crescent would no longer point to Mecca, but also because it would place the graves of the infidels in the location of the star on an Islamic flag, leaving them inside the symbolic Islamic heavens. Blasphemy!

Murdoch has a very different symbolism in mind for the star on his giant crescent and star flag. In the top third of the Sacred Ground Plaza, centered on the bisector of the giant crescent, in the exact position of the star on an Islamic flag, sits a separate upper section of Memorial Wall, inscribed with the 9/11 date. The date goes to the star on the Islamic flag. The date goes to the terrorists.

The duping of David Beamer

At this August’s public meeting of the Memorial Project, David Beamer (father of Flight 93 hero Todd Beamer) came out to counter Tom Burnett Sr.’s protests against the crescent design.

Mr. Beamer declared that he had performed several months of due diligence investigating the warnings about the crescent design, by which he presumably meant that he had checked at least a few of our factual claims, like the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent (now called a broken circle). But instead of reporting the results of his fact-checking, Beamer changed the subject. He did not say a single word about the accuracy of any of our claims, but only reported how he had met with architect Paul Murdoch and was satisfied that Murdoch’s design properly honors his son and the other murdered heroes of Flight 93.

If he actually did any fact checking, then he is fully aware that the giant crescent DOES point within 2° of Mecca, in which case there is only one plausible explanation for Beamer declaring the design innocent. Murdoch must have convinced him that the crescent orientation is determined by the landform, the flight path and the crash site, so that its orientation on Mecca HAS to be coincidence.

If Mr. Beamer had bothered to talk to the person who has been warning of an enemy plot then Alec Rawls would have explained to him that no, these physical facts about the crash site do NOT yield a Mecca-oriented crescent. They yield a crescent that points 44° north of Mecca. It is a very strange concept of due diligence to trust the assurances of the person one is being warned is an enemy operative while refusing to talk to the person who is issuing warnings

Very strange too, to think that just because one is convinced that the Mecca orientation of the crescent is a coincidence, that somehow makes it okay to deny the Mecca orientation when speaking to the press and the public, as several Project spokesmen have now done. The fact that Beamer and Hanley and other Project Partners have been duped be Murdoch”s explanations would be of little consequence if they just let the public know what they know, so the American people can decide for themselves whether the fact that it might be a coincidence makes it okay to plant the world’s largest Mecca-direction indicator on the Flight 93 crash site.

Obviously the answer would be “NO!” and this nightmare would be over. It is the lying that is the problem. Hanley et. al. can be a bunch of dupes if they want, but they have no right to deceive the public about what they know.

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Tom Burnett Senior: “We have an Islamist design here that can’t go forward, please.”

Powerful video of Tom Burnett Senior and Alec Rawls at the August 2nd Memorial project meeting. The clip below is Part 1 of Alec’s new video exposé, starting with Mr. Burnett ’s appeal to the American people to please help him stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic shaped crescent atop his son’s grave.

Part one: it points to Mecca. Clip covers the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, the phony redesign, and the crescent-topped minaret. Lots of unaired news video and animated graphics, bookended with the coolest spaghetti western music ever.

A terror war battle that we can still win, despite a president-elect who does not want to fight

Rational people still want to defeat the Islamofascist enemy, but half of the electorate will now get its way in pretending that there is no enemy. Exposing and stopping the terrorist Memorial to flight 93 is a chance for the rest of us to still achieve victory, and on multiple fronts at once. Not only can we foil an enemy plot, but we can at the same time expose the willful blindness of those peace-at-any-cost countrymen who are engaged in blatant cover-up of the most damning facts about the crescent design.

These are the two battles we need to win. We have to expose and stop the deceptive agents of Islamic conquest, and we have to expose and stop the peacenik cover-up of every enemy threat.

We also need to stop the re-hijacking of Flight 93 for its own sake. Just listen to Mr. Burnett’s insistence on a proper memorial for his son Tom and the other heroes. Yes, the battle over the memorial is only symbolic, but as our Democrat-controlled media just proved by delivering Obama to the presidency, it is the information war that ultimately determines everything.

To those conservatives who have been staying away from the memorial controversy, please reconsider. All of our claims about the Memorial are easy to verify. This is a real attack on our country, and in the age of Obama, it is a rare battle that we are still in a position to win. The father of one of America’s greatest heroes is pleading for your help, but he is also offering tremendous help, if you will only hear him out.

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A Veterans Day Week appeal from Flopping Aces

One of our blogburst participants, Curt at Flopping Aces, e-mails a reminder about the great work done by the VALOUR-IT program at Soldiers’ Angels, delivering computer-based help to wounded soldiers.

From Alec at Error Theory

New discovery: Murdoch’s preliminary design also contained an Islamic sundial

One of the dozen epic-scale mosque features in architect Paul Murdoch’s Crescent of Embrace design is a year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial. The shadow calculations take a bit of work to verify, but the overt similarity is immediate:

Traditional Islamic sundial, left. The gnomon’s shadow is just reaching the outer curved vertical, indicating time for Islamic afternoon prayers. On the right is a plan view of the Tower of Voices part of the Flight 93 memorial. Shadow calculations confirm that, when the tower’s shadow reaches the inner arc of trees, it will also be time for Islamic afternoon prayers.

An Islamic sundial is a very exacting structure that would be nearly impossible to construct by accident. Islamic prayer times are determined by shadow length, so the prayer-time indicator line must be placed a particular distance from the gnomon, and must follow a particular arc.

It turns out that architect Paul Murdoch’s also put an Islamic sundial in his preliminary crescent design (from before he was chosen as a design competition finalist). This first Islamic sundial was to have been situated a few hundred yards away from the sundial in his final design, and instead of being surrounded by a vast array of crescents of trees, Murdoch’s first sundial just used a single arc of trees, laid out along the tower’s afternoon prayer line. Here is the first incarnation of the Tower of Voices:

The view here is facing south, along the entry road. The Tower opens to the northeast.

The plan view shows a tree-line to the east of the tower that appears to be at least roughly the shape of the prayer line on an Islamic sundial:

Left hand image: the tower sits at the bottom of the north-south rectangle of black rock. Right hand image shows the shape of the afternoon prayer line for an Islamic sundial, generated by Fer de Vries’ ZW2000 sundial computer. It is calibrated to the crash site latitude of 40.03 north. Fer’s red X marks the center of the gnomon. The prayer-line image gets scaled up or down depending on the gnomon height.

Scaling the image to give the best fit to the tree line to the east of the tower, the fit is just about perfect when the gnomon height is set to 86 feet:

If an 86 foot tower is placed at the flashing red cross, then when the tower’s shadow reaches the base of the line of surrounding trees, it will be time for Islamic afternoon prayers. (Details below on how to determine this scaling.)

Does the Stage I Tower of Voices have a gnomon height of 86 feet?

Very likely. The Stage I design does not specify the height of the tower, but in the elevation view above it looks to be 90 or 100 feet tall, and in Murdoch’s final design, the tower height is 93 feet, which seems the likely height here.

That’s a bit off from 86, and a gnomon height of 93 feet would push the afternoon prayer line several feet out beyond the center of the line of trees, but notice that if the full tower height is 93 feet, the gnomon height is actually several feet shorter.

Take a look back at the elevation view of the tower and you’ll see that the it has a crescent shaped top, with two arms reaching up maybe 6 or 8 feet above the low point of the crescent. The consistent gnomon point would be the low center point, which would be pretty close to 86 feet, if the full tower is 93.

Thus this LOOKS to be another year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial. What we can say for certain is that Murdoch is within a minor height adjustment of having a second year-round accurate Islamic sundial. Given the specificity of these sundial shapes, that can’t possibly be coincidence, demonstrating that Murdoch had a terrorist memorial mosque in mind from the beginning.

Of course that had to be the case, given that a terrorist memorial mosque is what he ended up designing, but this is the first clear indication of Islamic intent going back to the preliminary design itself. Murdoch’s repeated Mecca orientations and the other elaborate proofs of terrorist memorializing intent don’t appear until the Stage II design.

In the final design, Murdoch took care to hide his precise Islamic symbol shapes

In his final Crescent of Embrace design (now called a broken circle), Murdoch is systematic about hiding geometrically precise Islamic structures behind seemingly imprecise Islamic symbol shapes. For instance, the giant central crescent does not point exactly at Mecca. It points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°, making it a not quite precise Islamic mihrab.

But Murdoch also includes a thematically defined crescent in his design. It starts where the flight path thematically breaks the circle at the upper crescent tip, which more than a hundred feet from the end of the full Crescent of Embrace structure. That hundred foot plus change in the end-point of the crescent alters the orientation of the crescent by exactly 1.8°, so that the “true” thematic crescent points exactly to Mecca, as closely as can be determined given the pixel resolution of the graphics. Murdoch then provides redundant proof of intent by repeating this whole multi-Mecca oriented geometry in the crescents of trees that surround the Tower of Voices. (Demonstration in the 2nd half of this post.)

Murdoch does the same thing with the Tower sundial. On first look, the inner arc of trees in Murdoch’s final Tower of Voices design is only an accurate marker for afternoon prayer times for 8 months of the year (from March to October). But upon further inspection, one sees that Murdoch used a tricky two-height gnomon, where light passes through a slot in the top of the tower from November to February, lowering the gnomon point at the center of the crescent topped tower for those months.

This tricky two height gnomon puts a kink in the afternoon prayer line that conforms exactly to Murdoch’s tree line, creating a year-round accurate Islamic sundial. True evil genius.

In the preliminary design, Murdoch was not so careful. His tree line follows the full traditional Islamic afternoon prayer line shape, which any informed person could immediately recognize.

The chances of Murdoch coming up with TWO different year-round accurate Islamic sundials by coincidence? 0/(∞²).

Sundial calculations

Islamic afternoon prayers commence when an object’s shadow is the length of its noon shadow, plus its height. As summer turns to winter, noon shadows get longer, so the shadow length at prayer time gets longer too. Also, shadows lengthen more quickly, so the time it takes the noon shadow to grow by the gnomon height gets shorter, making prayer times occur earlier. Thus the angle of the prayer-time shadows gets more northerly (earlier) as the days get shorter, creating the characteristic prayer-line arc.

The labor intensive way to calculate prayer times is to use J Geisen’s awesome sun-shadow applet to find the length of shortest shadow for a particular gnomon on an particular day at a particular latitude and longitude, then look for the time and shadow angle at which the gnomon’s shadow is the length of its noon shadow plus its height.

The easy way is to let Fer de Vries’ ZW2000 computer program do the work for you. Just download the zip files, right click the folder and extract all the files, then open the program, set the latitude to 40.03 degrees (shanskville PA), check “Islamic prayer lines,” click calculate, and set the scale so you can see the result. (The bigger the gnomon height you pick, the more you will have to scale the resulting graphic down to bring the prayer lines into the picture). Really easy.

In addition to generating prayer lines, De Vrie’s program also generates a bar that is equal in length to the gnomon height. It is visible in the bottom right corner of the graphic above that shows the prayer line superimposed over the tree line. That gnomon-height reference line makes it possible to scale the image of the gnomon point and its associated prayer line to the site-plan image.

The base image used is a 32x enlargement of a tiny piece of the large JPEG image of Murdoch’s Stage I design. That original image includes a distance scale, where 3.5 screen inches at 72dpi = 4000 ft. After enlarging 32x, that becomes 112 s.i. = 4000′, or 1 s.i. = 4000′/112=35.714′.

Once the graphic is resized so that it fits over the estimated gnomon point and the tree line, the gnomon height bar scales out to 2.41 inches. (It looks a bit bigger, but that is just because it was bolded, which makes the length grow along with the width.) 2.41 x 35.714 = 86′.

The Memorial Project claims that it investigated the sundial warnings and found them to be a false alarm, but their comments prove that they never even looked at the warnings

Memorial Project Chairman John Reynolds said last year that any tower with a wall around it can serve as an Islamic sundial. When prayer time comes around, just mark the wall with the angle of the tower’s shadow, and voilà.

FAIL. Islamic prayer times are determined by shadow length, not shadow angle, and the shadow angle at prayer time changes every day of the year. It CANNOT be marked on any old wall around a tower. An Islamic prayer-time marker must be set the right distance from its associated shadow-caster, and it must follow the right arc.

Imagine telling the public you have investigated a warning of terrorist attack and found it to be a false alarm, when in fact you never investigated it at all? That is what Reynolds is doing when he claims to have investigated the warnings of an Islamic sundial, when he doesn’t even know that Islamic prayer times are determined by shadow length. The irresponsibility of these people is breathtaking.

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What a mihrab means to the Wahhabists, the Khomeini-ists and the other Salafists

In 1981, Ayatollah Khomeini explained the meaning of a Mecca-direction indicator (called a mihrab), like the one now being planted on the Flight 93 crash site:

Mehrab means the place of war, the place of fighting. Out of the mehrabs, wars should proceed, just as all the wars of Islam used to proceeded out of the mehrabs. [Hat tip Yoel Natan, Moon-o-theism, p. 30]

The I-ah-told-you-so wasn’t just speaking allegorically either. The University of Chicago’s Francis Joseph Seinglass Comprehensive Persian-English dictionary lists amongst its definitions for mihrab: “warlike,” and “a field of battle.” (Hat tip Czechmade.)

Anyone who thinks it is okay to build the world’s largest mihrab on the Flight 93 crash site really should read Khomeini’s whole speech (his tribute to Muhammad). It’s only two pages, but psychopathic hellspawn like Khomeini can pack an awful lot of murder-lust into a short space, when every stinking sentence is a plea for wanton slaughter.

From beginning:

The real Day of God is the day that Amir al mo’menin drew his sword and slaughtered all the khavarej and killed them from the first to the last.

To end:

We believe that the accused essentially does not have to be tried. He or she must just be killed. Only their identity is to be established and then they should be killed.

“The accused,” of course, is YOU, and all the other “discontented people” who do not readily submit to the murder-cult’s endless demands.

To rid the world of who they accuse of violating God’s law, they grant themselves exemption from the Sixth Commandment. Evil stupidity. Maggots for brains. Matched only by the see-no-evil stupidity of a western world that is so defrauded by its dishonest left wing media that it is losing the capacity to fight back.

Will we really build a Salafist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site? Will we really elect a president who is in bed with Islamofascists and domestic terrorists alike? Will we really let Iran get the nuclear weapons with which to wipe city after American city off the map, as they so desperately crave? Will we really turn off the energy spigot–the key to past and continuing progress–based on utterly fraudulent claims of human-caused global warming, even as the world descends into a substantial cooling phase?

None of these issues should even be in question, yet the minority of us who are trying to stem the collapse of the nation can barely battle even these gimmies to a draw, and could lose all four. If the nation survives this “moment” in history–this long war with Islamic fascism and with our own liberty hating left–it will be thanks to the relative handful of people who recognize honest reason and evidence as impenetrable armor and unbreakable sword against those who seek advantage in manipulative dishonesty.

The demagogues and their dupes are powerful in numbers, but blind. Their hostility to contrary reason and evidence divorces them from reality, leaving them ignorant of surrounding truth. That is our advantage. We know the lay of the land, and can use it to defeat them, but we still have to get up and do it.

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Paul Murdoch channels Allahpundit

Two years ago Allahpundit (who works for Michelle Malkin) made a very strange judgment. He accepted that the original Crescent of Embrace design for the Flight 93 memorial pointed roughly to Mecca (to be exact, it points within 2 degrees of Mecca), but said that worrying about the orientation of the crescent reeked of “truther-iness.”

“A good rule of thumb,” said Allah:

if you need a protractor to properly express your outrage, you’ve probably gone too far.

Orientation on Mecca may sound esoteric, but it is certainly not esoteric to Muslims, who are supposed to face Mecca five times a day for prayer, and often carry special compasses for that purpose.

In particular, a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed arch shaped, but the archetypical mihrab is crescent shaped.) This isn’t merely suspicious, like learning to fly airliners without learning how to land. It is the discovered enemy objective: to stab a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America.

How can anyone be surprised? As our blogburst logo shows, the original crescent design was a bare naked crescent and star flag. For Allah to dismiss ADDITIONAL Islamic symbol shapes as coincidence is like seeing the second airplane fly into the Trade Center and saying: “Well now it HAS to be an accident.”

Allahpundit seems to have forgotten the defining quality of the 9-11 truth morons. It isn’t that their claims seem esoteric or even outlandish. It is that their claims are FALSE, and in most cases are revealed by the simplest fact-checking to be blatantly dishonest as well. The truthers are self-conscious purveyors of malicious disinformation, a la Michael Moore.

In contrast, everything we are saying about the flight 93 memorial is TRUE, and is easily verified to be true just by examining the official design drawings.

● The plans specify 44 translucent memorial blocks to be emplaced along the flight path, matching the number of passengers, crew AND terrorists. Just open up the design drawings and count. (The flight path symbolically breaks our harmonious circle according to architect Paul Murdoch, turning it into a giant crescent. Go figure.)

● The 93 foot Tower of Voices will be topped with yet another Islamic shaped crescent. Just look:

The symbolic lives of the 40 heroes literally dangle down below the symbolic Islamic heavens, projected against the sky above. Not a lot of different possible meanings here.

● The 9/11 date is to be inscribed on a separate section of Memorial Wall that is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent, which is the exact position of the star on an Islamic flag. The date goes to the terrorists.

● Etcetera ad nauseum, and architect Paul Murdoch proves that all of it is intentional by repeating every Islamic and terrorist memorializing feature in the Tower of Voices part of the memorial. (2 minute animation showing the repeated Mecca orientations here.)

How many airplanes have to hit the Flight 93 memorial before a few of our heavy hitters can admit that MAYBE it is not just an accident? Can we at least agree that the Park Service should be exposed for lying through their teeth about these facts?

If we could get word out to the public just about the Mecca orientation of the crescent, Murdoch’s plot would probably be kaput, especially given the numerous denials the Memorial Project has issued in the last year and a half. But getting even the most basic facts out is terribly difficult when it isn’t just the mainstream media that won’t report the facts, but even people like Michelle Malkin are remaining silent, after taking a leading role in raising the initial alarm.

The loss of her powerful voice is hard enough, but there is also the seeming implication. Even the most internet savvy conservatives–the people we most need to reach to have any hope of stopping this–presume that if Michelle is not still objecting to the Flight 93 memorial, it must be okay now.

It is NOT okay. It is a thorough-going memorial to the terrorists. As Tom Burnett Sr. (father of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Jr.) keeps urging, we have to “do something,” as his son got up and did something. We have to stop this re-hijacked Flight 93 before it reaches its destination.

If Michelle is going to hand such an important portfolio to Allah, doesn’t he have an obligation to check a few facts before smearing fellow conservatives as truther-like? Allah and Michelle are good friends and much beloved for their excellent judgment and hard work. There is no anger here. Just an appeal for both to take another look. Paul Murdoch has even provided a fitting pretext, if any is needed.

In an interview two weeks ago, Murdoch re-labeled the tips of his crescent structure the same way that Allah proposed two years ago, yielding a more extended crescent that no longer points to Mecca. Murdoch is channeling you Allah, but where you were merely ignorant, he is being deceptive.

Where are the breaks in the circle?

In 2006, Allah posted a graphic from Alec Rawls that used orientation lines to show how the defining points of the Mecca-oriented crescent are unchanged in the Circle of Embrace redesign:

Original Crescent of Embrace design, left, points to Mecca. The flight path can be seen coming down from the upper left corner of the image, breaking the circle at the upper crescent tip.

Every particle of that original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Circle of Embrace redesign. The original crescent tips are still there, yielding the same Mecca oriented crescent. Allah, however, suggested that the orientation of the crescent HAD been changed:

In blue: Allahpundit’s proposed orientation lines for the Circle of Embrace redesign.

If you don’t know that the theme of the whole design is the flight path breaking the circle at the original upper crescent tip, and you don’t notice that there is still a gap in the circle at the original upper crescent tip, you can get Allah’s altered orientation for the Circle redesign, no longer pointing to Mecca.

Murdoch, of course, knows the theme of his own design (being the first one to articulate it publicly). Still, pretending that the breaks in the circle have been changed is a useful dodge, and Murdoch employed it the other week.

Asked if the circle in the Circle of Embrace redesign depicts a broken circle, as critics claim, Murdoch said that the circle breaks when it reaches the sacred ground:

The edge of the sacred ground “breaks” the circular perimeter of the bowl to give it the prominence it deserves as the focal point of the entire park and the final resting place of the 40 heroes.

The Sacred Ground is the yellow-colored area in the graphics above. By acknowledging only the break at the sacred ground, Murdoch is suggesting that the tips of the crescent come up to yellow area on both sides, just as Allah drew.

The Park service website, however, goes on to identify another break as well, the original break at the upper tip of the original crescent design, where the flight path crosses the circle:

The trees surrounding this “circle of embrace” are missing in two places; first, where the flight path of the plane went overhead (which is the location of the planned memorial overlook and visitor center), and second, where the plane crashed at the Sacred Ground (depicted by a ceremonial gate and pathway into the Sacred Ground). 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…

In his interview, Murdoch does not just fail to mention the symbolic breaking of the circle at the original upper crescent tip, but offers an alternative description of the Entry Portal structure:

The entrance moves through the circular edge along the flight path, so as visitors enter they will be aligned with United Flight 93 through their own experience.

Sorry Murdoch, and Allah, but this passage through the original upper crescent tip does not just show the path of Flight 93. It explicitly symbolizes the flight path smashing our harmonious circle and turning it into the giant (Islamic shaped) crescent.

Entry Portal walkway follows the flight path through the Entry Portal walls, symbolizing the breaking of the circle, according to the Park Service itself.

Allah’s blue orientation lines are WRONG. The crescent is the unbroken part of the circle, which was not altered in the so-called redesign. All they did was add an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. Can Allah please post a correction?

It points to Washington

What made Allah throw up his hands was our further claim that the asymmetric crescent of memorial groves at the back of the full Crescent of Embrace points to the White House. But this too is TRUE, and if you look at Murdoch’s plan, there is very clear reason for it.

Murdoch constantly provides proof that his possible Islamic and terrorist memorializing structure are intentional, often by repetition. The purpose of the White House orientation is to prove that his drawing of only 38 Memorial Groves, instead of the advertised 40, is not a mistake.

The giant crescent represents the symbolic Islamic heavens. Since the crescent of Memorial Groves is part of the full crescent, Murdoch cannot actually memorialize the 40 infidels there and still have a proper mosque. Thus Murdoch has to PROVE that the 38 groves are intended to memorialize someone else.

Notice that the 38 groves can be seen as a set of 19 nested crescents, ranging in length from 38 groves down to two. That is one for each 9/11 hijacker. How can this intent be proved? First, Murdoch proves intent by repetition. The Tower of Voices is also surrounded by a set of 19 nested crescents:

Paul Murdoch’s detail view of the Tower of Voices. Click for larger image.

The nested crescents of memorial groves establish the precedent that arcs of trees as short as two are to be counted as crescents. Using this rule, there are 19 nested crescents in the Tower array.

That is not enough proof for Murdoch, who provides redundant proof of intent for ALL of his Islamic and terrorist memorializing features. To provide additional proof that the 38 groves are to be seen as 19 nested crescents, Murdoch takes advantage of the fact that crescents have orientation, via either the bisector of the crescent, or by a line across the crescent tips. He positions his crescent of groves so that a line across the tips of any of the 19 nested crescents points to the White House:

19 nested crescents, all pointing to the target that the Flight 93 terrorists were trying to destroy.

The White House sits at about the “i” in Washington in this Yahoo map. The other possible target of Flight 93, the Capitol Building, is also nearby, but Higher resolution analysis suggests that the crescent tip line points closer to the White House.

Repeated symbolic damnation

Does anyone want to think that all this is coincidence too: the two missing groves, the White House orientation, the second set of 19 nested crescents in the Tower array? “Wow. A dozen airplanes flying into the Trade Towers. That’s really got to be an accident now. That many airplanes just couldn’t be on purpose!”

No, what they can’t be is an accident. Paul Murdoch is dead serious about proving that he has designed a proper terrorist memorial mosque. THAT is why the Memorial Groves point to the White House. And it isn’t just the Memorial Groves. EVERY depiction of the 40 heroes has an opposite hidden meaning, proved by repetition.

Those 40 wind chimes, one for each of the heroes, all literally dangling down below the symbolic Islamic heavens projected in the sky above? That’s symbolic damnation.

So too with the 40 blocks inscribed with the 40 names. All four of the “extra” translucent blocks on the flight path are located within the symbolic Islamic heavens. The three inscribed with the 9/11 date are inscribed as placed the star on the Islamic crescent and star flag, while the 44th sits at the upper crescent tip (where the flight path breaks the circle).

In contrast, the 40 blocks inscribed with the names of the heroes are all further down the flight path, down below the Islamic star and hence symbolically cast out of the symbolic Islamic heavens, which again implies damnation.

All of this has a very clear purpose. If the memorial actually honored the 40 infidels it could not be a proper mosque. According to the Koran (9.18), mosques are not to be defiled by infidel presence. Depictions of victory over the infidel are of course allowed.

Allahpundit is not the only one who thinks that TOO MANY suspicious features somehow imply coincidence. The Memorial Project says the exact same thing. They know that the Mecca orientation claim is accurate. They know that ALL of our factual claims are accurate and admit it in private conversation, but have decided that the very outlandishness of all somehow implies that it has to be coincidence.

Flight 93 is supposed to be the symbol of our woken vigilance. We are supposed to be alert now to the nature of the Islamic terrorists who are waging war against us: that they hide amongst us, pretending to be trustworthy friends. Have the truthers actually succeeded in stripping the nation of that lesson, making us loathe to witness evidence of conspiracy?

9/11 was one of the most elaborate conspiracies in history (by al Qaeda, not by the Bush administration). We can’t just unlearn that lesson, and be blind to evidence of conspiracy in hopes of staying as far as possible from those who present phony evidence of conspiracy.

To make sense, one must follow the evidence wherever it leads. That is what the truthers DON’T do. The problem isn’t that they are pushing conspiracy theories, it is that they aren’t honest. Ignoring the facts in an anti-conspiracy direction does not make one opposite to the truthers, but makes one similar, as Allah darn well ought to know.

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“They had some forewarning and they chose to take action.” The defenders of the crescent also have forewarning, and are trying to cover it up.

Gordon Felt, president of the Flight 93 family group that supports the crescent shaped memorial, offered a nice summary statement of the heroism of Flight 93:

They had some forewarning and they chose to take action.

“It’s that citizen soldier, heroism message,” he said “that we want to get out and memorialize their actions.”

Mr. Felt also has forewarning of an enemy plot, but he and the other defenders of the crescent design are choosing not to act. They are displaying a perfect anti-spirit of Flight 93.

According to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird, they all know that all of our basic claims about the crescent design are accurate: the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent; the 44 translucent blocks that are to be placed along the flight path, etcetera. Yet they and their allies in the press are doing everything in their power to keep the public from knowing what they know.

Example 1: PA paper reports Mecca orientation controversy, omits its own verification of the Mecca orientation of the crescent.

In last week’s anniversary coverage of the 9/11 attacks, the Johnstown Tribune Democrat noted the controversy over the orientation of the crescent. We say it points to Mecca. The Park Service denies it:

The project also has been dogged by complaints spearheaded by California author Alec Rawls that the memorial points to Mecca and is a veiled tribute to the Islamic terrorists – a claim family members and developers maintain has been investigated and refuted.

What reporter Kirk Swauger fails to mention is that he himself fact-checked the Mecca-orientation claim last year, and published his findings:

Rawls maintains that the midpoint between the tips of the crescent points almost precisely toward “qibla,” the direction to Mecca, which Muslims are supposed to face for prayer.

His claims seem to be backed up by coordinates for the direction of qibla from Somerset that can be found on Islam.com. When superimposed over the crescent in the memorial design, the midpoint points over the Arctic Circle, through Europe toward Mecca.

This is the only instance in three years now where any news organization has ever published any fact-checking of our easy to fact check claims about the memorial design. Alec has several times emailed Kirk’s published confirmation of the Mecca-orientation to every newsdesk in Pennsylvania and to every reporter covering the memorial story. They ALL know about it. Yet even Kirk continues to present the Mecca orientation claim as a “he said, she said” conflict, without letting his readers know that he has verified the Mecca-orientation for himself (and this isn’t the first time he has made this omission).

If Mr. Swauger really wanted everyone to forget his confirmation of the Mecca-orientation, he could just avoid any mention of the orientation of the crescent at all. Alec’s best guess is that Kirk is being held back by Tribune Democrat editor Chip Minemyer, who has tried to sweep the memorial controversy under the rug from day one, but the reporters are also neck deep. Several have suggested that to investigate and report on the accuracy of our claims would be taking sides. Of course that phony “scruple” would disappear in a second if the facts showed our criticisms to be bogus.

Example 2: Gordon Felt himself misled the public about the 44 blocks.

The Crescent of Embrace design, now called the (broken) Circle of Embrace, calls for a total of 44 inscribed translucent memorial blocks to be placed along the flight path. (There were forty passengers and crew on Flight 93 and four terrorists.)

In trying to get this information out to the public, we need to be brief, so “44 inscribed translucent memorial blocks” sometimes gets shortened to “44 glass blocks,” or “44 blocks.” Asked last spring about the 44 blocks, Gordon Felt declared it a lie:

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.”

But he follows this denial with a footnote, indicating that he knows full well that there will be 44 memorial blocks:

Felt said the names of the passengers and crew will be placed on the memorial, but no final decision has been made on how they would be displayed or on what material.

In other words, he is nit-picking over our occasional description of the blocks as “glass blocks,” when they might not all be technically made of glass.

As Alec’s original report to the Memorial Project made clear, 43 of the blocks are described in the design drawings as “polished, translucent white marble”:

Click pic for larger image.

The lower section of wall, on the left, contains forty of the “translucent white marble” blocks or panels (backlit at night), inscribed with the names of the forty heroes. The upper section of wall, on the right, contains three more blocks, inscribed with the 9/11 date.

That upper section of wall, by the way, is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent, placing it in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag. Thus the date goes to the Islamic star. The date goes to the terrorists.

Here is the 44th block on the flight path. It marks the upper crescent tip, where according to the Park Service’s own website, the flight path symbolically breaks our (Christian) circle, turning it into the giant (Mecca oriented) crescent. A clearer depiction of al Qaeda victory is hard to imagine, and it all comes together right here:

At the end of the Entry Portal Walkway (after the walkway symbolically “breaks” the towering Entry Portal Walls) sits a large “glass memorial plaque” that dedicates the entire site.

This 44th translucent block on the flight path marks the spot where the terrorists symbolically broke our harmonious circle and turned it into a giant Islamic shaped crescent. To be inscribed: “A field of honor forever.”

Gordon Felt knows ALL of this, and is trying to keep the public from knowing. It’s as if someone on Flight 93, hearing from the ground that airplanes had crashed into the Trade Towers, insisted to the other passengers that NO airplanes had crashed into the Trade Towers.

Apparently grief has made these people crazy. They have forewarning, and are struggling with all their might to keep others from being forewarned as well.

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Frontpage Magazine covers the memorial debacle

FrontPage managing editor Jamie Glazov interviews Alec Rawls in this week’s FrontPage Interview.

Rawls takes the opportunity to lay out the basic facts for a new set of readers:

1. That the giant crescent (originally called the Crescent of Embrace) points to Mecca.

2. That this giant Mecca oriented crescent is STILL THERE in the Circle of Embrace redesign (explicitly described as a broken circle, just as the Crescent of Embrace was).

Punch line:

It’s like gate security catching a terrorist with a bomb and telling him to go back outside and see if he can hide it better the second time. All [architect Paul Murdoch] did was add some completely irrelevant disguise.

Please give FrontPage a visit, and if you haven’t bookmarked them already, the site is well worth your time.

Frontpage founder David Horowitz has been exposing the far left’s takeover of the Democrat mainstream since the 1980’s, and since 2001 has extended his Discover the Networks approach to our Islamofascist enemies. If you are drawn to the sound of the guns, FrontPage is on the frontlines of both the culture-war and terror-war battles for accurate information.

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