Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 2-13-2008
Feb 13, 2008 Flight 93
 |
 |
Dr. Daniel Griffith (“anything can point to Mecca, because the earth is round“) is still trying to convince the press that the Flight 93 crescent does not point to Mecca. In an email to the Park Service and the press this week, he tried to make it sound as if Alec Rawls is calculating the orientation of the crescent by using techniques that can be manipulated to achieve any desired result:
Based on Alec’s arguments, one could claim that the memorial is oriented toward the Vatican.
The Flight 93 crescent can indeed be seen as pointing to the Vatican, for the simple reason that the Vatican sits on the great circle line between the crash site and Mecca.
This is what Griffith represents as some concocted method for calculating the orientation of the crescent: the great circle method!
This “shortest distance” or “straight line” direction to Mecca (curving only in the over the horizon direction) is the relevant direction because this is the way that Muslims calculate the direction to Mecca. (There was a debate about it in the 1980’s and 90’s, largely settled by this nondescript looking analysis.)
Here is the great circle line from the Flight 93 crash-site to Mecca:
(Click-pic for larger image. Great circle calculator here.)
Here is the great circle line from the crash-site to the Vatican:
This calculator rounds to the nearest degree, so Mecca and the Vatican both are presented as lying on the great circle line that, from the crash site, proceeds 55° clockwise from north.
Of course a person who faces Mecca is also facing everything else that happens to lie in the direction of Mecca. When Griffith acknowledges that the crescent points to the Vatican, he is not a debunking of the Mecca-orientation of the Flight 93 crescent, but confirming it.
Reductio ad Hitlerum
Griffith pulled the same trick last July, telling reporter Kirk Swauger of the Johnstown Tribune Democrat that the crescent can be seen as pointing to a Nazi concentration camp if you want:
Griffith said Rawls suggested memorial organizers would be outraged if the crescent pointed to a Nazi concentration camp instead, the professor said it actually could be done.
Of course Rawls never suggested that anyone should care if the crescent pointed at a concentration camp. Is there a worldwide religion of facing Nazi concentration camps for prayer? Was Flight 93 hijacked by people who face Nazi concentration camps for prayer?
An unpublished report that Griffith wrote for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review in 2006 clarifies his concentration camp reference. It notes that there was a Nazi concentration camp (Drancy) located just outside of Paris, which as you can see on the maps above is also (like the Vatican) on the great circle line between the Flight 93 crash-site and Mecca. In his 2006 report, Griffith acknowledges that the crescent points to the Drancy camp, yet is still unwilling to acknowledge that it points to Mecca. Somehow, the crescent points to everything on the line to Mecca except Mecca.
When Griffith told Swauger that you can see the crescent as pointing to a Nazi concentration camp if you want, he was clearly trying to mislead Swauger into thinking that you can see the crescent as pointing wherever you want. This dishonest intention was made clear by another statement that Griffith made to Swauger (not reported by Swauger, but related by Swauger to Alec Rawls at the time). Griffith told Swauger that: “You can face anywhere to face Mecca.”
He is doing the same thing when he tells the Park Service now that the crescent can be seen as pointing to the Vatican, without being clear that this is because the Vatican sits on great circle line to Mecca.
Pecksniff
In his email, Griffith complains that Rawls has been trying to bully him into changing his analysis. Nobody is trying to bully Griffith into changing anything. We are trying to expose him as a fraud.
Griffith is practically in tears about being called a Pecksniff (a character from Martin Chuzzlewit “who lies and cants whether he is drunk or sober”). It is the perfect epithet. Look in the dictionary under Pecksniff and you will see Daniel Griffith’s picture.
Not that anyone should bother to read Griffith’s email, but if anyone wants to, it puts front and center another astounding example of Griffith’s free-form dishonesty.
Griffith quotes Rawls’s January 2006 report to the Memorial Project as saying that:
…the orientation to Mecca “take[s] a short cut over the North Pole … even though Mecca is south of Shanksville.”
From this supposed quote, Griffith goes on to construct an elaborate fantasy about how, since the great circle line between the crash-site and Mecca does not actually go over the North Pole, it was really Rawls, not he, who started this idea that you can face different directions to face Mecca.
But Rawls’s report to the Memorial Project did not say that a person facing the north pole from the crash site is facing Mecca. Rather, it includes an aside explaining why the shortest-distance line to Mecca “points in a northeasterly direction” (not due north), even though Mecca is south of Shanksville. The reason is because both are in the northern hemisphere. To illustrate, the report includes the simplest possible example: “The shortest distance between points on the opposite sides of the northern hemisphere will take a short cut over the North Pole.”
Griffith quotes only the second half of this sentence, omitting the part about connecting points “on the opposite sides of the northern hemisphere.” That allows him to pretend that the points referred to are the crash-site and Mecca. Of course Shanksville and Mecca are not on opposite sides of the hemisphere. Mecca is about 2/3rds of the way around the hemisphere from the crash-site.
Having Misrepresented Rawls as saying, not just that a person facing into the giant crescent is facing Mecca, but also that a person facing due north from the crash site is facing Mecca, Griffith then writes:
I fail to be convinced that only 2, rather than the infinity of possible, arcs are acceptable to Muslims.
Bwahahahaha! Griffith just finished saying how wrong it is to think that a person facing north from Shanksville is facing Mecca. Then he turns around and uses this face-north-to-face-Mecca claim (misattributed to Rawls) as justification for saying that a person facing any direction is facing Mecca. Just how much peck has this idiot been sniffing?
To join our blogbursts, email Cao (caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com) with your blog’s url.
Related
Where is the lizard army? (push it)
A plea from Tom Burnett Sr. (push it)
The fraudulent Park Service investigation of the Flight 93 memorial (push it)
Tags: flighet 93, mecca. memorial
Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 2-7-2008
Feb 7, 2008 Flight 93
Where is the lizard army?
Pennsylvania is on fire. Tom Burnett’s color advertisement in the Somerset Daily American, asking the people of Somerset to protest the crescent memorial to Flight 93, raised a great deal of awareness. At least four television stations covered the controversy, and there were two news stories in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review alone.
Those who went on to read Alec Rawls’ more detailed advertisement (exposing the fraudulent Park Service investigation of the giant Mecca-oriented crescent) are burning mad, and are taking up Tom Sr.’s call for state and Congressional investigations. Word is that two Pennsylvania state representatives, one Democrat and one Republican, are hot enough to co-sponsor a resolution initiating a state investigation.
That is a long way from actually getting an investigation. The hurdles are still huge, and it would sure be a big help if the high traffic conservative bloggers were pitching in. Charles Johnson and Michelle Malkin played a critical role in raising the initial alarm when the Crescent of Embrace design was unveiled in September 2005. Both also helped to expose the phony redesign, which leaves every particle of the original design completely intact.
But since 2006, nothing. For two years, as the revelations about the Memorial Project have become ever more explosive, the fire-hoses have ignored what will undoubtedly become one of the biggest scandals in American history.
This is a difficult story for our high traffic bloggers. With Flight 93 family members on both sides, no one can weigh in without checking the facts, and our high traffic bloggers are all stretched too thin to check the facts. Charles Johnson only has two eyes and two ears. No one can say he ought to do anything, when there is no way he ought to even be able to do a quarter of what he does.
Johnson’s lizard army, on the other hand, has thousands of eyes and thousands of ears. The question is whether this sensory system is connected to the lizard brain. Is there any trickle-up at LGF?
To try to establish this trickle-up connection, Charles recently installed a new link-rating system at the top of his main page. Let’s see if we can get it to work! Come on lizards. Time to rejoin the fight. Please take the links to the two advertisements that are now setting Pennsylvania on fire and see if you can rally your fellow lizards to push these links up into the collective consciousness of the lizard army.
Over the next two weeks, these ads will continue to be published in the free weeklies for the cities of Somerset and Johnstown. We are putting tinder to the first licks of flame, and maybe even have a couple of sticks in the fire, but we are still a long way from an established blaze, never mind the bonfire of awareness, and the firestorm of awareness, that it will take to stop Murdoch’s plot.
We need lizard help to stop architect Paul Murdoch from stabbing a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America! (That’s what a Mecca-oriented crescent is: the central feature of a mosque.)
This is YOUR story lizards
It was five lizards who discovered, almost immediately after the Crescent of Embrace was unveiled, that the nearly one mile wide crescent points almost exactly to Mecca (kifaya, khamr, Edgren, bluemerle, and Etaoin).
Etaoin Shrdlu’s Mecca orientation graphic, posted by Ace of Spades September 11, 2005 (three days after the crescent design was unveiled).
Charles stayed with the fight until July 2006, when he rallied the lizards to participate in the Park Service’s open comment period.
Then he and Michelle and all the other high traffic bloggers disappeared.
No links when Tom Burnett Sr. publicly protested the memorial by refusing to allow Tom Jr.’s name to be inscribed on one of those 44 glass blocks on the flight path (matching the number of passengers, crew AND terrorists).
No links when the crescent design was discovered to memorialize, not just the 4 hijackers of Flight 93, but also the full complement of 19 9/11 terrorists. (There are two sets of 19 nested crescents in the crescent design.)
No links when Tom Sr. and Alec Rawls protested the crescent and star flag configuration of the memorial on national television.
No links when an academic fraud told the Park Service not to worry about the similarity between the giant Mecca oriented crescent and the Mecca oriented mihrab around which every mosque is built because there has never been a mihrab anywhere near this BIG before.
No links when Congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo called in November 2007 for the Park Service to scrap the crescent design entirely.
The usual difficulty for the blogosphere is to get the mainstream media to cover our discoveries. This has been inverted for the memorial story. Dozens of mainstream news stories have been written about the controversy, none of which were ever linked by any high traffic conservative bloggers. All the weight has been carried by a creditable collection of small and mid-traffic bloggers, starting with our three dozen blogburst participants.
The blogosphere has an Achilles heel. A controversial story that requires fact checking gets skipped over by our high traffic link-editors. Charles Johnson’s addition of a decentralized link-editing utility might be able to overcome this weakness, but it won’t happen automatically. For this tool to work, the lizard army has to step up and make it work.
To join our blogbursts, email Cao (caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com) with your blog’s url.
Tags: fight the design, Flight 93, memorial
Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 1-30-2008
Jan 30, 2008 Flight 93
Not all of the Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial is hidden. One of the things that Tom Burnett Sr. protested from the beginning was the overtly minaret-like Tower of Voices. The Tower is formed in the shape of an extruded crescent, and even has its top cut at an angle so that its crescent arms reach up into the sky, similar to the upturned crescent motif seen atop minarets all over the world:
Up tower view (left) shows the Tower of Voices to be formed in the shape of an Islamic crescent, covering about 2/3rds of a circle of arc, with a circular inner arc. The top of the tower is cut at an angle (right) so that the crescent arms reach up into the sky.
This sky-reaching crescent is a standard mosque motif, seen from the Abdul Gaffoor mosque in Singapore:
… to Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland:
… to the Uppsala mosque in Sweden:
There is no way that the Islamic shaped crescent atop architect Paul Murdoch’s minaret-like tower is an accident, any more than THIS could possibly be an accident:
That’s before you even get to the hidden stuff, like the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent; the 9/11 date placed in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag; or the fact that the Tower of Voices turns out to be a year round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial:
Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign, which only disguised the original crescent with a few irrelevant trees.
That Islamic crescent reaching up into the sky is completely undisguised. How can anyone abide this?
Tags: Flight 93, islamic design, Mecca, memorial
Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 1-23-2008
Jan 24, 2008 Flight 93
Nasser Rabbat, a Syrian professor of Islamic architecture at MIT, told the Park Service not to worry about the giant Mecca oriented crescent at the center of the Flight 93 Memorial. He said that since it does not point quite exactly to Mecca (it is off by 1.8°) it can’t be considered a proper mihrab (the central feature around which every mosque is built).
Liar. Many of the most famous mihrabs face as much as 20 or 30 degrees off of Mecca.
Here is another Rabbat deception:
Mosques are never in the shape of a crescent or a circle. This defeats the purpose of lining up the worshipers parallel to the Qibla wall (Mecca orientation), which usually translates into a rectangular shape, or sometimes a square. [From the White Paper released by the Memorial Project in August 2007.]
It is true that most mosques are rectangular, the more clearly to mark the direction to Mecca, but this is certainly not a requirement, given that the two most religiously significant sites in Islam are round mosques. Significant site #1 is the Sacred Mosque in Mecca:
Second most significant is the Mosque of Omar, also called the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, from which point Muhammad supposedly ascended into heaven:
Perhaps because of the prominence of these precedents, a small but significant number of mosques around the world follow the round model.
There is the Tun Abdul Aziz mosque built in Malaysia in 1975, referred to colloquially as the “Masjid Bulat,” or “round mosque.”
There is the new 5,000 person Arafat Mosque in Nigeria, which the architect claims is “the only round mosque in Africa,” but he is wrong. Another round mosque, Al Nileen, sits at the confluence of Blue and White Nile rivers in Khartoum:
[From Google Earth. Look up “alnileen mosque”.]
Africa is also home to some older round mosques. Here is a round mosque from the Ivory coast. Similar mosques have also been found in Sierra Leone.
Here is a modern Russian mosque, laid out in shape of an eight point star.
There is even a famous round mosque right in the heart of the EU, at the northwest corner of the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels.
There is a round mosque in Kuwait, a round mosque in Kadavu India, and probably many more.
At the Islamic architecture website Archnet, a Muslim architect (not a native English writer) explains the problem with round mosques:
… a circular mosque can not function well because a mousqe should have an oriantation to kibla and as we all know that a circle does not have an orientation, How can we know the kibla wall if it is a circle ?
This problem does not afflict Paul Murdoch’s mosque design for the Flight 93 memorial because Murdoch’s giant crescent does create an orientation. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just as with a smaller size mihrab.
Geometrically, Murdoch’s Crescent of Embrace is just a gigantic Islamic prayer rug:
A Muslim prayer rug is a two dimensional mihrab, laid out to face Mecca, just as the Crescent of Embrace is.
Notice that to a person looking into the Flight 93 crescent, the irregularity of the outer arc of the crescent is not visible. The radial arbors are all behind the double row of red maples that line the walkway. The ends of the crescent are also well defined by the end of the walkway of red maples at the bottom and the end of the thousand foot long, fifty foot tall Entry Portal Wall on top. This is a perfectly comprehensible and recognizable Mecca direction indicator.
Rabbat’s comments to the Park Service do not even pretend to be objective. He lists “talking points” in defense of the crescent design without ever even pretending to weigh the merits of the case against the design.
Most obviously, Rabbat never considers the almost exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent as a grounds for concern, but limits his remarks to possible excuses for not worrying about this obviously worrisome fact. The same for all of his other talking points. He only even considers ways to absolve the crescent design.
In short, Rabbat is as overtly biased as he could possibly be, yet the Park Service has no qualms about this overt bias. Rabbat gives them the excuses for unconcern that they want and they eagerly embrace him. The Park Service investigation into warnings of an enemy plot was a total fraud.
Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 1-9-2008
Jan 9, 2008 Flight 93
Blogburst blockbuster: Professor who white-washed the Crescent of Embrace was Paul Murdoch’s classmate at UCLA
An excerpt from the Park Service investigation into the Flight 93 memorial identifies one of their consultants as a scholar from MIT who “wishes to remain anonymous.” Another document identifies this person as a religious scholar or a professor of Islamic architecture. MIT does not have a religion department, and they only have one professor of Islamic architecture: Professor Nassar Rabbat, who has confirmed that he is the Park Service consultant.
A check of Rabbat’s background shows that he was a classmate of 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 did a masters thesis titled: “House-form, climactic response and lifestyle: a study of the 17-19th century courthouse houses in Cairo and Damascus.”
This connection between Murdoch and Rabbat raises the possibility that Murdoch himself orchestrated the Park Service investigation into warnings about his own design. Rabbat denies knowing Murdoch, but given the blatant dishonesty of what he told the Park Service, that denial cannot be trusted.
Rabbat lied about something that every practicing Muslim knows
Rabbat’s first “major talking point” (from the Memorial Project’s White Paper, towards the bottom) is a blatantly dishonest excuse for why the Park Service should not be concerned about the almost exact Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. Rabbat assures the Park Service that because the Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is inexact, it can’t be seen as a mihrab:
Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.
Absolutely false, and Rabbat certainly knows it. This goes to the most basic principle of mosque design: that all mosques are expressions of Muhammad’s prototype.
Muhammad’s original mosque in Medina was not oriented precisely on Mecca. It was built to face Jerusalem. Later in his career Muhammad changed the direction that Muslims were to face for prayer (their qibla direction). Instead of facing north from Medina to Jerusalem they were to face south, towards Mecca (Koran 2.142-145). To effect this change, Muhammad just started using the southerly wall of his mosque as his “qibla wall” instead of the northerly wall, even though this wall had not been built to face Mecca.
In the abstract, Muhammad held the qibla direction from Medina to be “south.” But Mecca is not quite due south from Medina either. Thus both in practice and in the abstract, Muhammad was not particular about an exact orientation on Mecca, and in Islam, what is good enough for Muhammad has to be good enough for everyone. He is the model.
This leeway to face only roughly towards Mecca for prayer is not some obscure bit of doctrine. Every practicing Muslim knows that qibla orientation does not have to be exact because they all have to avail themselves of this allowance pretty much every day as they seek walls that are oriented not too far off of Mecca which they can face into for their frequent prayers.
Rabbat just flat out lied about something that every practicing Muslim knows, and this is an expert in Mosque design. He knows better than anyone the historic leeway afforded in Mecca orientation.
Is Rabbat the source of Patrick White’s foolishness?
Rabbat’s dishonest report to the Park Service may explain an amazing argument made by Patrick White, Vice President of Families of Flight 93. At the July 2007 public meeting of the Memorial Project, White argued in a private conversation that the almost exact Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.”
At the same time as White was privately making excuses for the almost exact Mecca orientation of the crescent, he was telling the newspapers that the Mecca orientation claim was false and preposterous, so he certainly cannot be absolved. But it is possible that he himself was misled about how Muslims would regard an inexactly oriented mihrab.
The Memorial Project received Rabbat’s comments about a year earlier, and Patrick White certainly had access to them. It seems likely that when White said that an inexact orientation on Mecca would be “disrespectful to Islam,” he was following Rabbat’s “can’t be off” lead.
The crescent design also includes an exact Mecca orientation
If Nassar Rabbat actually read the information that Alec Rawls sent to the Memorial Project, he would know that in addition to the physical crescent, the Crescent of Embrace design also includes a thematic crescent, defined by architect Paul Murdoch himself. The upper tip of this thematic crescent is the point where, in Murdoch’s explanation, the flight path breaks the circle. If this thematic or “true” upper crescent tip is used to define the orientation of the crescent, then the crescent points exactly to Mecca.
If Rabbat really thinks that exactness is what matters, he would have been alarmed to see that this thematic crescent is oriented exactly on Mecca. Instead, he ignored it.
The Park Service already knew about the Mecca orientation of the crescent
The Park Service’s other Islamic scholar, Kevin Jaques, did the same thing as Rabbat. He admitted the similarity between the giant Mecca oriented crescent and a traditional Islamic mihrab, then concocted a blatantly dishonest excuse for why the Park Service shouldn’t be concerned about it. Jaques assured the Park Service that there was no reason to worry because no one had ever seen a mihrab this big before:
Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.
If Jaques and Rabbat were willing to engage in such blatantly dishonest excuse-making, why did they start out by admitting that the giant crescent was geometrically close to a perfect mihrab? Because the Park Service already knew that the giant crescent was oriented almost exactly on Mecca, and that a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is the central feature around which every mosque is built.
Advisory Commission member Tim Baird would admit this explicitly in 2007, but it was obvious much earlier. What the Park Service wanted when it conducted its internal investigation in the spring and summer of 2006 was excuses not to be concerned about these damning facts, and that is what Jaques and Rabbat provided. Similarly for the egregious Daniel Griffith, the “professor of geospatial information,” who told the newspapers that “anything can point to Mecca, because the earth is round.”
The Park Service knew this was all fraudulent. Griffith’s “anything can point to Mecca” and Rabbat’s “it has to be exact” were complete contradictions of each other, but the Park Service gladly embraced both as excuses to pretend that there was nothing to worry about.
If these government functionaries were this desperate for a cover up, it is certainly plausible that they would accept any help they could get from Paul Murdoch. Not that it is hard to find radically dishonest, America-hating academics, but these three frauds are outliers even by worst standards.
More dishonest excuse-making from Rabbat
Rabbat’s next talking point is more of the same dishonest excuse-making:
Besides, in the US, a debate has been going on as to which is the right Mecca orientation: the one going through the North Pole or the one that follows a flat representation of the globe.
The orientation “through the North Pole” (55.2° clockwise from north, to be precise) is the great-circle direction to Mecca. This great circle direction to Mecca is the orientation of the Crescent of Embrace (almost exactly), and it is the direction in which almost all Muslims pray.
A few dissenters pray in the rhumb-line direction to Mecca (the direction of constant compass heading, which spirals down the globe in an east-southeasterly direction from North America). Rabbat pretends that the existence of these few dissenters somehow makes the whole matter of the Mecca oriented crescent a non-issue.
If anything, the debate over qibla direction shows the flexibility of the qibla direction, giving the lie to Rabbat’s earlier assertion that mihrab orientation “can’t be off.”
Rabbat certainly knows that the great-circle direction to Mecca is the dominant qibla direction. (It won out over the rhumb line direction for the very good reason that a person facing in the rhumb-line direction to Mecca is not actually facing Mecca, since the rhumb-line follows a curved path.) But don’t worry about a little thing like the crescent facing in the dominant qibla direction. Rabbat has plenty of lame excuses why you don’t need to care.
Tom Burnett’s call for a Congressional investigation
The Park Service won’t say how they came up with Griffith, Jaques and Rabbat so we have to force them. A lot of People must be forced to answer these and a lot of other hard questions, and the only way to do it is to heed Tom Burnett’s call for a Congressional Investigation.