Don’t Take Flight 93 To Mecca 2-2009
Feb 27, 2009 Political
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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Tags: blogburst, flight 93 memorial, Mecca
Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 9-18-2008
Sep 18, 2008 Flight 93
“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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Tags: flight 93 memorial, lies, Mecca, sham
Don’t Take Flight 93 To Mecca 9-9-08
Sep 9, 2008 Flight 93
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.
To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.
Tags: flight 93 memorial, frontpage
Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 6-5-08
Jun 5, 2008 Flight 93
A call for America’s churches to step up as witnesses for the truth about the Flight 93 memorial
Three segments of American society get paid to investigate and report facts: academia, the press, and government. For two and a half years, all three have been spinning desperately to avoid and suppress the facts about Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial.
Luckily there is a fourth segment of society that is also charged to witness truth, not for pay, but on religious principle. Asked by Pilate to account for himself, Jesus answered:
To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. [Jn. 18:37.]
Those who follow Jesus are supposed to do the same, which means first of all checking and reporting the facts when the importance of an issue warrants it.
The importance of the Flight 93 memorial to our churches could not be clearer. The Islam of the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 is a religion of murder and deceit. Their self-professed strategy is to hide amongst us, pretending to be trustworthy friends, while plotting mass-murder against Christians, Jews, and all non-Muslims.
Whether this religion of deceit is the “true” Islam, as the bin Ladenists assert, or a bastardization of it, a deceptive memorial to the 9/11 terrorists is a direct challenge to the truth witnessing capacity of our society, and to the truth witnessing character of our Christian churches.
In a contest between deceit and honesty, there is no doubt which is stronger. Witness exposes and destroys deceit. If our churches enter this contest, they win. But will they enter? THAT is the test. If our churches stand by, and fail to witness truth, then the al Qaeda religion of murder and deceit may well succeed in stabbing its terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America.
The father of one of our Flight 93 heroes is asking America’s churches for help
In consultation with Tom Burnett Sr., Alec Rawls has put together a flyer that all of us can take to our local churches to try to organize sanctioned fact-checking efforts that our churches can stand behind publicly two months from now.
August 2nd is the next public meeting of the Memorial Project. Tom and Alec will both be traveling to Somerset PA to rally opposition. Mancow Muller is urging his national radio audience to attend, and groups like Rolling Thunder are also being contacted.
With Mr. Burnett in attendance, even a modest turnout will bring substantial news coverage, but coverage alone is not enough. We are facing a fact-checking blockade by the mainstream media, and can only break it by enlisting churches or other independent groups to sponsor their own fact checking efforts.
Are you a member of any kind of group where interested members could set up an ad hoc committee to check a few basic facts about the planned memorial? The full group or chapter could then make an official decision whether to stand behind this fact checking publicly in a press release that Tom and Alec can announce at the August meeting.
Christian churches may be our best bet, being charged by Jesus to be witnesses for truth, and having “chapters” all over America. Thus this initial effort is addressed in particular to our churches, but any group that wants to expose important truths can perform the same service.
The flyer prints out front and back on a single sheet of paper. It has a couple of color graphics, but prints fine in black and white for inexpensive copying. If you want to participate, just add your contact info at the bottom (the file is MS Word and can be altered), then go see if you can raise some interest!
Tags: churches, flight 93 memorial, islam, Mecca, muslims symbols
Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 5-8-08
May 8, 2008 Flight 93
No more do-overs for terrorist memorializing architects
Defenders of the crescent design keep accusing Tom Burnett Sr. of trying to get an improper “do over” after failing back in 2005 to sway the design-competition jury. But who is really seeking the do-over? The American people rose up in protest in 2005 when they saw that the Memorial Project wanted to plant a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag on the flight 93 crash site:
That uproar forced the Memorial Project to agree to redesign the memorial so that it would no longer include Islamic symbol shapes (whether they are intentional or not). But nothing significant was changed. Every particle of the original crescent design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign, which only disguised the original crescent with a few irrelevant trees, placed to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent.
The American people caught a hijacker trying to re-hijack Flight 93, and the Memorial Project told him to go back outside and try again, which is exactly what he did. Now they accuse Tom Burnett of wanting an improper do-over?
There were dozens of articles and television segments about the crescent controversy this week, mostly in Pennsylvania, with some national news coverage by Fox News television and AP. This post is an attempt to capture the general thrust of the new wave of position statements.
The Memorial Project is inverting every moral imperative at this point, and it all comes from their fervent desire to reverse the results of September 2005. Their embrace of the crescent was rejected by America and they are determined to undo that defeat, to the point of being willfully blind to massive evidence of al Qaeda sympathizing intent.
The new face of the Memorial Project: Edward Felt’s wife and brother take the lead
Sandra Felt, one of the Flight 93 family members who helped select the Crescent of Embrace design, admits that she never paid any attention to warnings about Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism in the crescent design:
Sandra Felt has known for nearly three years about complaints that the design of the proposed Flight 93 National Memorial allegedly contains Islamic symbols, but she never gave them any credence.
“I don’t even think about it,” said Felt, whose husband, Edward, died on … United Airlines Flight 93.
And nobody blames her. It shouldn’t be on the Flight 93 families to investigate evidence that any one of us can easily fact check. But Sandra and her brother in law Gordon Felt, now President of Families of Flight 93, are going further, pretending for some reason that the charges people have made against architect Paul Murdoch are actually being leveled against them.
How could that be, when three of the features that our petition lists as unacceptable–the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, the 44 glass blocks on the flight path, and the giant Islamic sundial–were not even discovered until after the crescent design was selected? Nobody blames the family members for approving design features they had no inkling were there, yet Gordon Felt says that warnings about the design are “quite hurtful, to think we would want to create a memorial to those who murdered our loved ones.”
Nobody ever suggested any such thing, but Felt is getting as much mileage as he can out of this excuse NOT to look at the facts, telling Fox News television:
I was outraged, for anyone to infer that family members who have been such an integral part of this process have in any way been involved in memorializing the murderers of our loved ones. I find it extremely offensive.
This after expressing his anger at Tom Burnett last week for Tom’s failure to submit to the Memorial Project’s “democratic process.” Tom lost the jury vote, so in Felt’s view, he is apparently supposed to shut up now. Strange view of democracy.
Tags: flight 93 memorial, islam, Mecca, opposition, terrorist design