Do The Math
Alec Rawls calls the “Crescent of Embrace” planned for a Pennsylvania field the world’s biggest mosque.
Flight 93 families call it his right to free speech, but wrong and, they suggest, offensive. The NPS Flight 93 superintendent calls it “garbage.” The local paper rather clumsily employs standard journo dissing techniques, trotting out an academic and an imam to launch ad hominem attacks on Rawls, before the newspaper points out Rawls’ arguments are in fact correct. Then, a learned math whiz is brought in to explain that while Rawls is correct on this point, he could be correct on other points, too.
I doubt the 93 families and memorial juries intended to set up the world’s biggest outdoor mosque, or that they even intended to honor Islam. But a big red crescent with a memorial stone where the star goes looks awfully odd on that particular piece of hallowed American ground, even before you get to the complicated call to prayer/sundial/Mecca orientation math part.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:03 am on Wednesday, August 8, 2007
12 Responses to “Do The Math”
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August 8th, 2007 at 10:12 am
The longevity and refusal of this story to die reminds me of that famous “plastic turkey” GW was alleged to have served the troops on the battlefront a couple of years back.
The crescent-oriented-toward-Mecca story all started when “self-proclaimed bishop Ron McRae, a street evangelist based in Shanksville’s Somerset County” saw the Islamic equivalent of the Virgin Mary in the landscape architect’s plan. It took on a life of its own once Michelle Malking & Company — even Mark Steyn! — bought into the hysteria:
http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2005/09/a_matter_of_sca.html
August 8th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Egad. I misspelled Michelle’s last name. Should be Malkin, of course.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
No, Sissy, both you and Jules are wrong. It’s a landing pad for UFOs. I’ve read it before so it must be true. No, wait. A great big crescent, you say?
Sounds like it must be an homage to…. Crittenden! Outrageous!
August 8th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Since we live on a big round ball of dirt, you are facing Mecca no matter which way you face. But perhaps the idea of a crescent was ill-considered.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I’ve been there — it’s only about 70 miles from here. Forget the crescent and Mecca stuff. What I have trouble with is turning it into some kind of new age-y “healing” place. It’s a war memorial. I say keep it the way it is, a memorial created by visitors.
August 8th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
An astounding number of the willfully blind in this story have said exactly what RebeccaH says: that because the earth is round, you can face any direction to face Mecca. Do these people really think there is no such thing as a direction on planet earth? Muslims are certainly not so confused. They face Mecca five times a day to pray, and they calculate the direction to my by the great circle method, or the path of shortest distance. (Think of it as the straight line direction, curving only in the over-the-horizon direction, with no side to side movement.)
I learned from Pittsburgh Post Gazette reporter Paula Reed Ward that the editors of the Post Gazette knew about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent back in September 2005, when the Crescent of Embrace design was first unveiled. Paula was at an editorial meeting where a collective decision was made not to publish this explosive information. “We decided that because the earth is round, it didn’t matter,” Paula told me, “you can face any direction to get to Mecca.” Every editor in that room knows that Muslims face Mecca five times a day to pray. Suddenly they decided that there is not such thing as facing Mecca?
At the time, the Gazzeditors were were running editorials calling critics of the crescent design bigots. The obvious explanation is that they jumped at the first excuse they could think of to suppress information that did not support their established position.
In the end, this whole long sordid tale is about numerous people, with different motivations, all deciding that it can be somehow right or in their interest to avoid the truth. They start with their presumptions about which side they should be on, then avoid, suppress and make idiotic excuses for any evidence that does not support their presumptions.
The memorial debacle shows the total moral blindness that this backwards thought process leads to. Where the heroes of Flight 93 faced the harshest truths and saved the White House and our national leadership, the truth avoiders who are charged with memorializing the heroes of flight 93 twist all the way around to directly abetting out terrorist enemies.
Person after person who knows that my claims are factually correct (who admits these facts in private, while offering excuses for them) has come out in public insisting that my claims are false. In some part of their minds, they know that they are helping architect Paul Murdoch stab a terrorist memorial mosque into America’s heartland, but that is not as important to them as maintaining their desperate avoidance of the truth.
August 8th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
A memorial in the shape of a CRESCENT “ill considered”??? For a memorial to people who saved the White House from ISLAMISTS????
And on TOP of the CRESCENT, there is a star, fixed so that the “memorial” points to MECCA????
Maybe the West deserves to die.
August 8th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
I don’t understand the kind of thinking… Perhaps that’s it. There isn’t any thinking going on here. It’s like raising a memorial in the shape of a swastika in remembrance of all those Americans who lost their lives fighting in the ETO. Understanding that doesn’t require an Einstein, but it does require a modicum of thought.
August 9th, 2007 at 2:03 am
A crescent and a tower? My God. This is a travesty.
August 9th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Let’s see: Jules lives in a town that ends with “-field”. The memorial is in a field. The C faces east. Jules lives east of the C. The memorial has a tower. Jules is a towering work of.. something or other. Definitely secret homage to Jules. No amount of evidence will convince me otherwise. Einstein would agree.
August 9th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Suddenly, I’m reminded of all those Erich von Daniken-esque Discovery Channel shows about Stonehenge, Teotihuacan, fill in your favorite site, where somebody says, “It points at a star! It must be an astronomical observatory!”
August 9th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Yeah guys, all you have to do is drop the context of that memorial and it will fit your little scenarios.