Even more interesting….it appears the winning design to honor the heroes of flight 93 not only is shaped as the Red Crescent of Islam but actually points to Mecca: (via Blue Merle)
What would you say if you found out, among other issues of Islamic imagery being incorporated into the memorial, that the red crescent was canted on the prayer qibla to Mecca?
I know, I know.
But it is.
Shoot an arrow on the bow of the crescent and it flies along the path of the qibla. (the imaginary line to Mecca believers align themselves with when they pray.)
Politicalities does some calculations:
What you’re seeing is an azimuthal equidistant projection of the globe centered on the Flight 93 crash site. On such a projection, the concentric circles represent a fixed distance from the center, and the angle of a straight line from the center to any point represents the azimuth between the two points. Etaoin’s image shows that a line perpendicular to the endpoints of the crescent (that is, the direction the crescent faces) appears to pass very close to Mecca. Mecca sits near Saudi Arabia’s western coast with the Red Sea, and as Etaoin’s image shows, the crescent points right at it.
But I’ve always been one to go for cold calculations over pretty pictures, so I set to find out if indeed the crescent points towards Mecca. Here’s what I came up with:
According to this site, the latitude/longitude coordinates of Mecca are 21.4234, 39.8262 and the coordinates of the Flight 93 crash site are 40.052, -78.8963. Using the calculator from this site, I determined that the azimuth between the two points is 124.80?.
Next I went to the Flight 93 National Memorial website and found the biggest overhead view of the memorial I could find with north oriented up. I measured the distance from tip-to-tip of the crescent and came up with 64px east-west and 90px north-south. The arctangent of 64/90 is the angle between north and a line drawn between the tips, which works out to 35.42?. Adding 90? to this angle gives the direction the crescent faces as 125.42?.
Conclusion: the crescent points towards Mecca with an error of 0.62?, or 0.17%. If you take a circle and divide its circumference into 580 equal arcs, the angle subtended by one of those arcs is the error. (Bear in mind that any error in my figures could change this value; the figure most open to interpretation is the distance in pixels between the tips of the crescent.)
I don’t know if the architect deliberately made his design look like an Islamic crescent, or if it’s coincidental. I don’t know if the architect deliberately made his crescent point almost directly towards Mecca, or if it’s coincidental. What I do know is that a memorial in the shape of a swastika would never be permitted, whether the resemblance was intentional or a coincidence. Nor would a memorial resembling a Confederate battle flag.
U think they would allow this:
At a Holocaust Memorial?
Like I said in my earlier post, the designer of this memorial obviously meant this to thumb his nose at those who love this country. He thought he could get this thing through without anyone being the wiser. Maybe the whole 15 member panel thought the same thing, I don’t know. One thing I do know….this thing will not be built without a fight.
Ace has his say:
Okay, yes, it’s quite possible this is a coincidence. But this guy’s whole bio and his statements about his “art” suggest a lefty, and I’m just having trouble believing an architect dealing primarily in symbolism (the whole dealio is intended to be symbolic — forty trees for forty victims, windchimes to symbolize the rings of their last phone calls, etc.) missed the symbolism of the crescent, and then just happened to accidentally point it towards Mecca to boot.
What If A Known Right-Wing Architecht Had Done This?: I would suggest in that case the left, currently scoffing at this, would be having a fit, because they would read the monument and pointing the finger of blame at Mecca.
And, just in case you’re curious, I’d be against that too. It’s inappropriate in a memorial to the dead to have any stealth political messaging going on.
But Let’s Assume… that this all is inadvertant and coincidental. The left wouldn’t allow that a memorial was accidentally designed to suggest the shape of a cross; whether inadvertant or not, the symbolism is there.
A lot of lefty po-mo deconstructionists deny the author’s primacy in interpretation, and say that any reader can read any symbolism into a text he likes, pretty much.
So even if the “author” of this memorial is telling the truth– hey, that symbolism is still there.
One reader points out, sagely, that a memorial should spark discussion about those being memorialized. Well, that being the case, this designer has failed miserably, because no one — no one — is talking about the courageous dead of Flight 93. Everyone’s talking about that crescent.
I just find it amazing, utterly amazing that the left cannot see how inappropiate this is. Are they that far gone? Is there no one on the left side with any common sense? Sad.
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