Flight 93 memorial: blogburst for 7/16/08

My last post about the prospect of talks with Ahmadinejad and the Iranian leadership was uncanny in its alacrity and celerity, if I do say so myself. When I heard the morning news informing us of today’s stunning development that the Bush administration has agreed to negotiate directly with Iran on the nuclear issue, an eerie wave swept over me. I felt as if I were in the Twilight Zone. While I had been lightheartedly amusing myself with publishing a cute little tirade on the futility of dialog with Iran, the uselessness of which is glaringly obvious to anyone who cares to glare, feeble nitwits in our nation’s policy think tanks, in the State Department, and in the White House were ready to pop the cork on a bottle of what I had just defined as patent idiocy. It certainly can seem as if the world has gone mad.

But now and then there is a ray of light, some truly wonderful news—not the usual small victory or consolation prize , but a genuine triumph. Our blogburst author Alec Rawls (who blogs on the Flight 93 memorial plan and other relevant topics at Error Theory) has scored a major coup by enlisting and securing the valuable support of Muslims Against Sharia in condemning the project design. I have been interested in, but admittedly suspicious of, their intriguing website and work for some time. Let’s just say I have healthy reservations about almost everyone on both sides of the jihad. One never knows who is going to throw you under the bus, and I didn’t get to be the great Haid Dasalami by being anyone’s chump or by failing to learn from naive mistakes that can get one killed. I live by the admonition, “Remember, thou art mortal.” That being said, Alec opined on June 25th that Muslims “could undo much of this suspicion” by joining in our indignant condemnation of the memorial plan.

Indeed they can, and now a valiant group of them has.

The present collaboration of these important Muslim reformers is extremely gratifying, enormously encouraging, most appreciated, and very much welcome.

As anti-Nazi resistance leader Victor Laszlo (immortally played by the late Paul Henreid) said in the 1942 Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca, “Now I know our side will win.”

“I hope I’ll see your face again, baby…”

Thanks to Muslims Against Sharia for putting together a short video on the re-hijacking of Flight 93:

YouTube video Hijacking of Flight 93 Memorial by MuslimsAgainstSharia

The voice at the beginning is flight attendant CeeCee Lyles.

CeeCee’s family has really struggled without her. One of the many stories that clearly illustrate how much one life matters. (Serious tear-jerker warning).

Check out The Strata-Sphere

The blogburst on June 25th asked those hero bloggers who forced the redesign of the crescent memorial back in 2005 to please notice that the giant Mecca-oriented crescent is still there.

Many thanks to AJ Strata for taking another look and writing a long post on the fundamentally unchanged memorial. It looks like he might keep after this, too, since he gives the memorial another mention amidst his debunking of recent claims that Obama’s birth certificate scan shows signs of Photoshopping.

If you aren’t familiar with The Strata-Sphere, it is second to none as a source for terror war news and analysis.

The Pennsylvania press reports our “Who broke the circle?” e-mail campaign, and covers up the Park Service’s refusal to answer

Since the memorial design is still being described as a broken circle, and since the unbroken part of the circle (the crescent) remains completely unchanged, our e-mail campaign demanded to know “WHO is being depicted as breaking the circle?”

It can only be the terrorists. The circle is a symbol of peace, and it was the terrorists who broke the peace on 9/11. So the design shows the terrorists breaking our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent. A clearer depiction of al Qaeda victory is hard to imagine.

The Memorial Project and the Park Service sent evasive replies to the hundred or so emails they received, never answering the question posed, but the fact that they issued a mass response made the e-mail campaign news. How did the Pennsylvania press cover it? With a cover up.

Reporter Kecia Bal mentions our “Who broke the circle?” subject line but never reports the substance our letter: that the circle can only have been broken by the terrorists, who then succeed in turning it into a giant Islamic crescent.

Instead, Kecia quotes an e-mailer admitting that “it was a cut-and-paste kind of thing,” as if they might not even have understood the content, which remains a mystery to Kecia’s readers. She does not even let her readers know that the official government response failed to answer the question.

Why is the local media covering this up? Because the entire Memorial Project, including both advisory boards, was appointed by the Somerset County Board of Supervisors. As a result, it is stacked with local eminences, all of whom are by now deeply implicated in the two-and-a-half-year cover up. Kecia thinks she is doing these local eminences a favor by trying to make this story go away, but she is not.

The further architect Paul Murdoch’s terrorist-memorializing plot proceeds, the bigger the scandal. All of these local folks could still be heroes by stepping up and tackling the hijacker. Continuing to block for him instead is the worst thing they can do, not just for the country, but for themselves. We are trying to haul these people out of a burning building and they are tearing their fingernails out on the doorjambs. Crazy.

The August 2nd Memorial Project meeting

If you are within weekend traveling distance, please consider joining Tom Burnett Sr. in Somerset PA on August 2nd. If you get there early enough for the Memorial Project’s public meeting (10AM-1PM) you can sign up to speak. We will rally in the afternoon on Saturday and visit the crash-site Sunday.

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