Flight 93 memorial: blogburst for 9/3/08

by Haid

I don’t have much to say tonight regarding this edition of the Flight 93 blogburst, because like everyone else I’ve been busy watching Sarah Palin rock the Republican house in Minnesota. Alec Rawls, though, outdoes himself in this installment, which winds up, appropriately, at last week’s Democratic convention, where Islamic Society of North America President Ingrid Matteson spoke.

After watching Governor Palin mock and belittle the Dems, it’s hard to reflect on all their unsavory connections and associations and not feel that they deserve it. So if some of what you read in today’s blogburst post outrages you, take heart that tonight in St. Paul an awesome lady promised to give government back to the people. I know she’s not thinking much about the Park Service as yet, but I can’t think of a better place to start cleaning house.

ISNA crescent atop Flight 93 minaret

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is a Saudi-funded Wahhabi group. Its logo is in the shape of a mosque with a crescent-topped minaret and a crescent-topped dome. Here is the ISNA logo juxtaposed with a similarly shaped mosque from Uppsala, Sweden:

Both configurations have upturned crescents. The difference is that the arms of the ISNA crescents are lifted symmetrically, while the Uppsala crescents have one arm above the other.

On actual minarets, the Uppsala configuration is the norm, seen also in this photo of the Abdul Gaffoor mosque in Singapore:

There seems to be only one example of an actual minaret that is to be built in the ISNA configuration. That is the Tower of Voices minaret from the planned Flight 93 memorial:

Two views of the Tower of Voices minaret, showing an Islamic-shaped crescent at the top, with its arms reaching symmetrically up into the sky. (Source images here and here, originally from the Memorial Project’s design competition website.)

The up-tower view shows the symbolic Islamic heavens projected against the sky while the symbolic lives of the forty heroes literally dangle down below. Murdoch had to do this in order for his Crescent of Embrace design (centered around a giant Mecca-oriented crescent) to be a proper mosque. The forty infidels could not actually be honored in the design. They had to be depicted as symbolically damned.

Murdoch actually repeats this theme in the central crescent, where the four extra translucent blocks (one for each hijacker) are all placed in the symbolic Islamic heavens (the crescent and star parts of the structure) while the forty translucent blocks inscribed with the names of the heroes are all placed outside of the symbolic Islamic heavens.

Do Wahhabis recognize the crescent as a symbol of Islam?

One of the two Muslim scholars whom the Park Service tapped for expert opinion (on whether claims of Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial should be taken seriously) was a Paul Murdoch classmate named Nasser Rabbat. Both received master’s degrees in architecture from UCLA in 1984.

One of the excuses Rabbat offered the Park Service for not being concerned about all the Islamic-shaped crescents was to question whether the crescent really should be seen as a Muslim symbol at all:

The crescent is a debatable Islamic universal symbol. Many groups do not use it. I know in fact of no militant group that uses it. [AHEM] Islamic modern states have opted to use it, sometimes with the star, which is a modern symbol with no Islamic connotation.

He is right here that the most fanatical Islamic fundamentalists, the Salafis, who model themselves on the first three generations of violent Islamic conquest, are not keen on the crescent, since it was adopted as a Muslim symbol by the Ottomans, long after the time of Muhammad.

The official Saudi state religion of Wahhabism is Salafist. That is why the Saudi Arabian flag is one of the only Islamic flags not to feature the Ottoman crescent and star:

Saudi flag, left, features the Muslim profession of faith, and a sword. Turkish flag, right, features the Ottoman crescent and star.

But ISNA is a primary vehicle for the Saudi-funded building of Wahhabi mosques in North America. How can this be? Is the crescent actually enough a universal Islamic symbol that even the Salafi and Wahhabi Saudis acknowledge it?

Indeed, and for a very simple reason. The crescent is not just the shape of the Ottoman flag. It is also a reference to the Islamic lunar calendar, and it is the shape of the archetypical Islamic mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. Here are the two most famous mihrabs in the world, the mihrab at the Prophet’s mosque in Medina, and the mihrab of the Great Mosque in Cordoba, seen here in sequence with Barack Hussein Obama’s campaign logo.

Face into the crescent to face Mecca. For the contrast between Murdoch’s intentional use of Islamic symbol shapes and Obama’s likely unintentional use of Islamic symbol shapes, see our earlier blogburst on Obama’s crescent-topped logo.

So yes, the crescent actually is a universal Islamic symbol. The only people who even question it are the most extreme Salafis, which evidently includes Nasser Rabbat. How did this Paul Murdoch classmate ever get tapped by the Park Service in the first place, so that he could even be in a position to give them his blatantly dishonest excuses for not being concerned about the giant Mecca- oriented crescent? Just one of the many things that Congress needs to investigate. (Petition here).

ISNA big in Murdoch’s hometown of LA

Murdoch could be some kind of nihilistic leftist, but the most likely explanation for his attempt to stab a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America is that he at some point converted to an aggressively hateful, violent and supremacist sect of Islam like Saudi Wahhabism and is acting today as a freelance jihadist.

Such a person would almost certainly be familiar with ISNA. By some estimates, 80% of American mosques preach the Saudi poison, but often the Saudi funding is hidden. Not so in Los Angeles, where the city’s largest mosque, the King Fahd mosque in Culver City, is openly funded by the Saudi government.

We won’t learn Murdoch’s actual associations without a congressional investigation, but the fact that he used a minaret configuration that is elsewhere seen only in the ISNA logo is mildly suggestive of a Wahhabi connection. For now, the only reason to bring up the Murdoch/ISNA likeness is to clarify that even Salafis accept the crescent as a component of mosque design.

ISNA President Ingrid Matteson spoke at the interfaith convocation of the 2008 Democratic National Convention

They picked a Wahhabi as their representative of Islam? Why not invite bin Laden himself, who is a perfectly orthodox Wahhabi?

ISNA was founded by the Saudi-funded Muslim Students Association, which has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the progenitor of all modern Sunni terrorist groups, including al Qaeda.

What else should we expect? After all, the mainstream left DID spend the last five years trying desperately to hand Iraq over to al Qaeda and Iran.