After denying for 4 years that the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 will contain 44 inscribed memorial panels (equaling the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists) the Memorial Project has announced a new design that appears to collapse three of the panels into one:

Artist’s depiction of the slightly altered design for the Sacred Ground Plaza.

[If you are a newcomer, the Plaza sits in the position of the star on architect Paul Murdoch's giant Islamic crescent and star flag. They call the giant crescent a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle--what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11--is completely unchanged. It is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.]

The focus of the Plaza is the two part Memorial Wall that follows the path of Flight 93 down to the crash site. As before, the lower section of wall contains 40 memorial panels, inscribed with the names of the 40 heroes. Instead of being small translucent panels set into the wall, they will now be 8 foot tall slabs. Nice.

The symbolically significant change is in the separate upper section of Memorial Wall that will be inscribed with the 9/11 date. In the original design, this separate upper section of wall contained three additional inscribed memorial panels:

Elevation view from original Sacred Ground Plaza design PDF.

The wall on the left is designated: “WALL WITH INSCRIBED NAMES ON FOLDED BAND OF TRANSLUCENT MARBLE.” The opening between the two sections of wall is marked “TRAIL,” and the wall on the right is designated: “WALL WITH INSCRIBED DATE.”

The three translucent panels inscribed with the 9/11 date were a problem because further up the flight path, at the upper crescent tip (where Flight 93 symbolically breaks the circle, turning it into the giant Islamic shaped crescent), sits one more inscribed translucent memorial panel:

At the end of the Entry Portal Walkway sits a huge glass panel that dedicates the entire site. In the original design, this brought the total number of inscribed translucent memorial panels on the flight path to 44, with the number of “extra” blocks matching the number of Islamic hijackers on Flight 93.

The enabling legislation for the Flight 93 Memorial specifically bars the Park Service from memorializing the enemy, but architect Paul Murdoch has other ideas. He doesn’t just include them in some kind of can’t-we-all-just-get-along multiculturalist fantasy. He depicts them as triumphant warriors, placing the capstone of his terrorist memorializing block count at the exact point where, in Murdoch’s description, the terrorists’ circle-breaking, crescent-creating feat is achieved. They explode through our peaceful circle, then die along with their victims. The capstone block commemorating this glorious martyrdom will be inscribed: “A field of honor forever.”

The Memorial Project is okay with all of this, but thanks to our blogbursts, too many people OUTSIDE of the Project also know about the terrorist memorializing block count, so they decided to fix up architect Paul Murdoch’s disguise, telling a caller two years ago that they were going to turn the three panels with the 9/11 date into one large panel. That would change the memorial block count from 44 to 42. Here is Mountain Goat’s report on that 2007 phone call:

The gentleman did add, that the translucent blocks are actually white marble, and that the one with Sept. 11 inscribed on it will be one block, although it will be roughly the length three of the other blocks would have been.

This seems to be the change that is depicted in the new design image, though we will have to see the construction drawings to be sure. (An FOIA request for the recently completed construction drawings was submitted to the Park Service earlier this month.)

Primping Murdoch’s disguise does not stop his terrorist-memorializing plot, but only helps him to get away with it

The Park Service assumes that the 44 blocks were a coincidence and that by eliminating the coincidence it has eliminated the problem, but the 44 blocks were not a coincidence and changing the number of blocks to 42 does nothing alter the terrorist memorializing intent. Also, because the Park Service has been trying NOT to see Murdoch is up to, they left other terrorist memorializing features of the inscribed panels completely intact.

Notice, for instance, that the separate upper section of memorial wall, inscribed with the 9/11 date, is centered on the centerline of the giant crescent:

The trail that divides the Memorial Wall into two parts is marked in purple. The section of wall with the 9/11 date is marked in aqua.

You can see just by looking that the upper section of wall is centered on the center line of the crescent. That is the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag. Thus the 9/11 date goes to the star on the Islamic flag. The date goes to the terrorists.

Changing the number of panels used to inscribe the 9/11 date does nothing to alter this terrorist memorializing feature. Not that Murdoch really cares whether the Park Service executes his design with proper Islamic precision.

To Murdoch, it is the plan that matters

Murdoch made clear from the beginning that it is the plan that matters, not whether the memorial is actually built exactly to his specifications. We can tell that he fully expected at least one of his terrorist memorializing features to be caught and stopped because he left provision for his “mistake” to be easily corrected. This was the so called “40 Memorial Groves.” There were supposed to be one for each of the 40 infidel heroes, but Murdoch’s site-plan only shows 38 groves:

Why 38? Try to figure it out for yourself, then look here. As usual, Murdoch provides multiply redundant proof of intent, once you figure out what he is up to.

Notice that Murdoch left room for two more Memorial Groves, one at each end. But just as the 38 Groves “mistake” is easy to fix, it will also be easy to un-fix it later. Indeed, failure to follow Murdoch’s exact design is not a bug. It is a feature.

Islamic fundamentalists have been citing control of the al-Aqsa mosque as a grounds for waging war against Israel since the founding of the modern Jewish state. If we fail to be true to the glorious design of Murdoch’s terrorist memorial mosque, that will just be one more reason for Murdoch’s co-religionists to conquer The Great Satan, so that this death-penalty insult can first be avenged (“It is not for any prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land” 8.67), then corrected.

Murdoch has not admitted to being Muslim (never mind a fundamentalist Muslim), but he HAS demonstrably designed an al Qaeda sympathizing memorial to Flight 93, all according to the established principles of proper mosque design (chapter 5), so there is no doubt of his ambition. Anyone who tries to sneak an al Qaeda memorial onto the Flight 93 crash site IS al Qaeda.

In 2005, the Park Service helped Murdoch hide his giant crescent by calling it a broken circle instead (as Murdoch had described it all along). Now the Park Service is helping to disguise yet another of Murdoch’s terrorist memorializing design features, but without even acknowledging this time that the changes are in response to anything troublesome about the original design.

So tell us Park Service: if there never were 44 memorial panels on the flight path, as you have been telling the press for almost four years, why did you change the number of panels? And do you really think it is wise to help a hijacker improve his disguise?

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Everyone involved with the Flight 93 Memorial knows that the Crescent of Embrace points to Mecca

In 2007, Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird told Alec Rawls (the author of these blogburst posts) that everyone at the meetings he attended is fully aware that the giant crescent, originally named the Crescent of Embrace, really does point almost exactly at Mecca. Professor Baird says they all just assume (himself included) that the Mecca orientation must be an innocent coincidence.

Pretty crazy, when they have also been told the meaning of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca. Every mosque is built around a Mecca-direction indicator called a mihrab, and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Geometrically, the Crescent of Embrace is the world’s largest mihrab.

However honestly Project Partners believe that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence, this is not what they tell the public. When reporters asked Memorial Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley about the Mecca orientation, she denied it:

“The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site,” she said.

Thinking that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence in no way justifies lying to the public about this explosive information. If Baird’s account is accurate—that the dozens of Memorial Project Partners all know that the giant crescent actually does point to Mecca—then the Memorial Project has a lot of explaining to do. Now an overlooked article from 2007 corroborates Professor Baird’s information.

Dr. Glenn Kashurba

It turns out that a Pennsylvania psychiatrist who has been intimately involved with the memorialization of Flight 93 (writing two books on the subject) argued to a reporter before the July 2007 Memorial Project meeting that the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent (which he took as a given) should be seen as coincidental:

“When you calculate angles to Mecca – I’m going to be in Washington, D.C., this week, and I’m sure if I calculate angles of the monuments, at least one points to Mecca,” Kashurba said. “I don’t know if it will be the White House or the Lincoln Memorial, but at least one will. People looking for a way to support their way of looking at things will look at this in this way for ever and ever.”

If Dr. Kashurba was getting his information from the Memorial Project’s public statements, he would have denied that the crescent points to Mecca. Here is what Memorial Project Partner Patrick White told the press 9 days before the Kashurba story:

Rawls, of Palo Alto, Calif., contends that the centerpiece of the design points toward Mecca.

Rawls’ claims are untrue and “preposterous,” according to Patrick White, Families of Flight 93 vice president. “We went through in detail all his original claims and came away with nothing.”

Kashurba knew better, as did Patrick White himself. The week after his public denial, a local woman asked White how he could be okay with the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. This time White did not deny the Mecca orientation, but argued that it cannot be seen as honoring Islam because the inexactness of the Mecca orientation would be “disrespectful” to Islam.

Mecca orientation takes literally 2 minutes to verify, starting from source documents

It is not surprising that these Memorial Project insiders would know that the giant crescent does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (1.8° north of Mecca to be precise, ± 0.1°). After all, they had by the summer of 2007 been examining Rawls’ report, and answering questions from the press about it, for over a year, and the near Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is trivially easy to verify.

Just use any of the online Islamic prayer-direction calculators to print out the direction to Mecca from Somerset PA. Place this graphic over the Crescent site-plan on your computer screen, and you will see that the Mecca-direction line (which Muslims call “qibla”) almost exactly bisects the crescent:

The green circle in this image is from the qibla calculator at Islam.com (down at the moment, but you can use the one at Qibla.com, or QiblaLocator.com). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca.

Patrick White knows this and deceives the press and the public about it. Dr. Kashurba knows it and stands by as White and others deceive the press and the public about it. These deceptions have been blatant.

Everything points to Mecca?

The Project even went to far as to dig up an academic fraud from Texas, willing to deny that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round.

Was the reporter embarrassed to ask Muslims if they can really face any direction to face Mecca? Hard to blame her. Just to ask such a stupid question is to answer it, but the obviousness of the fraud is no excuse for letting it stand.

According to Professor Baird, every Memorial Project member who saw these denials knew that they were fraudulent, yet not one of them has tried to tell the public about the Project’s dishonest cover-up. When the truth does get out to the broader public, Project members are going to have a lot to answer for, which is presumably why they are keeping their mouths shut now. They have done a very bad thing and they don’t want it exposed.

What proves Islamic intent is the architect’s elaborate repetition of the Mecca orientation

No one ever claimed that the almost exact Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace proves Islamic intent. Architect Paul Murdoch proves intent in a different way: by elaborate repetition of his Mecca orientations. His first confirmation of intent is to include an exact Mecca orientation.

In Murdoch’s explanation, the flight path breaks the circle, turning it into the giant crescent. To find this thematically defined crescent, remove those parts of the full Crescent of Embrace that extend out past the point where the flight path breaks the circle. The resulting true or thematic crescent points EXACTLY at Mecca:

At the upper tip of the crescent, the flight path comes down from the NNE and symbolically breaks the circle. What symbolically remains standing is the true or thematic Crescent of Embrace, pointing exactly at Mecca.

Murdoch’s next confirmation of intent is to exactly repeat this entire multi-Mecca oriented geometry in the vast array of crescents of trees that surround the Tower of Voices part of the memorial. Setting aside the chance that an architect could in the first place design a memorial to Flight 93 out of nothing but crescents just by innocent coincidence (which must be close to zero), the odds that these crescents would by random chance manifest Murdoch’s repeated Mecca orientations are 1 in 131 billion:

The only change was to include an explicitly broken off part of the circle

The original Crescent of Embrace design included the symbolically broken off parts at the upper crescent tip. When the bare naked Islamic-crescent shape caused a public uproar, the Memorial Project added another broken off part of the circle, floating out in front of the mouth of the original crescent.

They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, the symbolic result of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. That makes it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque.

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Senator Specter’s payoff for betraying his party: betrayal of his state

We now know one of the payoffs that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter received for being one of three Republican Senators who allowed President Obama’s trillion-dollar Spendulus bill to become law. WPXI in Pittsburgh reports that Specter has a 5.5 million dollar earmark for the crescent-shaped Flight 93 memorial in the omnibus spending bill just passed by the Senate.

Much as the people of Pennsylvania want to see a fitting memorial built, they yanked support for the crescent design in August 2007 after Tom Burnett Sr., father of Flight 93 hero Tom Jr., started warning the country that the memorial design is STILL packed to the gills with Islamic symbolism. Since that time the Memorial Project has hardly raised a dime, and a September 2007 interview with State Senator Jane Orie, who sponsors the Hearts of Steel memorial fund, makes clear that concerns about Islamic symbolism predominate. Here is her exchange with Pittsburgh talk-radio host Fred Honsberger:

Orie: “No matter who it is, and no matter where I went today for 9/11 events, everybody brought up this crescent. Whether it is intentional or not, it is disturbing to people.”

Honsberger: “So everyone is bringing it up to you.”

Orie: “Absolutely.”

Orie is talking here about the so-called “redesign.” The people of Pennsylvania know that the giant crescent, which the redesign was supposed to remove, is still there. The Park Service calls it “Circle of Embrace” now, but the circle is still broken, and the unbroken part of the circle——what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11——remains exactly as it was in the original Crescent of Embrace (pictured above). Architect Paul Murdoch’s design is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

Pennsylvanians have voted with their pocketbooks to reject this memorial to the terrorists, but Arlen Specter is determined to cram it down their throats anyway, the same way he helped Obama cram a trillion dollars of socialist pork down America’s throat.

Specter knows better than any other politician not just that the giant Islamic-shaped crescent is still there, but that it points to Mecca

Our group was actually very hopeful back in 2007 that Senator Specter might put and end to the memorial debacle. After Mr. Burnett’s public appeal, Specter’s office wanted a briefing on the Islamic symbolism that we have found in the crescent design. One of our most knowledgeable people then spent 45 minutes with Stan Caldwell, Executive Director of Senator Specter’s Pittsburgh office, explaining in detail the Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism.

Caldwell had no trouble understanding our graphical proof that the giant crescent points almost exactly at Mecca:

A person standing between the tips of the Crescent of Embrace and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing within two degrees of the Muslim prayer direction (qibla), which is calculated as the great circle direction to Mecca. (Green qibla graphic produced by the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. Another calculator is available at QiblaLocator.com.)

Caldwell also had no trouble understanding that the giant crescent is still there. All the redesign did was place an extra arc of trees out behind the mouth of the crescent, an arc of trees that according to the Park Service’s own website explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle:

Animation starts with the bare naked Crescent of Embrace. The re-colored Circle of Embrace site plan is superimposed on top, then everything but the changes are removed. The only change is extra arc of trees (flashing) that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact.

Our man also explained the significance of the Mecca orientation: that it turns the giant Islamic-shaped crescent into a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The planned memorial is actually the world’s largest mosque, and Arlen Specter’s office is fully aware of it.

Do Specter and Caldwell have some explanation? The press will never ask, but we can:

DC Phone: 202-224-4254

DC Fax: 202-228-1229

Another Washington Post cover-up

Dan Eggen reports how Families of Flight 93 (an adjunct to the Memorial Project, representing only those families who are backing the crescent design) have been in Washington seeking federal money. He includes no mention of WHY the private fundraising effort has failed. But State Senator Orie’s discussion of her fundraising difficulties is not hard to find. Any reporter doing a story on the memorial’s fundraising problems would presumably start here:

The whole first page of search results is our blogburst post about Orie. (“Fundraising difficulties” yields the same result.)

Either Dan Eggen is completely incompetent, or the Post is taking sides, refusing to report the facts that don’t support the terrorist memorializing side.

Perhaps ombudsman Andrew Alexander should weigh in on this. The Post has NEVER reported on Mr. Burnett’s long battle to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic-shaped crescent atop his son’s grave. Mr. Burnett left a long comment on Dan Eggen’s article which Eggen simply ignored, along with private offers to talk.

So which is it Mr. Alexander? Is the Post incompetently ignorant of a controversy that has raged for years, or is it intentionally suppressing the facts about the giant Mecca-oriented crescent?

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Tom Burnett Senior: “We have an Islamist design here that can’t go forward, please.”

Powerful video of Tom Burnett Senior and Alec Rawls at the August 2nd Memorial project meeting. The clip below is Part 1 of Alec’s new video exposé, starting with Mr. Burnett ‘s appeal to the American people to please help him stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic shaped crescent atop his son’s grave.

Part one: it points to Mecca. Clip covers the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, the phony redesign, and the crescent-topped minaret. Lots of unaired news video and animated graphics, bookended with the coolest spaghetti western music ever.

A terror war battle that we can still win, despite a president-elect who does not want to fight

Rational people still want to defeat the Islamofascist enemy, but half of the electorate will now get its way in pretending that there is no enemy. Exposing and stopping the terrorist Memorial to flight 93 is a chance for the rest of us to still achieve victory, and on multiple fronts at once. Not only can we foil an enemy plot, but we can at the same time expose the willful blindness of those peace-at-any-cost countrymen who are engaged in blatant cover-up of the most damning facts about the crescent design.

These are the two battles we need to win. We have to expose and stop the deceptive agents of Islamic conquest, and we have to expose and stop the peacenik cover-up of every enemy threat.

We also need to stop the re-hijacking of Flight 93 for its own sake. Just listen to Mr. Burnett’s insistence on a proper memorial for his son Tom and the other heroes. Yes, the battle over the memorial is only symbolic, but as our Democrat-controlled media just proved by delivering Obama to the presidency, it is the information war that ultimately determines everything.

To those conservatives who have been staying away from the memorial controversy, please reconsider. All of our claims about the Memorial are easy to verify. This is a real attack on our country, and in the age of Obama, it is a rare battle that we are still in a position to win. The father of one of America’s greatest heroes is pleading for your help, but he is also offering tremendous help, if you will only hear him out.

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A Veterans Week appeal from Flopping Aces

One of our blogburst participants, Curt at Flopping Aces, e-mails a reminder about the great work done by the VALOUR-IT program at Soldiers’ Angels, delivering computer-based help to wounded soldiers.

(The Blogroll)

One of the dozen epic-scale mosque features in architect Paul Murdoch’s Crescent of Embrace design is a year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial. The shadow calculations take a bit of work to verify, but the overt similarity is immediate:

Picture of Sundial

Traditional Islamic sundial, left. The gnomon’s shadow is just reaching the outer curved vertical, indicating time for Islamic afternoon prayers. On the right is a plan view of the Tower of Voices part of the Flight 93 memorial. Shadow calculations confirm that, when the tower’s shadow reaches the inner arc of trees, it will also be time for Islamic afternoon prayers.

An Islamic sundial is a very exacting structure that would be nearly impossible to construct by accident. Islamic prayer times are determined by shadow length, so the prayer-time indicator line must be placed a particular distance from the gnomon, and must follow a particular arc.

It turns out that architect Paul Murdoch’s also put an Islamic sundial in his preliminary crescent design (from before he was chosen as a design competition finalist). This first Islamic sundial was to have been situated a few hundred yards away from the sundial in his final design, and instead of being surrounded by a vast array of crescents of trees, Murdoch’s first sundial just used a single arc of trees, laid out along the tower’s afternoon prayer line. Here is the first incarnation of the Tower of Voices:

The view here is facing south, along the entry road. The Tower opens to the northeast.

The plan view shows a tree-line to the east of the tower that appears to be at least roughly the shape of the prayer line on an Islamic sundial:

Left hand image: the tower sits at the bottom of the north-south rectangle of black rock. Right hand image shows the shape of the afternoon prayer line for an Islamic sundial, generated by Fer de Vries’ ZW2000 sundial computer. It is calibrated to the crash site latitude of 40.03 north. Fer’s red X marks the center of the gnomon. The prayer-line image gets scaled up or down depending on the gnomon height.

Scaling the image to give the best fit to the tree line to the east of the tower, the fit is just about perfect when the gnomon height is set to 86 feet:

If an 86 foot tower is placed at the flashing red cross, then when the tower’s shadow reaches the base of the line of surrounding trees, it will be time for Islamic afternoon prayers. (Details below on how to determine this scaling.)

Does the Stage I Tower of Voices have a gnomon height of 86 feet?

Very likely. The Stage I design does not specify the height of the tower, but in the elevation view above it looks to be 90 or 100 feet tall, and in Murdoch’s final design, the tower height is 93 feet, which seems the likely height here.

That’s a bit off from 86, and a gnomon height of 93 feet would push the afternoon prayer line several feet out beyond the center of the line of trees, but notice that if the full tower height is 93 feet, the gnomon height is actually several feet shorter.

Take a look back at the elevation view of the tower and you’ll see that the it has a crescent shaped top, with two arms reaching up maybe 6 or 8 feet above the low point of the crescent. The consistent gnomon point would be the low center point, which would be pretty close to 86 feet, if the full tower is 93.

Thus this LOOKS to be another year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial. What we can say for certain is that Murdoch is within a minor height adjustment of having a second year-round accurate Islamic sundial. Given the specificity of these sundial shapes, that can’t possibly be coincidence, demonstrating that Murdoch had a terrorist memorial mosque in mind from the beginning.

Of course that had to be the case, given that a terrorist memorial mosque is what he ended up designing, but this is the first clear indication of Islamic intent going back to the preliminary design itself. Murdoch’s repeated Mecca orientations and the other elaborate proofs of terrorist memorializing intent don’t appear until the Stage II design.

In the final design, Murdoch took care to hide his precise Islamic symbol shapes

In his final Crescent of Embrace design (now called a broken circle), Murdoch is systematic about hiding geometrically precise Islamic structures behind seemingly imprecise Islamic symbol shapes. For instance, the giant central crescent does not point exactly at Mecca. It points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°, making it a not quite precise Islamic mihrab.

But Murdoch also includes a thematically defined crescent in his design. It starts where the flight path thematically breaks the circle at the upper crescent tip, which more than a hundred feet from the end of the full Crescent of Embrace structure. That hundred foot plus change in the end-point of the crescent alters the orientation of the crescent by exactly 1.8°, so that the “true” thematic crescent points exactly to Mecca, as closely as can be determined given the pixel resolution of the graphics. Murdoch then provides redundant proof of intent by repeating this whole multi-Mecca oriented geometry in the crescents of trees that surround the Tower of Voices. (Demonstration in the 2nd half of this post.)

Murdoch does the same thing with the Tower sundial. On first look, the inner arc of trees in Murdoch’s final Tower of Voices design is only an accurate marker for afternoon prayer times for 8 months of the year (from March to October). But upon further inspection, one sees that Murdoch used a tricky two-height gnomon, where light passes through a slot in the top of the tower from November to February, lowering the gnomon point at the center of the crescent topped tower for those months.

This tricky two height gnomon puts a kink in the afternoon prayer line that conforms exactly to Murdoch’s tree line, creating a year-round accurate Islamic sundial. True evil genius.

In the preliminary design, Murdoch was not so careful. His tree line follows the full traditional Islamic afternoon prayer line shape, which any informed person could immediately recognize.

The chances of Murdoch coming up with TWO different year-round accurate Islamic sundials by coincidence? 0/(∞²).

Sundial calculations

Islamic afternoon prayers commence when an object’s shadow is the length of its noon shadow, plus its height. As summer turns to winter, noon shadows get longer, so the shadow length at prayer time gets longer too. Also, shadows lengthen more quickly, so the time it takes the noon shadow to grow by the gnomon height gets shorter, making prayer times occur earlier. Thus the angle of the prayer-time shadows gets more northerly (earlier) as the days get shorter, creating the characteristic prayer-line arc.

The labor intensive way to calculate prayer times is to use J Geisen’s awesome sun-shadow applet to find the length of shortest shadow for a particular gnomon on an particular day at a particular latitude and longitude, then look for the time and shadow angle at which the gnomon’s shadow is the length of its noon shadow plus its height.

The easy way is to let Fer de Vries’ ZW2000 computer program do the work for you. Just download the zip files, right click the folder and extract all the files, then open the program, set the latitude to 40.03 degrees (shanskville PA), check “Islamic prayer lines,” click calculate, and set the scale so you can see the result. (The bigger the gnomon height you pick, the more you will have to scale the resulting graphic down to bring the prayer lines into the picture). Really easy.

In addition to generating prayer lines, De Vrie’s program also generates a bar that is equal in length to the gnomon height. It is visible in the bottom right corner of the graphic above that shows the prayer line superimposed over the tree line. That gnomon-height reference line makes it possible to scale the image of the gnomon point and its associated prayer line to the site-plan image.

The base image used is a 32x enlargement of a tiny piece of the large JPEG image of Murdoch’s Stage I design. That original image includes a distance scale, where 3.5 screen inches at 72dpi = 4000 ft. After enlarging 32x, that becomes 112 s.i. = 4000′, or 1 s.i. = 4000′/112=35.714′.

Once the graphic is resized so that it fits over the estimated gnomon point and the tree line, the gnomon height bar scales out to 2.41 inches. (It looks a bit bigger, but that is just because it was bolded, which makes the length grow along with the width.) 2.41 x 35.714 = 86′.

The Memorial Project claims that it investigated the sundial warnings and found them to be a false alarm, but their comments prove that they never even looked at the warnings

Memorial Project Chairman John Reynolds said last year that any tower with a wall around it can serve as an Islamic sundial. When prayer time comes around, just mark the wall with the angle of the tower’s shadow, and voilà.

FAIL. Islamic prayer times are determined by shadow length, not shadow angle, and the shadow angle at prayer time changes every day of the year. It CANNOT be marked on any old wall around a tower. An Islamic prayer-time marker must be set the right distance from its associated shadow-caster, and it must follow the right arc.

Imagine telling the public you have investigated a warning of terrorist attack and found it to be a false alarm, when in fact you never investigated it at all? That is what Reynolds is doing when he claims to have investigated the warnings of an Islamic sundial, when he doesn’t even know that Islamic prayer times are determined by shadow length. The irresponsibility of these people is breathtaking.

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What a mihrab means to the Wahhabists, the Khomeini-ists and the other Salafists

In 1981, Ayatollah Khomeini explained the meaning of a Mecca-direction indicator (called a mihrab), like the one now being planted on the Flight 93 crash site:

Mehrab means the place of war, the place of fighting. Out of the mehrabs, wars should proceed, just as all the wars of Islam used to proceeded out of the mehrabs. [Hat tip Yoel Natan, Moon-o-theism, p. 30]

The I-ah-told-you-so wasn’t just speaking allegorically either. The University of Chicago’s Francis Joseph Seinglass Comprehensive Persian-English dictionary lists amongst its definitions for mihrab: “warlike,” and “a field of battle.” (Hat tip Czechmade.)

Anyone who thinks it is okay to build the world’s largest mihrab on the Flight 93 crash site really should read Khomeini’s whole speech (his tribute to Muhammad). It’s only two pages, but psychopathic hellspawn like Khomeini can pack an awful lot of murder-lust into a short space, when every stinking sentence is a plea for wanton slaughter.

From beginning:

The real Day of God is the day that Amir al mo’menin drew his sword and slaughtered all the khavarej and killed them from the first to the last.

To end:

We believe that the accused essentially does not have to be tried. He or she must just be killed. Only their identity is to be established and then they should be killed.

“The accused,” of course, is YOU, and all the other “discontented people” who do not readily submit to the murder-cult’s endless demands.

To rid the world of who they accuse of violating God’s law, they grant themselves exemption from the Sixth Commandment. Evil stupidity. Maggots for brains. Matched only by the see-no-evil stupidity of a western world that is so defrauded by its dishonest left wing media that it is losing the capacity to fight back.

Will we really build a Salafist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site? Will we really elect a president who is in bed with Islamofascists and domestic terrorists alike? Will we really let Iran get the nuclear weapons with which to wipe city after American city off the map, as they so desperately crave? Will we really turn off the energy spigot–the key to past and continuing progress–based on utterly fraudulent claims of human-caused global warming, even as the world descends into a substantial cooling phase?

None of these issues should even be in question, yet the minority of us who are trying to stem the collapse of the nation can barely battle even these gimmies to a draw, and could lose all four. If the nation survives this “moment” in history–this long war with Islamic fascism and with our own liberty hating left–it will be thanks to the relative handful of people who recognize honest reason and evidence as impenetrable armor and unbreakable sword against those who seek advantage in manipulative dishonesty.

The demagogues and their dupes are powerful in numbers, but blind. Their hostility to contrary reason and evidence divorces them from reality, leaving them ignorant of surrounding truth. That is our advantage. We know the lay of the land, and can use it to defeat them, but we still have to get up and do it.

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Paul Murdoch channels Allahpundit

Two years ago Allahpundit (who works for Michelle Malkin) made a very strange judgment. He accepted that the original Crescent of Embrace design for the Flight 93 memorial pointed roughly to Mecca (to be exact, it points within 2 degrees of Mecca), but said that worrying about the orientation of the crescent reeked of “truther-iness.”

“A good rule of thumb,” said Allah:

if you need a protractor to properly express your outrage, you’ve probably gone too far.

Orientation on Mecca may sound esoteric, but it is certainly not esoteric to Muslims, who are supposed to face Mecca five times a day for prayer, and often carry special compasses for that purpose.

In particular, a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed arch shaped, but the archetypical mihrab is crescent shaped.) This isn’t merely suspicious, like learning to fly airliners without learning how to land. It is the discovered enemy objective: to stab a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America.

How can anyone be surprised? As our blogburst logo shows, the original crescent design was a bare naked crescent and star flag. For Allah to dismiss ADDITIONAL Islamic symbol shapes as coincidence is like seeing the second airplane fly into the Trade Center and saying: “Well now it HAS to be an accident.”

Allahpundit seems to have forgotten the defining quality of the 9-11 truth morons. It isn’t that their claims seem esoteric or even outlandish. It is that their claims are FALSE, and in most cases are revealed by the simplest fact-checking to be blatantly dishonest as well. The truthers are self-conscious purveyors of malicious disinformation, a la Michael Moore.

In contrast, everything we are saying about the flight 93 memorial is TRUE, and is easily verified to be true just by examining the official design drawings.

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Memorial Project Superintendent lies about receiving threats

Joanne Hanley, superintendent of the Flight 93 Memorial Project, cannot answer the damning facts about the crescent design (now called a broken circle), so she has decided to slander the people who are pointing them out. In a speech at the Memorial Project’s August 2nd meeting, she cited a list of “threats” she had received from critics, saying for instance that her “career would be destroyed.”

In defense of Superintendent Hanley, Flight 93 family member Calvin Wilson expressed his disgust at the violent threats and charged that critics were acting like the terrorists themselves. Three Pennsylvania newspapers covered Hanley’s claims to have been threatened, one editorialized against the uncivilized critics, and a Memorial Project press release highlighted Wilson’s outraged response to the supposed threats.

It is all a lie. Here is the Letter to the Editor that Alec Rawls just sent to the duped Pennsylvania newspapers, exposing Superintendent Hanley’s deception:

A warning is not a threat. A warning is to protect against a threat.

As the lead organizer of the movement to stop the crescent design, I can tell you who made the statements that Superintendent Hanley was complaining about. I recognized every one of the phrases she cited as coming from myself. It is ME who Joanne Hanley is accusing of making threats, an accusation that is not just false, but grotesquely dishonest.

What Joanne Hanley is casting as threats were WARNINGS, trying to alert her to the threat posed by architect Paul Murdoch and his scheme to plant a giant Mecca-oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. This is one of Superintendent Hanley’s excuses for refusing to heed warnings about the crescent design. She pretends that warnings are threats and hence SHOULD NOT be listened to.

When I couldn’t get Hanley to look to the facts for the country’s sake, I tried to appeal to her instinct for self-preservation, warning her of the personal consequences of Murdoch’s attempt to stab a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America. (That is the meaning of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca: it is the central feature of a mosque.)

As I put it in a March 2006 email to both Superintendent Hanley and Project Manager Jeff Reinbold:

I have been trying to save your lives and your careers for six months. It is not too late for you. You can still do your jobs and investigate the basic facts I have warned you about, like the Mecca-orientation of Murdoch’s original Crescent of embrace, and the continued presence of Murdoch’s original crescent in the redesign.

Shortly after this email, Joanne Hanley told me why she was not concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. In a conference call with Jeff Reinbold, she told me that: “It isn’t exact. That’s one we talked about. It has to be exact.” (The giant crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± .1°.)

If she had admitted to the public what she was admitting in private—that the giant crescent does indeed point almost exactly to Mecca—it would have been okay. The people of Pennsylvania would be able to decide for themselves whether a giant Mecca-oriented crescent makes an acceptable memorial to the victims of Islamic terrorism, so long as it does not point EXACTLY at Mecca. Instead, the Memorial Project decided to deceive the public, sending an academic fraud from the University of Texas to assure the press that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round. [Post Gazette, “Flight 93 memorial draws a new round of criticism,” August 18, 2007.]

Just as I warned Superintendent Hanley that her career was in jeopardy, I also warned Dr. Griffith that his career would be destroyed if he did not correct this blatant disinformation. Like Hanley, Griffith too interpreted my warning as a threat, as if it would be ME who was responsible for the harm to his reputation, when he was covering up evidence of an enemy plot by lying about basic geometry, pretending that there is no direction between two points on planet earth.

In spite of the Memorial Project’s active cover-up of Murdoch’s plot, I continued to treat Superintendent Hanley as what she is: a fellow countryman aboard a hijacked airplane who is in need of rescue. As I put it in another email to Superintendent Hanley last November:

I don’t want you to be hurt here. There is only one bad guy in this story: Paul Murdoch. I want to help everyone else get off of this hijacked airplane. … I am not your enemy. I am your friend. I am the one who has been trying to save you, for two damned years, and I still am, despite your persistent public slanders against me.

Is it even POSSIBLE to be clearer? A warning is not a threat. A warning is to protect someone from a threat, as my communications spelled out over and over. For Joanne Hanley to pretend that these warnings about the threat she is facing were threats in themselves is deliberate dishonesty. For her to tell Calvin Wilson that these attempts to protect her from Murdoch’s plot were violent threats against her, prompting Wilson to use his status as a family member to attack critics on this dishonest basis, is even worse.

Joanne Hanley is not the only person I am warning. Every Pennsylvanian is aboard this hijacked airplane. How can the newspapers of Pennsylvania let stand a fraudulent claim that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca? How can the educated people of Pennsylvania, the math teachers, the college students, the politicians, let such a fraud stand, when every one of you knows that Muslims face Mecca for prayer?

If Pennsylvanians continue to be willfully blind to easily verifiable evidence of an enemy plot in your own back yard, history will not be kind to you.

Alec Rawls
Palo Alto CA
August 12, 2008

Morality requires trust in truth

Imagine if one of the passengers on Flight 93 was told that if they did not retake the airplane, they would be killed when the terrorists flew the airplane into a building. If the passenger was Joanne Hanley, she would say: “Stop threatening me!”

Any excuse to avoid the truth, no matter how nonsensical or even suicidal. A photo-negative of the fighting spirit of Flight 93.

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.) Jesus wasn’t a witness for the truth only sometimes, or only about matters of salvation. He proceeded from the factual truth of every situation that crossed his path, and called upon the rest of us to similarly trust in truth.

Secular moral reason demands the same thing. Anyone who thinks that it can somehow be right or in their interest to avoid or suppress the truth will through that avoidance of the truth become divorced from reality, with the inevitable effect that their ideas about what is right or in their interest can only be wrong. This is the irrationality of the Memorial Project. They proceed on the assumption that the crescent design is innocent, while self-consciously covering up evidence that it is not.

This malfeasance puts the rest of our society to the test. All of the people who we pay to check and report the facts: government, academia and the media, are all desperately trying to suppress the truth. That leaves it up to the rest of us to witness and communicate the truth about Murdoch’s plot. (Some basic facts, and how to verify them for yourself, posted here.)

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Rally this Saturday: Stop the crescent mosque!

Tom Burnett Sr. and Alec Rawls will be in Somerset PA this weekend to condemn the crescent/broken-circle memorial to Flight 93. Here is Alec’s notice about the press conference that he and Mr. Burnett will host after they speak at the public meeting of the Memorial Project Saturday morning:

…Also on the press conference panel will be Diane Gramley, President of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, and the Reverend Ron McRae of Johnstown.

In addition to our own statements, Mr. Burnett will read a statement from Congressman John Kline (R-MN), and Alec Rawls will present statements from Rich Davis, founder of the Chester County Victory Movement, and from the president of Muslims Against Sharia Law.

After answering questions for the press, Mr. Burnett and his co-panelists will host a rally to stop the re-hijacking of Flight 93. Members of our informal Western Pennsylvania Compatriots group (who spoke out at the last public meeting) will be in attendance, and some out of town folks will be coming as well.

And check this out: a big color ad in the local paper:

To inform and invite the local populace, a half-page full-color ad will be running in tomorrow’s edition of the Somerset Daily American. It explains how the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Circle of Embrace redesign, which is explicitly described by the Park Service itself as a “broken” circle. That is exactly how architect Paul Murdoch described his original Crescent design.

All the redesign does is include an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle (the crescent), remains exactly as it was. It is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca , as your colleague Kirk Swauger verified a year ago:

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.

Except for Kirk’s verification of the Mecca orientation of the crescent (which was not picked up by any other news organization), reporters have not been bothering to check the facts. When our claim that there are to be 44 inscribed translucent blocks emplaced along the flight path was reported a few months ago, Gordon Felt, President of Families of Flight 93 was quoted denying it, but despite this clear conflict of factual claims, no reporter bothered to simply open up the design drawings and count.

Can reporters actually be shamed into doing their jobs? Doubtful. They seem to regard actually checking the facts as giving some kind of unfair advantage to the side that is right (which they would be happy do do if the right side was THEIR side).

When the press is in this anti-fact-checking mode, their methodology is just to quote each side. We are trying to take advantage of this behavior by having some of our independent supporters use source documents to fact-check our basic claims, then attest in press releases and at the public meeting that they have personally counted the translucent memorial blocks etcetera.

Co-panelist Diane Gramley will be making such declarations for the cameras. Cao (the organizer of these blogbursts) did some checking from source documents this week and has already posted a powerful press release about her findings that Alec will present at the press conference.

Tom Burnett’s attendance should bring national news coverage. If Tom and Alec can direct some of that coverage to our independent fact checking, it might break the media embargo on fact checking, and once we get the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent out as verified national news, the crescent goose will be cooked.

If you want to participate in our fact-checking drive, Alec has a set of fact checking guides, with links to source documents, at CrescentOfBetrayal.com. Just send him a link to the post or comment in which you attest to your fact-checking results, and he will compile them.

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“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:

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

Last week’s blogburst 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?” email 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 email 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 email 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 shaped) crescent.

Instead, Kecia quotes an emailer 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 that 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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