Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 9-18-2008
Sep 18, 2008 Flight 93
“They had some forewarning and they chose to take action.” The defenders of the crescent also have forewarning, and are trying to cover it up.
Gordon Felt, president of the Flight 93 family group that supports the crescent shaped memorial, offered a nice summary statement of the heroism of Flight 93:
They had some forewarning and they chose to take action.
“It’s that citizen soldier, heroism message,” he said “that we want to get out and memorialize their actions.”
Mr. Felt also has forewarning of an enemy plot, but he and the other defenders of the crescent design are choosing not to act. They are displaying a perfect anti-spirit of Flight 93.
According to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird, they all know that all of our basic claims about the crescent design are accurate: the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent; the 44 translucent blocks that are to be placed along the flight path, etcetera. Yet they and their allies in the press are doing everything in their power to keep the public from knowing what they know.
Example 1: PA paper reports Mecca orientation controversy, omits its own verification of the Mecca orientation of the crescent.
In last week’s anniversary coverage of the 9/11 attacks, the Johnstown Tribune Democrat noted the controversy over the orientation of the crescent. We say it points to Mecca. The Park Service denies it:
The project also has been dogged by complaints spearheaded by California author Alec Rawls that the memorial points to Mecca and is a veiled tribute to the Islamic terrorists – a claim family members and developers maintain has been investigated and refuted.
What reporter Kirk Swauger fails to mention is that he himself fact-checked the Mecca-orientation claim last year, and published his findings:
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.
This is the only instance in three years now where any news organization has ever published any fact-checking of our easy to fact check claims about the memorial design. Alec has several times emailed Kirk’s published confirmation of the Mecca-orientation to every newsdesk in Pennsylvania and to every reporter covering the memorial story. They ALL know about it. Yet even Kirk continues to present the Mecca orientation claim as a “he said, she said” conflict, without letting his readers know that he has verified the Mecca-orientation for himself (and this isn’t the first time he has made this omission).
If Mr. Swauger really wanted everyone to forget his confirmation of the Mecca-orientation, he could just avoid any mention of the orientation of the crescent at all. Alec’s best guess is that Kirk is being held back by Tribune Democrat editor Chip Minemyer, who has tried to sweep the memorial controversy under the rug from day one, but the reporters are also neck deep. Several have suggested that to investigate and report on the accuracy of our claims would be taking sides. Of course that phony “scruple” would disappear in a second if the facts showed our criticisms to be bogus.
Example 2: Gordon Felt himself misled the public about the 44 blocks.
The Crescent of Embrace design, now called the (broken) Circle of Embrace, calls for a total of 44 inscribed translucent memorial blocks to be placed along the flight path. (There were forty passengers and crew on Flight 93 and four terrorists.)
In trying to get this information out to the public, we need to be brief, so “44 inscribed translucent memorial blocks” sometimes gets shortened to “44 glass blocks,” or “44 blocks.” Asked last spring about the 44 blocks, Gordon Felt declared it a lie:
Opponents also claim there is a plan to have 44 glass blocks — for the 40 victims and four hijackers — in the design.
“That’s an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as fact,” said Edward Felt’s brother, Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93. “It’s misleading and helps drive the conspiracy theory.”
But he follows this denial with a footnote, indicating that he knows full well that there will be 44 memorial blocks:
Felt said the names of the passengers and crew will be placed on the memorial, but no final decision has been made on how they would be displayed or on what material.
In other words, he is nit-picking over our occasional description of the blocks as “glass blocks,” when they might not all be technically made of glass.
As Alec’s original report to the Memorial Project made clear, 43 of the blocks are described in the design drawings as “polished, translucent white marble”:
Click pic for larger image.
The lower section of wall, on the left, contains forty of the “translucent white marble” blocks or panels (backlit at night), inscribed with the names of the forty heroes. The upper section of wall, on the right, contains three more blocks, inscribed with the 9/11 date.
That upper section of wall, by the way, is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent, placing it in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag. Thus the date goes to the Islamic star. The date goes to the terrorists.
Here is the 44th block on the flight path. It marks the upper crescent tip, where according to the Park Service’s own website, the flight path symbolically breaks our (Christian) circle, turning it into the giant (Mecca oriented) crescent. A clearer depiction of al Qaeda victory is hard to imagine, and it all comes together right here:
At the end of the Entry Portal Walkway (after the walkway symbolically “breaks” the towering Entry Portal Walls) sits a large “glass memorial plaque” that dedicates the entire site.
This 44th translucent block on the flight path marks the spot where the terrorists symbolically broke our harmonious circle and turned it into a giant Islamic shaped crescent. To be inscribed: “A field of honor forever.”
Gordon Felt knows ALL of this, and is trying to keep the public from knowing. It’s as if someone on Flight 93, hearing from the ground that airplanes had crashed into the Trade Towers, insisted to the other passengers that NO airplanes had crashed into the Trade Towers.
Apparently grief has made these people crazy. They have forewarning, and are struggling with all their might to keep others from being forewarned as well.
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Tags: flight 93 memorial, lies, Mecca, sham
Don’t Take Flight 93 To Mecca 9-9-08
Sep 9, 2008 Flight 93
Frontpage Magazine covers the memorial debacle
FrontPage managing editor Jamie Glazov interviews Alec Rawls in this week’s FrontPage Interview.
Rawls takes the opportunity to lay out the basic facts for a new set of readers:
1. That the giant crescent (originally called the Crescent of Embrace) points to Mecca.
2. That this giant Mecca oriented crescent is STILL THERE in the Circle of Embrace redesign (explicitly described as a broken circle, just as the Crescent of Embrace was).
Punch line:
It’s like gate security catching a terrorist with a bomb and telling him to go back outside and see if he can hide it better the second time. All [architect Paul Murdoch] did was add some completely irrelevant disguise.
Please give FrontPage a visit, and if you haven’t bookmarked them already, the site is well worth your time.
Frontpage founder David Horowitz has been exposing the far left’s takeover of the Democrat mainstream since the 1980’s, and since 2001 has extended his Discover the Networks approach to our Islamofascist enemies. If you are drawn to the sound of the guns, FrontPage is on the frontlines of both the culture-war and terror-war battles for accurate information.
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Tags: flight 93 memorial, frontpage
Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 8-14-2008
Aug 14, 2008 Flight 93
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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Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 7-31-2008
Jul 31, 2008 Flight 93
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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Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 7-17-2008
Jul 17, 2008 Flight 93
“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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Click for list of participants:
Tags: Flight 93, Mecca, memorial, muslims against sharia