Will Tom Tancredo keep his Flight 93 promise?
When the Crescent of Embrace design for the Flight 93 Memorial was unveiled in September 2005, Representative Tom Tancredo was the only Congressman to state the obvious, that “the crescent’s prominent use as a symbol in Islam–and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists,” raises the possibility that “the design, if constructed, will in fact make the memorial a tribute to the hijackers.” (Tancredo Press release, 9/12/2005, dead link.)
Looking at the original Crescent of Embrace publicity photo, it couldn’t be a memorial to anyone BUT the hijackers:
Architect Paul Murdoch’s job is to work with symbols. He did not plant a bare naked crescent and star flag on the crash site by accident.
Two days later, Tancredo’s press secretary laid out Tom’s conditions:
… that the congressman would be happy with the changes only if the crescent shape is removed.
But all the Memorial Project did was add some surrounding trees. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign. The crescent shape was NOT removed. It was only very slightly disguised:
The graphics were recolored, and a few trees were added outside of the mouth of the crescent (lower left). Every particle of the original crescent and star structure remains.
Representative Tancredo was right to demand removal of the crescent. It turns out that a person facing directly into the half mile wide crescent will be facing Mecca. That makes it a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built. You can plant as many trees around a mosque as you want and it will still be a mosque. This is the world’s largest mosque, by a factor of a hundred.
So where is Tom Tancredo? Will he live up to his promise and demand that the crescent be removed? Or is he now okay with a terrorist memorial mosque being planted on the graves of our murdered heroes?
Contact Tancredo
Feel free to copy and paste this post into an email for Representative Tancredo’s new press secretary. Or you can use Tom’s online mail form to let him know how he was duped.
Representative Tancredo was effective in 2005 in standing up for the honor of Flight 93. Now that the crescent mosque is actually being built, he is more needed than ever. Please Mr. Tancredo: live up to your Flight 93 promise!
When Tom Burnett Sr. went public with his plea for a Congressional investigation, he mentioned Representative Tancredo as someone he liked and hope would be of help. Please Mr. Tancredo, hear the urgent warnings from this father of one of our murdered heroes!
The phony redesign
To see clearly how the redesign leaves the original Mecca-oriented cescent fully intact, note that the orientation of the original crescent can be determined by connecting the most obtruding points of the original crescent structure, then forming the perpendicular bisector to this line (red arrow):
The green circle shows the direction to Mecca (the “qibla” direction) from Somerset PA. It was generated using the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. Just place this qibla graphic over the original Crescent of Embrace site plan and the Mecca-direction line almost exactly bisects the crescent.
Looking closely at the above graphic (click for larger image), you can see that on the bottom the most obtruding tip of the original crescent structure was the last red maple, while on the top it was the end of the thousand foot long, fifty foot tall, Entry Portal Wall. Here is an artist’s rendering of the end of the Entry Portal Wall as seen in the Bowl of Embrace redesign. It shows how overtly this upper crescent tip remains intact in the redesign:
The redesign only added the extra row of trees on the left, behind the visitors in this graphic. Notice that these trees are not even visible to a person who is facing into the crescent. They do nothing to affect even a visitor’s experience of the crescent, never mind the presence or integrity of the crescent itself. The original Mecca-oriented crescent remains completely intact and is now being built.