Wretchard on the Flight 93 Memorial: Yep, It Opens to Mecca
There are some, even among readers of this blog (we love you anyway, Jojo!), who think that the controversy over the Flight 93 Memorial and its crescent design is much ado about nothing. Maybe so, but Wretchard of the Belmont Club, who has long been known as one of the blogging world’s most astute and insightful commentators, found himself skeptical of claims that the crescent “opens” towards Mecca (i.e, the direction of the perpendicular drawn to a line drawn from tip to tip – see this image).
Wretchard did the math, and what’s more, he tells us how to do it, also, and he concludes: holy cow, it really DOES open towards Mecca. Now Wretchard, as I indicated, is a quite reasonable person, and he is willing to accept that this probably coincidental. However:
…[T]he simplest explanation it seems to me, is that the orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is coincidental.
But what a coincidence! Memorials are symbols above all and it may be inappropriate to commemorate Flight 93 with a Red Crescent facing Mecca.
…I am reminded of all those “Freudian” symbols that everyone suddenly noticed in High School, or about calculations showing the Great Pyramid had this or that occult meaning. Looking at the architect’s portfolio and the topography it was better than even odds he was going to come up with a semicircle somewhere and if you allowed for twenty degree arcs as the limit of suggestion, there was a 1 in 9 chance of an accidental orientation to Mecca because any azimuth has a reciprocal.
But memorials are what we perceive them to be; they rarely have an intrinsic value. They “remind” us of things, and it so happened that a design which was probably innocently conceived triggered certain unfortunate associations. Symbols are powerful and dangerous to the unwitting. During the Stalin era, one man was sent to the Gulag because he hung his hat over Stalin’s picture. It didn’t matter that he was blind. It was the symbolism of his act that counted then. Perhaps years from today no will object to Red Crescents displayed in conjunction with the victims of September 11, just as someday people may remember that Swastikas were widely employed as ancient religious symbols. One day, but probably not in 2005.
“It may be inappropriate to commemorate Flight 93 with a Red Crescent facing Mecca” – yes, indeed, it just may (hat tip to Michelle Malkin)…
Sorry to go off topic, Mark, especially on this post, but if you just tried to e-mail me, I can’t get to it. When I try to sign into Yahoo e-mail, I get “The page cannot be displayed.” And since I’m still having issues with Internet Browser, I can’t get at that e-mail account either. I’m going to have to cuddle up with Verizon and see what the h*** is going on.
No worries…just send me an e-mail when you get it back up…
Red Crescent Symbol Of Jihad
Michelle Malkin asks in this update post whether people watched the excellent Discovery Channel’s special Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back and how they felt about the Flight 93 Memorial. The short answer is yes we did and it was excellent…
This seems a bit wierd to me.
The red crescent symbol — sure. But the orientation? I go back and forth… (It’s pointing the opposite way, there’s controversy about “great circle” vs. “shortest line” directions to Mecca..etc)
In the end, I’m with Ace of Spaces — let’s just make it a circle (or a circle with three openings to enter from).
Personally, I think this all to be a case of a cigar being just a cigar. Didn’t know that I was supposed to be offended by the overt islamism until reading the likes of Michelle Malkin, &c.
Rather than overanalyse this stuff, I think that maybe we should be more interested in the ‘museum of American Atrocities’ (or whatever the Moveon.org ™ affiliate is calling it) spectacle in NYC.
For some excellent commentary on this whole thing, take a look at:
http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu
bebere, I certainly don’t want to seem like I’m hyping this thing; I just think it’s inappropriate…as I said (or at least implied, I hope), I agree with Wretchard that it’s probably not intentionally reminiscent of Islam…but you’re not the first regular to think I’ve jumped the shark on this one…
bebere-
I think you just hit on why this story has such traction. Because it’s not an isolated incident.
I also started out in the “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” camp — but the panel deciding on this design recommended that the name be changed to “arc of embrace” — and the artist refused to let it be changed. Why demand that it be called a “crescent” — what is he trying to represent?
All I can come up with as symbolic associations of a crescent are: (1) Islam; (2) the Fertile Crescent (Iraq); and (3) a crescent moon.
I can’t figure out what relevance the moon might have… so I’d enjoy hearing what symbolism the artist intended — except that he claims he had no symbolic intentions — but don’t change the word. I’m skeptical.