Crescent of Betrayal

By Jamie Glazov
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Monday, September 08, 2008

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Alec Rawls, the author of Crescent of Betrayal, a soon-to-be published book about the giant Mecca-oriented crescent that the Park Service is planning to plant at the Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania . Given the urgent public need to know, WND books has allowed Mr. Rawls to make a preliminary draft of his book available for free download until the print edition comes out in 2009. Mr. Rawls is working with Tom Burnett Sr., father of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Jr., to stop the planting of the crescent. Helping them are about a hundred bloggers who post a weekly “Stop the Crescent Memorial” blogburst, usually written by Mr. Rawls.

FP: Alec Rawls, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Rawls: Great to talk to you. FrontPage does a great job exposing Islamist threats, so the memorial debacle is right up your alley.

FP: Tell us about what this Crescent is all about and how you got involved.

Rawls: Some of your readers will remember the original controversy that erupted when the winning Crescent of Embrace design was unveiled in September 2005. A publicity shot released by architect Paul Murdoch showed what appeared to be a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag stamped atop the crash site. It is obvious when you see a side by side comparison of Murdoch's publicity photo and an Islamic crescent and star:

Original Crescent of Embrace publicity shot, left. Wikipedia's "typical" Islamic crescent and star, right, colored red and viewed from the same angle. The memorial plaza that sits roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag marks the Flight 93 crash site. For the full original publicity shot, as it appeared in Pittsburgh Post Gazette, click here.

A set of five poster-sized design images were available on-line, and people started poring through them. Within two days, a group of commentators at the Little Green Footballs website had verified that the giant crescent actually points to Mecca. When I heard that, I had to verify it for myself, and actually refined the calculations a bit. I found that a person standing midway between the tips of the crescent and facing into the center of the crescent would be facing 1.8° north of Mecca, plus or minus a tenth of a degree.

If anyone wants to verify the Mecca orientation for themselves, it takes literally two minutes. Just use the Mecca direction calculator at Islam.com to print out a graphic of the direction to Mecca from Somerset PA (ten miles from the crash site). Place it over the crescent site plan on your computer screen and you'll see that the "qibla" line (the Muslim prayer direction) bisects the crescent.

A person standing between the tips of the crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing almost exactly in the qibla direction (towards Mecca). Click for larger image.

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 shape, but the architypical mihrab is crescent shaped.

The planned memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque. Of the dozen typical mosque features, every one is represented in the crescent design, all on the same epic scale as the half mile wide mihrab. Laid out over three miles of property, this will be the world's largest mosque by a factor of a hundred. It is also full of terrorist memorializing features.

FP: This is mind-boggling. Who is behind all of this? What are the objectives of those who are orchestrating this? What is the meaning here?

Rawls: All I know about the architect is what he did. He proves intent by endless repetition of his Islamic and terrorist memorializing geometries. Clearly, he wants his accomplishment to be undeniable once it is a fait accompli.

Why would Murdoch want to build a memorial to al Qaeda’s heroes instead of ours? The most likely explanation is that he is on the side of al Qaeda. Flight 93 taught us the nature of our terror war enemies: that they hide amongst us, pretending to be trust-worthy friends. That fits Murdoch’s behavior exactly. I would guess that he converted to Islam at some point, became a radical Islamist, and is now acting as a freelance jihadi. But it is also possible that he is some kind of nihilistic leftist who just saw a chance to strike a blow against America and has the artistic genius to pull it off.

Murdoch is really not the hard part of the story to understand. We hosted an open design competition in time of war and literally invited the entire world to enter. Of course we should have expected that there would be entries from the other side, secretly aiming to memorialize the terrorists. Much harder to understand is the willful blindness of dozens of people now in government, academia and the media who are actively and self-consciously covering up evidence of an enemy plot. They don’t accept my conclusion that this is a terrorist memorial mosque, and use that as an excuse to lie about the evidence.

For instance, in February 2006 I talked to a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette—Paula Ward—who told me that she and other reporters had happened onto the several independent verifications of the Mecca orientation of the crescent when it was first discovered, back in September 2005. She told me that the newspaper held a special meeting of editors and reporters where the editors decided the Mecca-orientation discovery should not be published.

This would and should have been headline news across the country, and would have spelled the end of the crescent design. It would have been the second airplane flying into the Trade Center . With one airliner (the crescent and star flag configuration), people could think that maybe it was an accident. But everyone knew instantly when the second airliner hit the Trade Center that the nation was under attack. The Post Gazette made a conscious editorial decision to hide the second airliner hitting the Flight 93 memorial: the Mecca-orientation of the crescent.

That was a key moment. Instead of being exposed as an al Qaeda sympathizer, Murdoch was simply told to try to make his design look less objectionable. 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 he did was add some completely irrelevant disguise.

The original crescent design was described as a broken circle. The so-called redesign is still described, right on the Park Service’s own website, as a broken circle. In the original, the broken off part was removed completely, leaving only the crescent. Now there is an extra arc of trees, floating out behind the mouth of the crescent, 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.

Animation superimposes the Circle of Embrace redesign on the original Crescent of Embrace design, then removes everything but the changes (flashing). To activate the animation, click here.

FP: Why is it important to stop this effort?

Rawls: The first thing is to stop an enemy plot. This is a symbolic attack on America , every bit as ambitious in its own way as the 9/11 attacks. The Wahabbists build mosques to claim territory. By claiming the Flight 93 crash site, Paul Murdoch is trying to turn Flight 93 into an al Qaeda victory.

But there is another reason to stop this besides stopping a national disaster. Exposing the re-hijacking of Flight 93 will give the whole country a shocking look at the truth suppressing culture of the mainstream left that has taken over the media, academia, the Democrat party, and much of our government bureaucracy. These people see everything in terms of what they think it is most advantageous for them to see, not in terms of what is really there. The litany of willful blindness to Murdoch’s plot will wake a lot of people up to how relentlessly dishonest our media has become. “They covered up what???”

This is a crucial lesson for America today, when the media is right now engaged in a massive cover up of Barack Obama’s suspect loyalties. For people to learn about Obama’s relationship with unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers, they have to watch a McCain ad. They’ll never hear about it from the mainstream media. Ditto for Obama’s Nation of Islam connections, or his close relationship with his Luo kinsman Raila Odinga, now Prime Minister of Kenya, who like Obama calls himself a Christian, but was revealed by Kenya ’s Muslim leaders to actually be a secret Muslim. He signed a secret Memorandum of Understanding with Muslim leaders where he recognizes Islam as the only true religion and promises to impose Sharia law, yet no mainstream western newspaper has ever reported that Obama’s kin and confidant is known to be lying about being a Christian.

If the media succeeds in keeping the truth about the Flight 93 memorial suppressed, it will be disgusting to have a terrorist memorial mosque stabbed into the heartland of America , but it won’t physically kill us. If the media succeeds in shepherding into the presidency a man of hidden loyalties who is sympathetic to Iranian nuclear ambitions, it will be putting a gun to our collective heads and pulling the trigger.

Flight 93 is supposed to be the symbol of our woken vigilance, yet those who are charged with the memorialization of Flight 93 are actively covering up the most explosive evidence of an enemy plot. If that can shock people into realization of how pervasively they are being deceived by our Democrat dominated institutions, it can raise the fighting spirit of Flight 93 itself. That is the ultimate objective here: to wake people up to the fight we are in, not just against our Islamofascist enemies, but also against the domestic soporifics who find it advantageous to pretend that Islamofascism is a smear instead of a reality.

FP: What can be done to stop this project?

Rawls: Expose what the truth suppressors are trying to suppress. One of things we have going for us is the immediately repulsive graphics released by the Memorial Project itself. Do we really want every visitor to the Flight 93 memorial to look up and see an Islamic crescent soaring in the sky above the symbolic lives of the 40 heroes?

This artistic rendering of the minaret-like Tower of Voices comes direct from the architect. The 40 wind chimes, literally dangling down below the symbolic Islamic heavens projected in the sky above, represent the lives of the 40 heroes.

That graphic ought to be front page news across America , but in fact, very few people have ever seen it. It has been available, but it has never been published. Congressmen are in the dark too. Anyone can send this picture to their Congressman, point out the obviously worrisome symbolism, and request a Congressional investigation.

Anyone can send the simple graphical proof of the Mecca orientation of the giant central crescent to their local newspaper and insist that this is a national news story, not just a local Pennsylvania story. I have succeeded in driving quite a bit of local Pennsylvania news coverage by running half a dozen half-page color advertisements in the Somerset newspaper, but the information needs to get out to the whole country. Anyone who wants to run an ad in their own neck of the woods, just email me (alec@rawls.org) and I’ll help with ad copy.

One thing anyone can do is sign our online petition, where people can also sign up to be contacted about activist opportunities. At the other extreme, if anyone has the really big bucks, I believe I can get us a very reasonable price on one of the most valuable pieces of property in the world.
They can’t build their damned terrorist memorial mosque if they don’t own the property, and the Memorial Project has treated the owner of the crash site so despicably that the property remains unsecured. (They wanted to take the land at a fraction of its market value, and accused the property owner of trying to extort “blood money” from the deaths of the heroes because he wanted them to commission an independent appraisal of the property value, as the Park Service’s own guidelines require.)

If we can buy the land, then we can announce that we will sell the land to the Park Service only if an independent investigation of our factual claims about the memorial demonstrates these claims to be false, as the Memorial Project keeps insisting they are. We want the facts to be scrutinized. The defenders of the crescent design are desperate to avoid scrutiny. The question is, can our left-wing elites succeed in keeping such explosive truths suppressed? I am confident they cannot, but it is going to take a broad based effort to overcome their truth-suppressing power.

FP: Alec Rawls, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Rawls: Thank you.

- Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.