The giant Mecca-oriented crescent remains completely intact in the the Bowl of Embrace redesign. In particular, the circle is still broken.

Don't let anyone tell you that the memorial is a circle now instead of a crescent. It is a broken circle, which is exactly how architect Paul Murdoch described it in September 2005, when controversy over the Crescent of Embrace design first erupted:

[Murdoch] said he would work to satisfy critics who complained that it honors the terrorists. Its shape is a circle broken by the flight pattern of the plane, which supporters have said follows the topography of the area.

When the American people said no to this attempt to plant a giant Islamic flag on the crash site, the Park Service agreed to get rid of the Islamic symbology, but they didn't. They only disguised it with a few irrelevant trees. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign:

Crescent-Bowl, site-plan, side-by-side, 600px

Except for re-coloring, the only change in the so-called redesign (right) is the extra arc of trees on the west side of the memorial. The unbroken part of the circle (the crescent) is unchanged in the phony redesign. (Full Crescent of Embrace site-plan here. Full Bowl of Embrace site-plan here.)

The extra arc of trees in the Bowl of Embrace explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. This from the Park Service's own website (describing the current design):

The circle is broken in two places that mark the southeastern path of the plane to the crash site. The circle is broken at the entry to the memorial and at the crash site. [To navigate to this page, start at the Flight 93 Memorial home page and click News, then "more", then "questions."]

Including a broken off part of the circle is perfectly consistent with Murdoch’s original terrorist memorializing theme. The terrorists still break our liberty-loving circle and still turn it into a giant Mecca-oriented crescent. Nothing is changed, thematically or geometrically.

Here is an animated graphic, showing the only change in the Bowl of Embrace redesign. Instead of the broken off part of the circle being removed entirely, a chunk of the broken off part of the circle remains floating out behind the mouth of the crescent:

Crescent-Bowl, site-plan animation, 300px

A Muslim facing into the giant crescent for prayer will not even be able to see the extra arc of trees as he faces into the giant Mecca-direction indicator. In effect, the redesign just plants some trees behind Murdoch's terrorist memorial mosque, which makes no difference at all. You can plant as many trees around a mosque as you want. It is still a mosque.

 

Who broke the circle?

The Memorial Project has refused to confront the obvious terrorist-memorializing symbolism of the architect Paul Murdoch's circle-breaking/ crescent-creating theme, so we asked our petition mailing list to demand an answer to this simple question. A couple hundred emails later, the Memorial Project sent out an evasive response, but there can only be one answer.

The circle is a symbol of peace, and the only ones who can be charged with breaking the peace on 9/11 are the terrorists. Thus it can only be the terrorists who are being depicted as breaking the circle and turning it into a giant Mecca-oriented crescent. A clearer depiction of al Qaeda victory is hard to imagine.

UPDATE:  At the August 2008 Memorial Project meeting, Project Manager Jeff Reinbold and Deputy Superintendent Keith Newlin insisted that it is the passengers and crew who are being depicted as breaking the circle in their broken-circle design. Got that America. It is the passengers and crew of Flight 93 who broke the peace on 9/11!

 

Her is another animation that shows the only actual change from the original Crescent of Embrace design: the extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. This animation morphs between two views of architect Paul Murdoch's 3-D mock-up of the crescent/broken-circle design:

Photobucket

The original design is the bare naked crescent and star flag. The extra arc of trees that is added to the Circle of Embrace design is to the lower left. All the other seeming changes are fictitious. There will be no additional plantings except for the extra arc of trees. The altered mock-up makes it look as if additional trees will be planted all around, obscuring the outer arc of the original crescent, but the planting schedule reveals this to be a fraud. No trees or even bushes will be planted outside of the original giant crescent.

 

Back to main "proof" page

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