Kevin Jaques: U.S. response to 9/11 should conform to sharia lawDr. Kevin Jaques is one of the Three Mosqueteers. Of the three academics who are helping architect Paul Murdoch to plant a terrorist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site, Jaques was most central to the Park Service’s fraudulent internal investigation.

He has also left a revealing paper trail. Shortly after 9/11, Indiana University School of Law sponsored a forum on the likely legal fallout from the attacks: consequences for immigration law, civil rights, etcetera. As the university’s resident expert on Islamic (sharia) law, Jaques was invited to say something about our looming engagement with the Islamic world and their systems of law.

He chose to write a prescriptive article, urging the United States to frame its response in conformity with traditional sharia requirements:

In formulating an American response to the acts of terror, it is necessary to define them according to the provisions of Islamic law.

Whitewashing sharia

Jaques makes the basic arguments for submission that any anti-war multiculturalist might make. He offers an appeasement pitch:

If the United States wishes to approach the fight against terrorism to limit future revivalist terror groups from forming and attacking American citizens and interests, it will be necessary to craft a response that conforms to the realities of Islamic law.

And he offers a when-in-Rome pitch:

Muslim religious leaders think of the world in legal terms and will react to U.S. policies according to how these policies conflict or adhere to Islamic legal principles.

Of course we should avoid gratuitous offense, when in Rome (just as we should practice it as a pastime at home). But should we really submit to sharia law?

Nowhere does Jaques even acknowledge that world-wide submission to sharia law is the ultimate goal of the 9/11 terrorists. That is a pretty glaring omission for someone who is advocating adherence to sharia law, but Jaques does more than just elide the point. He actively misleads, going to great lengths to pretend that the terrorists reject the whole idea of sharia law:

[R]evivalist movements around the Islamic world are articulating new and exciting systems of legal interpretation that, in real terms, are similar to traditional legal norms. Only the violent fringe—approximately 1 percent to 2 percent of Muslims worldwide—would disparage any discussion of Islamic law as being reflective of the kinds of non-Islamic ideas that they claim have contaminated Islam since the very first centuries of Islamic history.

Talk about a whitewash! To paint sharia as benign, Jaques pretends that the “violent fringe” is opposed to it, and this is no offhand comment. The whole first third of Jaques’ discussion is spent setting up this punch line.

Qutb did you say?

Jaques begins by describing how Islamic jurisprudence has historically proceeded by working out consensus views of the meaning of “texts of revelation”: the Koran and the sunnah (Muhammad’s biography). He then discusses the trend toward “revivalism,” starting in the 14th century, which sought to purify Islamic jurisprudence by purging all influences other than Koran and biography.

The modern phase of this revivalism is the work of Wahhab and Qtub, the sources of today’s bin Ladenist doctrines of maximally aggressive conquest. Wahhab dismissed the requirement for consensus, insisting that anyone can read the Koran for themselves, and Qtub carried this innovation in a particularly violent direction:

Qutb advocated a radicalized form of Wahhabi extremism as the only means of driving foreign (meaning U.S. and Israeli) influences out of the Islamic world. His writings have become the basic texts of contemporary violent fringe movements around the Islamic world.

Jaques identifies the “violent fringe” with Qutb while claiming that the violent fringe “disparage[s] any discussion of Islamic law.” But Qutb did not shun sharia law. Just the opposite. He declared that any Muslim ruler who failed to impose sharia should be killed as an apostate.

This is detailed in Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower. Flopping Aces posted an excerpt last year:

Sayyid Qutb had pointed the way by declaring that a leader who does not impose Sharia on the country must be an apostate. There is a well known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam. The pious Anwar Sadat was the first modern victim of the reverse logic of takfir.

Jaques takes the 20th century’s foremost advocate for imposing sharia by violent means across the entire globe and suggests that he and his followers “would disparage any discussion of Islamic law.”

Whitewashing Wahhabism

Pretending that the violent fringe spurns sharia allows Jaques to whitewash, not just sharia, but also the mainstream revivalist movements that, as Jaques acknowledges, fully embrace sharia:

… revivalist movements around the Islamic world are articulating new and exciting systems of legal interpretation that, in real terms, are similar to traditional legal norms.

The mainstream of revivalism is Saudi Wahhabism, the state sponsored doctrine of violent aggressive conquest whose “fringe” elements attacked us on 9/11. As Jaques notes, these revivalists are thoroughly traditional in their interpretations of sharia law. All of them look backwards to the purity of 7th century Islam. Not much “new” there, however “exciting” to a person of Jaques’ evident sympathies.

Doctrinally, there is no gap between the “violent fringe” of bin Ladenists and the larger Wahhabi sect that spawned them. At most there are questions about whether bin Laden has been a good general, whose strategies effectively serve the Wahhabi goal of world domination. Mainstream Wahhabism completely embraces all of bin Laden’s objectives.

Honest about one thing: how sharia limits infidel responses

When he turns to the question of how we could frame a military response that is consistent with sharia law, Jaques takes the subject seriously, and is commendably forthright, acknowledging sharia as the law of Islamic conquest:

The laws of war that developed in the earliest periods divide the world into two halves, dar al-Islam, or the “land of submission” and dar al-harb, the “land of war.” Dar al-Islam refers to any territory that is under the control of Muslims and thus forms an Islamic commonwealth. Legal texts imply that the term is meant to denote a political designation of submission to Muslim political authority. … All areas outside of Muslim political authority are considered to be in a potential state of war with the Muslim state. All relations between the areas of submission and the areas of war are regulated by the concept of jihad … an obligatory “struggle” against non-believers who are not already under Muslim rule.

Any cessation in hostilities is purely strategic, until Muslims can get back to a position of strength from which to continue to fight:

The law outlines, in most cases, rules for the cessation of struggle (hudnah) when it is deemed by the Imam or his surrogates that it is to the advantage of the Muslims to do so, or out of a need due to Muslim weakness. In cases where Muslims simply seek some advantage in the cessation of hostilities, hudnah is limited to a period of four months. If the cessation of hostilities is due to Muslim weakness, hudnah can last for a period of up to 10 years.

Jaques also acknowledges that under Islamic law, infidels have no legal rights to fight back against Muslims at all:

…reaction by the United States becomes problematic since the rebels are still defined as Muslim and the law expressly forbids non-Muslims from attacking Muslims in a Muslim land.

Yes, well, that is the problem with conforming to the law of Islamic supremacism. It’s called “surrender.”

Takfir squared, or Qutbed

So we must submit to Islamic law, says Jaques, yet according to Islamic law, we are not allowed to fight back. What to do? What to do?

Jaques, expert in the nuances of Islamic law, offers us a way out. We can embrace Qutb’s innovation and declare the bin Ladenists apostates! (The strategy of takfir.) Then we would be allowed to kill them. But of course we have to get Muslim jurists to okay this first:

American responses to the attacks will be greatly assisted if Muslim jurists are willing to define the attacks as riddah (apostasy) and not as bughat (rebellion), or simple homicide (qatl). In the latter two categories, the perpetrators remain Muslim and any effort by non-Muslims to punish them will expressly violate provisions in Islamic law that prevents non-Muslims from killing Muslims. Only apostates may be killed by non-Muslims, and in some interpretations, Muslims may ask non-Muslims for assistance in bringing apostates to justice.

The only way Jaques is able to make this Qutbian strategy seem like a real possibility is through his earlier deception, pretending that the “violent fringe” is hostile to sharia law. Since there is not actually any doctrinal divide between the bin Ladenists and the traditional Islam, there is no way for traditional jurists to declare them apostates.

Jaques himself makes clear that the complaint about bin Laden from the point of view of traditional Islam is that he acted without consensus, and that he seems to be a bad general, engaging in acts that weaken rather than strengthen the Muslim position:

Defining the acts as contraventions of ijma would not hinge just on the enormity of the acts (simple murder contravenes ijma but is not defined as apostasy), but also on the idea that they endanger the Muslim community because of what they suggest about structures of legal authority. Encouraging others to commit suicide, claiming the right to declare jihad, to kill thousands (including many Muslims) and destroy billions of dollars of property without proper consent, and to risk the lives of Muslims due to Western military and economic retaliations challenges the authority of the community of jurists and of every principle of law that, by consensus, seeks to promote the welfare of the Muslim community.

But if bin Laden is just a bad general, acting without proper authority, how exactly is he supposed to be declared an apostate? Under sharia, the terror attacks might at most be viewed as rebellion (for which infidels have no recourse), but as Jaques notes, the demise of the caliphate makes it impossible even to establish bin Laden as a rebel. Who is he rebelling against?

Defining the acts as bughat [rebellion] is complicated by the fact that there is no universally recognized Muslim leader in any area of the Muslim world and has not been for more than 700 years. Many jurists argue that since this is the case, rules for bughat are not applicable today.

The bin Ladenists are trying to rectify this lack of a recognized Muslim leader by establishing a new caliphate. That hardly makes them apostates.

First Jaques pretends that the terrorists are hostile to sharia law. Then he pretends that sharia law is hostile to the terrorists. All the while neglecting to mention that the terrorists’ explicit goal is world submission to sharia law. That is quite a concatenation of strategic deception (taqiyya).

Jaques was just as deceptive in his advice to the Memorial Project

That giant Mecca-oriented crescent that forms the centerpiece of the Flight 93 Memorial? Jaques admits that it is similar to the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built, but so what:

…just because something is ’similar to’ something else does not make it the ’same’.

The half-mile wide crescent is much too big, says Jaques, to be recognized as the central feature of a mosque. After all, that would make it the world’s biggest mosque by a factor of a hundred! What could be sillier? But Taqiyya very much for asking.

Jaques does not name his own religious beliefs, but it seems pretty clear that he must be a Muslim, and probably of the revivalist stripe (which he finds so “new and exciting”). Will he deny it, as Islam allows (Koran, verse 16:106)? Feel free to ask. Please note any response in the comments.

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If you want to join the blogroll/blogburst for the Crescent of Betrayal blogburst, email Cao at caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com, with your blog’s url address. The blogburst will be sent out once a week to the participants, for simultaneous publication on this issue on Wednesdays.

Crescent of betrayal/surrender Blogburst Blogroll

1389 Blog – Antijihadist Tech
A Defending Crusader
A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever
And Rightly So
Big Dog’s Weblog
Big Sibling
Cao2’s Weblog
Cao’s Blog
Chaotic Synaptic Activity
Error Theory
Faultline USA
Flanders Fields
Flopping Aces
Four Pointer
Freedom’s Enemies
Ft. Hard Knox
GM’s Corner
Hoosier Army Mom
Ironic Surrealism II
Jack Lewis
Kender’s Musings
My Own Thoughts
Nice Deb
Ogre’s Politics and Views
Part-Time Pundit
Right on the Right
Right Truth
Stix Blog
Stop the ACLU
The Renaissance Biologist
The View From the Turret
The Wide Awakes
Thunder Run

TBogg has edited a comment thread to remove an important piece of evidence about the Memorial Project’s cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned Flight 93 memorial. A historically important comment left by a consultant to the Memorial Project has been deleted.

In January 2006, Alec Rawls baited theTBogg leftists for insisting that it is perfectly okay to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. TBogg’s comment thread swelled to epic proportions and eventually yielded something more than theusual litany of moonbat excuses for not thinking straight. At the end of the thread, posted sometime in March or April of 2006, there appeared an extended comment, about 600 words long, posted anonymously, and written as a semi-formal evaluation of Rawls’ January 2006 report to the MemorialProject.

Mr. Rawls would later find out that this anonymous comment was the sole piece of written feedback on which the Memorial Project was basing its denial of Islamic features in the winning design. (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, pp. 149-50.)

The Project only communicated snippets of the TBogg comment, so the fact that the whole thing had been posted online caught them by surprise, undermining their ability to control the story. In particular, the TBogg comment did not deny the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. On the contrary, it acknowledged that the crescent at the center of the memorial isgeometrically similar to a traditional mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), and offered a variety of excuses for why people should not be concerned about this similarity. (e.g. “[J]ust because something is ‘similar to’ something else, does not make it the ‘same’.”)

Dr. Kevin Jaques

Only in the last couple of weeks has the identity of the anonymous scholar who wrote the TBogg comment been learned. Last week’s blogburst about the Park Service’s fraudulent internal investigation discusses a Memorial Project “White Paper” that identifies the TBogg commentator as Dr.Kevin Jaques, an Islamicist (a scholar of Islam), at the University of Indiana.

One of Dr. Jaques excuses for not being concerned about the half-mile wide Mecca-oriented crescent is that it is so much bigger than any other mihrab:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

You might recognize it as a giant crescent from an airplane like Flight 93 flying over
head, but from the ground? Pshaw.

It’s too big to recognize!

TBogg deleted the Kevin Jaques comment from his comment thread

For most of 2007, the original TBogg comment thread has not been available, but TBogg now has it reposted, with one glaring omission: Dr. Jaques comment has been removed.

If you want to see what TBogg is posting now, the url for his 2006 “Lunacy abounds” post is http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/01/lunacy-abounds-nuts.html.For posterity, here are copies of the original comment thread, as of 5/29/2006, with Dr. Jaques’ comment intact at the end, and the comment thread repost, as of 12/3/2007, with Dr. Jaques’ comment deleted.

A full discussion of what TBogg properly calls “the infamous comment thread” can be found in Chapter Eight of Alec’s Crescent of Betrayal book (download 3, pp 131-).

The question now for Mr. TBogg is why he deleted Kevin Jaques’ comment. Did he do it on his own, or did he do it at someone’s request? Did Dr. Jaques ask him to delete the comment? Did architect Paul Murdoch ask? Did someone in the Park Service ask?

Whether TBogg acted on his own or was prompted, it is obvious that he understood that he was deleting an important piece of evidence. Just the fact that he singled it out for deletion shows a conscious act of cover-up. Maybe he did not realize the full import of having the comment remain publicly available via an original source, but he certainly knew he was covering up something important. What kind of blogger deletes a piece of evidence that he knows to be central to a high profile controversy?

(Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO) sent the Park Service a letter last month asking that crescent design be scrapped entirely.) This is very bad behavior.

Was TBogg’s comment thread originally removed in order to hide Jaques comment?

It was odd enough when the “infamous comment thread” first disappeared from TBogg’s blog. What blogger removes anything famous from their blog? But at that time, there was no publicly available information that could have alerted TBogg to the significance of that last anonymous comment. The most likely explanation for the disappearance of the comment thread seemed to be that TBogg simply had a coding glitch, or maybe he is cheap enough to have been worried about bandwidth.

Now that the comment thread has been restored without the Jaques comment, it seems likely that the reason the comment thread came down in the first place was to hide the Jaques comment. The interesting thing about this scenario is that at the time the comment thread was removed (sometime between June 2006 and June 2007) the only way TBogg could have learned the importance of that last anonymous comment would have been through the internal investigation conducted by the Park Service in the spring and summer of 2006. No one else knew that the comment came from an advisor to the Memorial Project until July 2007 when Alec Rawls released the downloadable “Director’s Cut” version of his Crescent of Betrayal book. (Given the urgent public need to know, World Ahead Publishing graciously allowed Alec to make his then final draft available for free download until the print edition—still being updated—comes out in the first quarter of 2008.)

The TBogg comment thread was removed before the Director’s Cut release. (Noted in Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, at p. 131.) Chief Ranger Jill Hawk, who was conducting the investigation, would not tell Alec who wrote the anonymous TBogg comment, but Alec warned her to be suspicious. Given the overtly dishonest nature of its excuse making, he urged her to double check its provenance. She answered back that she had been able to get email confirmation of authorship.

This email communication with Jaques might well have alerted him to the faux pas he committed by posting his comment on the TBogg thread. Did he then contact TBogg and ask for the comment to be removed?

That would seem to be the most likely scenario. Others who were privy to the internal investigation could have also contacted TBogg, but there is no evidence for any other such route of transmission.

It is disturbing to think that TBogg would have acceded to any request to remove evidence about a possible enemy plot. He is fully aware of what Rawls is claiming: that an al Qaeda sympathizing architect entered our open design competition with a plan to build a terrorist memorial mosque and won. Kevin Jaques’ TBogg comment is crucial for understanding how such aplot could succeed, revealing the utter fraudulence of the internal investigation that should have detected any such plot. As the lone consultant to the Memorial Project on the crescent design, Jaques engaged in overtly dishonest excuse-making. And TBogg is willing to help him cover it up?

If TBogg has some other explanation for his deletions, the rest of us would sure like to hear it.

The fraudulent internal investigation

For more of Kevin Jaques’ dishonest excuse-making, see last week’s blogburst on the fraudulent internal investigation. Before the Park Service was done, it managed to round up two more academic frauds in addition to Kevin Jaques. There is Dr. Daniel Griffith, who claims there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca, and a third Mosqueteer still to be discussed. (Saving the worst for last.)

But Jaques is the central fraud, being the Project’s sole source of feedback during a crucial period when its dismissive posture was set in stone. In addition to being an expert on sharia law, Jaques has also proved to be an expert at taqiyya.

He was a man who saw his service to others more important than his own life in dire circumstances: Pvt George Watson, US Army.

In recognition of his last effort, his Medal of Honor citation reads:

Citation: For extraordinary heroism in action on 8 March 1943. Private Watson was on board a ship which was attacked and hit by enemy bombers. When the ship was abandoned, Private Watson, instead of seeking to save himself, remained in the water assisting several soldiers who could not swim to reach the safety of the raft. This heroic action, which subsequently cost him his life, resulted in the saving of several of his comrades. Weakened by his exertions, he was dragged down by the suction of the sinking ship and was drowned. Private Watson’s extraordinarily valorous actions, daring leadership, and self-sacrificing devotion to his fellow-man exemplify the finest traditions of military service.

In more detail, here are the circumstances of the story in Wikipedia:

A resident of Birmingham, Alabama, He had entered the Army September 1, 1942, and was a member of the 2nd Battalion, 29th Quartermaster Regiment. He was a passenger aboard the Dutch steamer USAT Jacob on March 8, 1943, which was near Porloch Harbor, New Guinea, when the ship was hit by Japanese bombers.

When the ship was abandoned, Watson remained in the water and, instead of trying to save himself, assisted soldiers who could not swim into life rafts.

Weakened by his exertions, he was dragged down by the suction of the sinking ship and drowned. His body was never recovered.

Pvt Watson is one of seven African-Americans to have been awarded the Medal of Honor in WWII. However, his award did not happen until 1990, when, of ten names of African-American heroes were submitted for upgrading/award for the MOH, did he become one of those seven, and all of them honored decades after their courageous acts. In 1997, President Clinton made the presentations. The other six awardees all served with line combat units. Pvt Watson, alone, of the Quartermaster Corps, received this high honor, from a non-combat unit.

To remember this hero, who had no known family, a field at Ft Benning, and the courthouse for Jefferson County, GA have been named for him.

A Military Sealift Command ship, the USNS WATSON (T-AKR-310) carries the name of Pvt Watson. A LMSR with “roll-on, roll-off” capability, it was built at NASSCO:

USNS Watson will be assigned to MSC’s Afloat Prepositioning Program which prepositions on ships equipment and supplies for the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and the Defense Logistics Agency worldwide. Prepositioning improves U.S. capabilities to deploy forces rapidly in any area of conflict.

Watson is scheduled to be loaded with U.S. Army cargo in September (1998). USNS Watson will be crewed by 29 merchant mariners from Maersk Lines Limited under contract to MSC. In addition, up to 50 military personnel can embark to “monitor and maintain the military equipment on board, ensuring its readiness.

By the year 2001, MSC will have taken delivery of 19 LMSRs as part of the U.S. Navy Strategic Sealift Acquisition Program. The program is in response to the need for expanded sealift capability identified in a congressionally mandated study done in the early 1990s. The 19 LMSRs will provide five million square feet of sealift capacity early in the next century.

Large, Medium-speed, roll-on/roll-off ships – T-AKR Description: Military Sealift Command’s newest class of ships – Large, Medium- speed, Roll-on/Roll-off Ships, or LMSR – will significantly expand the nation’s sealift capability in the 1990s and beyond. Nineteen LMSRs will have been converted or built at U.S. shipyards by the year 2001.

Features: Large, Medium-speed, Roll-on/Roll-off Ships, or LMSRs, can carry an entire U.S. Army Task Force, including 58 tanks, 48 other track vehicles, plus more than 900 trucks and other wheeled vehicles. The ship carries vehicles and equipment to support humanitarian missions, as well as combat missions. The new construction vessels have a cargo carrying capacity of more than 380,000 square feet, equivalent to almost eight football fields. In addition, LMSRs have a slewing stern ramp and a removable ramp which services two side ports making it easy to drive vehicles on and off the ship. Interior ramps between decks ease traffic flow once cargo is loaded aboard ship. Two 110-ton single pedestal twin cranes make it possible to load and unload cargo where shoreside infrastructure is limited or nonexistent. A commercial helicopter deck was added for emergency, daytime landing.

Not only is this ship named for him, as the first of the several units in the class, they will all honor Pvt Watson as the WATSON Class T-AKR-310 ships.

Pvt George Watson’s Medal of Honor is maintained at the US Army Quartermaster Museum at Ft. Lee, VA.

His legacy is to continue to provide help to others on the field of combat.

Bonus reading: Eagle1 talks about a response by government and industry to seaborne threats.

Memorial superintendent admits giant crescent still present in memorial design

No comment from the Park Service yet on Congressman Tancredo’s request for a new Flight 93 Memorial. We did a little better with last week’s blogburst letters. Some emailers got a response from Memorial Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley, answering Mr. Tancredo’s contention that the original giant crescent is still present in the redesign. Interestingly, her description of the redesign actually admits that the giant crescent IS still present, both geometrically and thematically.

In 2005, architect Paul Murdoch explained his original Crescent of Embrace design in terms of the flight path: as the hijacked airliner came over the ridgeline above the crash site, its flight path symbolically broke the circle, turning it into a giant crescent. In the original design, the broken off part of the circle was removed entirely:

Flight 93 came down from the Northwest (the upper left). The flight path breaks the circle at the upper crescent tip, says Paul Murdoch, then continues down to the crash site, which is located between the crescent tips (roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag).

In describing the barely altered redesign, Superintendent Hanley uses the exact same “breaking the circle” language that Paul Murdoch used to describe the original design, only now the broken off part of the circle is not completely removed. A broken chunk of it remains, so that the design now includes “two breaks” instead of one:

The most prominent refinement was in the treatment of the naturally occurring bowl-shaped landscape feature. The design now surrounds that area with a circle of trees which is broken in two places – the location which marks the flight path as it breaks the circular continuity of the bowl edge, and the Sacred Ground where the crash occurred. The locations of the two breaks in the circle are based on the flight path and crash site of Flight 93.

The site plan graphic for the redesign was dramatically re-colored, making the crescent LOOK more like a circle. You have to examine closely to see that the original break in the crescent is still there, along with the new “second break.” But as Superintendent Hanley admits, the original break IS still there, and it is still intended to be seen as being there. Hanley is directly admitting what Congressman Tancredo is complaining about, that the original crescent has only been disguised.

A side-by-side comparison of the Crescent of Embrace site-plan and the redesign site-plan confirms that the only change was to include a chunk of the symbolically broken off part of the imaginary full circle:

Ignoring the re-coloring of the image, the only change is the additional arc of trees to the left side of the crescent. (Click pic for larger view.)

Including a chunk of the broken off part of the circle does nothing to remove the original crescent, but on the contrary is perfectly consistent with it, both geometrically and thematically. The terrorists are still depicted as breaking our humanitarian circle and turning it into a giant Islamic shaped crescent.

Just to make sure people get it, Paul Murdoch has placed a huge glass block at the spot where this circle-breaking, crescent-creating feat takes place. It is the 44th translucent block emplaced along the flight path (matching the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists) and is inscribed: “a field of honor forever.”

Earlier admissions that the redesign retains the crescent and star configuration of an Islamic flag

An August 18th article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette quoted Superintendent Hanley denying the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent:

“The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site,” she said.Mr. Murdoch reinforced that idea.

“It’s oriented toward the Sacred Ground,” he said. “It just couldn’t be clearer.”

The symbolism of the memorial, he continued, is representative of the geography of the crash site, an idea that predates Islam or any other major religion.

They are not calling it a crescent and star configuration, but that is what they are describing, and what they are talking about here is the redesign. They are admitting that the design still has the arms of the crescent reaching out towards the crash site, which sits between the crescent tips, in the position of the star on an Islamic flag. “It just couldn’t be clearer.”

Connect a line from the lower crescent tip to the thematic upper crescent tip (the 44th glass block, commemorating the spot where the flight path breaks the circle) and a perpendicular to this line (the direction of a person facing directly into the giant crescent) points exactly to Mecca. Thus does Paul Murdoch tie the Islamic features and the terrorist memorializing features of his design into a perfect bin Ladenist embrace. The 44th block defines the exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent.

Very simply, we hosted an open design competition in time of war. Of course the enemy would enter. The only thing that is hard to understand is why the Memorial Project is willfully blind to this ploy.

Blogroll for Wednesday “stop the crescent memorial” blogbursts

1389 Blog – Antijihadist Tech
A Defending Crusader
A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever
And Rightly So
Big Dog’s Weblog

Big Sibling
Cao’s Blog
Chaotic Synaptic Activity
Error Theory
Faultline USA
Flanders Fields
Four Pointer
Ft. Hard Knox

GM’s Corner
Ironic Surrealism II
Jack Lewis
Kender’s Musings
My Own Thoughts
Nice Deb
Ogre’s Politics and Views

Part-Time Pundit
Right on the Right
Right Truth
Stix Blog
Stop the ACLU
The View From the Turret
The Wide Awakes
Thunder Run

Secretary Gates talks back to Congress.

The current flap of Congress being asked for about $190B to continue to fund the war and Nancy Pelosi coughing up $50B with demands to extract ourselves from conducting National Defense proves to me Congress shows more and more ignorance of their own jobs.

Just because DoD gets handed about a trillion dollars or more, doesn’t mean it’s in one huge bank account, to be spend as the DoD officials decide.

I’m no real money expert, but was, for 2.5 years, responsible for managing about $34M worth of funds. Federal budget money is tagged in all sorts of ways, so it will be spent in the manner in which it was justified to Congress thought the development of each annual budget.

Quickly, as a not to detailed level, there is money that is specifically authorized for expenditure in a specific fiscal year and then there is “multi-year money.” The multi year money is labeled with how much of it will be spent in each fiscal year in the range of the funding. Within those two gross categories, there is account designation as well. For instance, there will be funds for manpower (pay checks), MILCON (military construction projects), software development, and a raft of other designations. The Federal Budget is like a real budget, in some ways, that is based on justified needs.

The game rules for money managers? It’s a federal crime to shift funds from one account to another, without getting permission. Here, I’m not clear on exactly how that process works, but I know it exists, and suspect it has something to do with going back up the chain of command to Congressional offices that control appropriations. So, for Secretary Gates just to shrug his shoulders and start walking around the Pentagon halls, with his steno pad, asking for funds from various people to make up the shortfall of his request, he’s in violation of Federal Law. I’m sure Nancy and Harry are aware of not only this, but, if he does do it in the correct way, the extended period of time it will take to accomplish moving $140B from existing accounts to the one funding the front line warfighters needs. That way, they can slow roll the effort at a second level.

Congress really gets this when they “ear mark” funds for their special projects, yet somehow have amnesia when it comes to DoD spending, unless, of course, there is tax money designated to be laundered though the DoD funds to get to a family member, friend of political supporter, then they are all over making sure it’s not diverted.

One more reason to rid ourselves of the “professional” politician class we have become hamstrung with.

The Park Service has a history of keeping the Secretary of the Interior in the dark about the decisions it makes in his name. It is likely that Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has never been told about the many warnings of Islamic symbolism in the planned Flight 93 Memorial. Please help bring Dirk into the loop by pasting the following letter (or one of your own) into an email for him.

Dear Secretary Kempthorne:

Please heed Congressman Tom Tancredo’s call to completely scrap the present design for the Flight 93 Memorial. The original Crescent of Embrace design would have planted a bare naked crescent and star flag on the crash site:

The memorial plaza that sits roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic flag marks the crash site. (Click pics for larger images.)

All the redesign did was add some trees to the west of the original crescent:

Aside from the re-coloring of the site-plan image, the only actual change in the design is the additional arc of trees to the rear of a person facing into the original crescent.

The Park Service promised Congressman Tancredo in 2005 that Islamic iconography would be removed from the memorial. Instead, this iconography has only been very slightly disguised. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the redesign.

The giant crescent points to Mecca

In September 2005, a half dozen different bloggers verified that a person facing directly into the original Crescent of Embrace would be facing almost exactly at Mecca. That makes the crescent a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built.

Face into the crescent to face Mecca:

Left: mihrab from the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain. Right: Crescent of Embrace also faces Mecca. The green circle is from the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. When it is placed over the original Crescent of Embrace site plan, the Mecca-direction line (the “qibla”) almost exactly bisects the crescent.

You can plant as many trees around a mosque as you want and it will still be a mosque. But this isn’t just the world’s largest mosque. The planned memorial is also full of terrorist memorializing features.

Please hear my voice along with those of Congressman Tancredo and Tom Burnett Sr., who is refusing to allow Tom Jr.’s name to be used in the crescent design. The memorial to Flight 93 should not be a terrorist memorial mosque.

Sincerely,

Secretary Kempthorne’s phone number is 202-208-7351
Snail-mail: Hon. Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of Interior
Office of the Secretary
Rm. 6156, ms7229-MIB
1849 C St, NW
Washington, DC 20240-0001

In September 2005, Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo said that he would not be happy so long as the Flight 93 Memorial still included the giant crescent. He has kept his promise. The crescent is still there, and Tom Tancredo is NOT HAPPY.Alec Rawls has just received from Representative Tancredo a letter of complaint that Mr. Tancredo sent to Park Service Director Mary Bomar this afternoon. It notes the continued presence of the crescent:

Unfortunately, it appears that little if any substantive changes to the most troubling aspect of the design – the crescent shape – have been made.

And it calls for scrapping the crescent design entire and starting anew:

And while I regret having to contact the Park Service again about this issue, I sincerely hope that you will direct the committee to scrap the crescent design entirely in favor of a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism.

Thank you Tom Tancredo! The full text of Mr. Tancredo’s letter is pasted below.

G Gordon Liddy is on it

Alec Rawls will be on G Gordon Liddy’s radio show tomorrow morning (Tuesday) from 11-12, talking about the many Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned memorial. The show should be a blockbuster.

Tom Burnett Sr. is going to call in. Tancredo or his press secretary TQ Houlton may call in.   And YOU can call in:

1 800 GGLiddy

Streaming audio and broadcast stations here. Podcasts here. For the full expose, see Alec’s Crescent of Betrayal book, available for free download until the print edition of the book comes out in February.

A crescent and star flag on the crash site

For those who are not familiar with the memorial debacle, the original Crescent of Embrace design would have planted a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag on the crash site:

Architect Paul Murdoch’s job is to work with symbols. He did not plant an Islamic flag on the crash site by accident. But even if this were somehow coincidence, it would still be wrong to build the memorial in a shape that the hijackers claimed as their own.

Representative 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. See Crescent of Betrayal, download 1, page xiii.)

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.

Nothing was changed

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. (Click here for site plan view.)

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.

If you want to thank Tom Tancredo for keeping his Flight 93 promise and standing up again for the honor of our murdered heroes, his phone numbers and online email form are here.

Full text of Representative Tancredo’s letter to Park Service Director Mary Bomar

November 5, 2007

The Honorable Mary A. Bomar
Director
National Park Service
U.S. Department of Interior
1849 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20240

Dear Director Bomar,

I am regrettably writing you in reference to the proposed memorial to commemorate the victims of Flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. As you may know, I contacted Director Mainella in late 2005 about my concerns with the design.

The appropriateness of the original design, dubbed the “Crescent of Embrace,” was questioned because of the crescent’s prominent use as a symbol in Islam – and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists. As I pointed out in my September 2005 letter, the use of the crescent has raised questions in some circles about whether the design would make the memorial a tribute to the hijackers rather than the victims whose mission the flights passengers helped to thwart.

When I received Director Mainella’s response to my letter on October 6, 2005, I was pleased to read her assurance that the advisory committee and the architect were amenable to “refinements in the design which will include negating any perceptions to the iconography.” I was also pleased to learn that the name of the memorial was to be changed.

Unfortunately, it appears that little if any substantive changes to the most troubling aspect of the design – the crescent shape – have been made. This deeply concerns me. As I told Director Mainella in 2005: Regardless of whether or not the invocation of a Muslim symbol by the memorial designer was intentional, I continue to believe that the use of this symbol is unsuitable for paying appropriate tribute to the heroes of Flight 93 or the ensuing American struggle against radical Islam that their historic last act has come to symbolize.

I remain committed to ensuring that this memorial is a powerful symbol for the whole nation and a testament to the courage and will of the passengers of the flight – as I am sure you are. And while I regret having to contact the Park Service again about this issue, I sincerely hope that you will direct the committee to scrap the crescent design entirely in favor of a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Sincerely,

Tom Tancredo, M.C.

The phony redesign

To see clearly how the redesign leaves the original Mecca-oriented cescent fully intact, note that the orientation of the crescent is determined by connecting the most obtruding points of the 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 the most obtruding tip at the bottom of the original crescent structure is the last red maple at the bottom. On top, the most obtruding tip of the crescent structure is the 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 not even affect a visitor’s experience of the crescent, never mind affect the presence or integrity of the crescent itself.

When Tom Burnett Sr. came out against the Flight 93 Memorial, the press asked architect Paul Murdoch if there were really going to be 44 inscribed translucent blocks emplaced along the flight path (equaling the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists). Murdoch acknowledged 43 of the blocks, but denied knowing about a 44th:

[T]here are 40 inscribed marble panels listing the names of the passengers and crew at the gateway to the Sacred Ground, where their remains still rest.There is then an opening in the wall, Mr. Murdoch said, and three additional panels, which would include the date, Sept. 11, 2001.

“Where the other one is being fabricated, I don’t know,” he said.

Yes he does. Paul Murdoch is fully aware of the large dedicatory glass block at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway:

Man and child stand in front of the 44th block, which forms the railing at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway. The glass block will be inscribed: “A field of honor forever.” This Walkway provides visitors with their first view of the inside of the giant crescent. (From the Entry Portal page of the original design PDFs. Click pic for wider view.)

The flight path

The Entry Portal Walkway is built along the flight path. It signifies, in Paul Murdoch’s own description, the terrorists breaking the circle and turning it into a giant crescent. The flight path then continues down to the crash site, which sits in the middle of the mouth of the giant crescent (in roughly the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag).

Just before the impact point is the Memorial Wall, also built along the flight path. This two part wall is where the other 43 blocks will be placed (the ones described by Paul Murdoch above):

The forty translucent blocks that run horizontally through the left hand section of wall (closest to the impact crater) will be inscribed with the names of the forty murdered heroes. The three on the right will be inscribed with the 9/11 date. (From the Sacred Ground Plaza page of the original design PDF’s. Click pic for larger image. The alternating white and gray depicts the zig zag layout of the translucent blocks.)

Challenged by the father of one of our murdered heroes, Murdoch told a desperate lie, feigning ignorance of one of the most prominent features of his own design: the huge glass block that dedicates the entire site. This should have been the end of his hijack attempt, but Murdoch’s deception was abetted by both the Memorial Project and the press.

The abettors

“That has been disproved so many times,” said Bill Hayworth, the Memorial Project’s PR flack, when asked about the 44 blocks. Would it have been too much for reporters to ask for this proof?

In fact Murdoch is the first one to ever even deny that there are 44 glass blocks on the flight path. The only earlier Memorial Project statement about the 44 blocks was from Project Manager Jeff Reinbold, who told Alec Rawls in an April 2006 conference call that the giant glass block can’t be counted with the small glass blocks because it is bigger: “If we are going to count the big glass block with the small glass blocks,” he said, “then we have to count the windows in the visitor center too.” (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, p. 146.)

“The windows in the visitor center are not on the flight path,” Rawls replied. He never said they were all the same size, and he never said there are no other panes of glass in the Memorial. Reinbold’s silly dodges do not contradict Rawls’ 44 glass blocks claim in any way.

The press was also in on the deception. Kecia Bal, the reporter who quoted Hayworth’s dismissal of the 44 blocks claim had already verified the block count for herself. Mr. Rawls had earlier sent her close ups of all 44. She responded with a request for copies of the original design PDFs, so she could check the veracity of these close-ups for herself.

When Bal quoted Hayworth, she knew he was wrong, and allowed him to mislead the public by suppressing her own fact checking of the 44 blocks. People can think that the 44 blocks are innocuous if they want, but lying about the block count certainly is not innocuous. Similarly for many the other lies that are being told in defense of the crescent design.

Memorial Project members insist that it is just coincidence that a person facing directly into the giant crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca, but that isn’t what they are telling the public. They are telling the newspapers that the Mecca-orientation claim is false, while acknowledging amongst themselves that the Mecca orientation is real.

Again and again Murdoch, the Memorial Project and the press are lying in concert to cover up the facts of the design. Some people will be unsure what to make of the many suspicious features of the crescent design but no one should doubt the need to expose and condemn those who lie about the facts.

Tracked back @: Cao’s Blog

Read this one.

Is it getting better? How about way better. It’s working….it.is.working. Rich Lowry brings us the story that you will most likely not see in the MSM.

Chip in with your 2 cents, in the comments section on that post. Leave your mark for a better world to live in.

Oct 25th has established itself as a “triple crown” of major military battles in history.

In 2005, I encapsulated details on and links to more information on the Battle of Agincourt – 1415 (remembered by the Henry V’s great speech from Shakespeare), the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War – 1854, and the Battle Off Samar – 1944.

Update (late PM): And, boy! is there a lot more!

For example:
1940: Benjamin O. Davis, Sr becomes the Army’s first African-American general
1942: Battle of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal begins
1974: USAF launches it’s first ICBM