Where is the lizard army?

Pennsylvania is on fire. Tom Burnett’s color advertisement in the Somerset Daily American, asking the people of Somerset to protest the crescent memorial to Flight 93, raised a great deal of awareness. At least four television stations covered the controversy, and there were two news stories in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review alone.

Those who went on to read Alec Rawls’ more detailed advertisement (exposing the fraudulent Park Service investigation of the giant Mecca-oriented crescent) are burning mad, and are taking up Tom Sr.’s call for state and Congressional investigations. Word is that two Pennsylvania state representatives, one Democrat and one Republican, are hot enough to co-sponsor a resolution initiating a state investigation.

That is a long way from actually getting an investigation. The hurdles are still huge, and it would sure be a big help if the high traffic conservative bloggers were pitching in. Charles Johnson and Michelle Malkin played a critical role in raising the initial alarm when the Crescent of Embrace design was unveiled in September 2005. Both also helped to expose the phony redesign, which leaves every particle of the original design completely intact.

But since 2006, nothing. For two years, as the revelations about the Memorial Project have become ever more explosive, the fire-hoses have ignored what will undoubtedly become one of the biggest scandals in American history.

This is a difficult story for our high traffic bloggers. With Flight 93 family members on both sides, no one can weigh in without checking the facts, and our high traffic bloggers are all stretched too thin to check the facts. Charles Johnson only has two eyes and two ears. No one can say he ought to do anything, when there is no way he ought to even be able to do a quarter of what he does.

Johnson’s lizard army, on the other hand, has thousands of eyes and thousands of ears. The question is whether this sensory system is connected to the lizard brain. Is there any trickle-up at LGF?

To try to establish this trickle-up connection, Charles recently installed a new link-rating system at the top of his main page. Let’s see if we can get it to work! Come on lizards. Time to rejoin the fight. Please take the links to the two advertisements that are now setting Pennsylvania on fire and see if you can rally your fellow lizards to push these links up into the collective consciousness of the lizard army.

Over the next two weeks, these ads will continue to be published in the free weeklies for the cities of Somerset and Johnstown. We are putting tinder to the first licks of flame, and maybe even have a couple of sticks in the fire, but we are still a long way from an established blaze, never mind the bonfire of awareness, and the firestorm of awareness, that it will take to stop Murdoch’s plot.

We need lizard help to stop architect Paul Murdoch from stabbing a terrorist memorial mosque into the heartland of America! (That’s what a Mecca-oriented crescent is: the central feature of a mosque.)

This is YOUR story lizards

It was five lizards who discovered, almost immediately after the Crescent of Embrace was unveiled, that the nearly one mile wide crescent points almost exactly to Mecca (kifaya, khamr, Edgren, bluemerle, and Etaoin).

Etaoin Shrdlu’s Mecca orientation graphic, posted by Ace of Spades September 11, 2005 (three days after the crescent design was unveiled).

Charles stayed with the fight until July 2006, when he rallied the lizards to participate in the Park Service’s open comment period.

Then he and Michelle and all the other high traffic bloggers disappeared.

No links when Tom Burnett Sr. publicly protested the memorial by refusing to allow Tom Jr.’s name to be inscribed on one of those 44 glass blocks on the flight path (matching the number of passengers, crew AND terrorists).No links when the crescent design was discovered to memorialize, not just the 4 hijackers of Flight 93, but also the full complement of 19 9/11 terrorists. (There are two sets of 19 nested crescents in the crescent design.)

No links when Tom Sr. and Alec Rawls protested the crescent and star flag configuration of the memorial on national television.

No links when an academic fraud told the Park Service not to worry about the similarity between the giant Mecca oriented crescent and the Mecca oriented mihrab around which every mosque is built because there has never been a mihrab anywhere near this BIG before.

No links when Congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo called in November 2007 for the Park Service to scrap the crescent design entirely.

The usual difficulty for the blogosphere is to get the mainstream media to cover our discoveries. This has been inverted for the memorial story. Dozens of mainstream news stories have been written about the controversy, none of which were ever linked by any high traffic conservative bloggers. All the weight has been carried by a creditable collection of small and mid-traffic bloggers, starting with our three dozen blogburst participants.

The blogosphere has an Achilles heel. A controversial story that requires fact checking gets skipped over by our high traffic link-editors. Charles Johnson’s addition of a decentralized link-editing utility might be able to overcome this weakness, but it won’t happen automatically. For this tool to work, the lizard army has to step up and make it work.

To join our blogbursts, email Cao (caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com) with your blog’s url.

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Come and see http://caosblog.com and http://thewideawakes.org

A Father’s Plea

A plea from Tom Burnett Sr. to the wonderful people of Somerset

(The ad copy below is running in tomorrow’s Somerset Daily American.)My son Tom confronted a terrible moment of truth. Faced with a plot against our nation, he and the other heroes of Flight 93 fought back, and at the cost of their lives, foiled that plot to destroy the White House or the Capitol. Now it is time for the rest of us to face our moment of truth. Flight 93 has been re-hijacked, and I am requesting that if you can, you go down to the public meeting of the Memorial Project at Somerset Courthouse Saturday, sign up to comment at the end, and demand that a proper investigation be conducted.

THIS was no accident:

The Memorial Project held an open design competition in time of war, in-

viting the entire world to enter. Guess who joined in? That group of trees that sits roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic flag is the crash site. Who do YOU think is being memorialized here?

A second Islamic feature that I also protested when I served on the Stage II jury is the minaret-like Tower of Voices , formed in the shape of a crescent, with its top cut at an angle so that its crescent arms reach up into the sky.

Upturned crescents are a standard mosque adornment in many Muslim countries.

Every iota of this original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the so-called “redesign.” That is why Congressman Tancredo asked the Park Service this autumn to scrap the existing design entirely. Instead of getting rid of the giant crescent as Tancredo demanded back in 2005, architect Paul Murdoch only disguised it with a few surrounding trees.

Also remaining are those damned 44 glass blocks on the flight path. (There were forty passengers and crew and four Islamic terrorists on Flight 93.) The Memorial Project acknowledges the 40 blocks inscribed with the names of my son and the other heroes, and they acknowledge the three inscribed with the 9/11 date, but they pretend not to know about this one: the huge glass block that dedicates the entire site.

When this 44th glass block is pointed out, Project Partners say that it can’t be counted with the other blocks because it is not the same size. What? Because the capstone to the terrorist memorializing block count is magnificent, that is supposed to make it okay?

For every Islamic or terrorist memorializing feature of the crescent design, the Park Service has another equally phony excuse. Please read the exposé below of the Park Service’s fraudulent investigation, and please come to the meeting on Saturday to demand state and Congressional investigations into the Flight 93 memorial.

Tom Burnett Sr.

February 2008

PDF of ad copy here.

Non-locals who want to help, please contact your senators and representatives!

More deceptions from Muslim advisor regarding Flight 93 mosque

Nasser Rabbat, a Syrian professor of Islamic architecture at MIT, told the Park Service not to worry about the giant Mecca oriented crescent at the center of the Flight 93 Memorial. He said that since it does not point quite exactly to Mecca (it is off by 1.8°) it can’t be considered a proper mihrab (the central feature around which every mosque is built).

Liar. Many of the most famous mihrabs face as much as 20 or 30 degrees off of Mecca.

Here is another Rabbat deception:

Mosques are never in the shape of a crescent or a circle. This defeats the purpose of lining up the worshipers parallel to the Qibla wall (Mecca orientation), which usually translates into a rectangular shape, or sometimes a square. [From the White Paper released by the Memorial Project in August 2007.]

It is true that most mosques are rectangular, the more clearly to mark the direction to Mecca, but this is certainly not a requirement, given that the two most religiously significant sites in Islam are round mosques. Significant site #1 is the Sacred Mosque in Mecca:

Second most significant is the Mosque of Omar, also called the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, from which point Muhammad supposedly ascended into heaven:

Perhaps because of the prominence of these precedents, a small but significant number of mosques around the world follow the round model.

There is the Tun Abdul Aziz mosque built in Malaysia in 1975, referred to colloquially as the “Masjid Bulat,” or “round mosque.”

There is the new 5,000 person Arafat Mosque in Nigeria, which the architect claims is “the only round mosque in Africa,” but he is wrong. Another round mosque, Al Nileen, sits at the confluence of Blue and White Nile rivers in Khartoum:

[From Google Earth. Look up “alnileen mosque”.]

Africa is also home to some older round mosques. Here is a round mosque from the Ivory coast. Similar mosques have also been found in Sierra Leone.

Here is a modern Russian mosque, laid out in shape of an eight point star.

There is even a famous round mosque right in the heart of the EU, at the northwest corner of the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels.

There is a round mosque in Kuwait, a round mosque in Kadavu India, and probably many more.

At the Islamic architecture website Archnet, a Muslim architect (not a native English writer) explains the problem with round mosques:

… a circular mosque can not function well because a mousqe should have an oriantation to kibla and as we all know that a circle does not have an orientation, How can we know the kibla wall if it is a circle ?

This problem does not afflict Paul Murdoch’s mosque design for the Flight 93 memorial because Murdoch’s giant crescent does create an orientation. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just as with a smaller size mihrab.

Geometrically, Murdoch’s Crescent of Embrace is just a gigantic Islamic prayer rug:

A Muslim prayer rug is a two dimensional mihrab, laid out to face Mecca, just as the Crescent of Embrace is.

Notice that to a person looking into the Flight 93 crescent, the irregularity of the outer arc of the crescent is not visible. The radial arbors are all behind the double row of red maples that line the walkway. The ends of the crescent are also well defined by the end of the walkway of red maples at the bottom and the end of the thousand foot long, fifty foot tall Entry Portal Wall on top. This is a perfectly comprehensible and recognizable Mecca direction indicator.

Rabbat’s comments to the Park Service do not even pretend to be objective. He lists “talking points” in defense of the crescent design without ever even pretending to weigh the merits of the case against the design.

Most obviously, Rabbat never considers the almost exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent as a grounds for concern, but limits his remarks to possible excuses for not worrying about this obviously worrisome fact. The same for all of his other talking points. He only even considers ways to absolve the crescent design.

In short, Rabbat is as overtly biased as he could possibly be, yet the Park Service has no qualms about this overt bias. Rabbat gives them the excuses for unconcern that they want and they eagerly embrace him. The Park Service investigation into warnings of an enemy plot was a total fraud.

Stop the Memorial Betrayal Blogburst: TBogg’s Lying

Nod: Cao

TBogg’s phony excuse for the deleted Flight 93 document

Slight language warning, with Clinton-Lewinski analogy (4th section).

TBogg has posted an explanation for how Kevin Jaques’ assessment of the Flight 93 Memorial went missing from one of his comment threads. Sometime following “the Infamous Alec Rawls Comment Thread,” says TBogg:

… after I was done picking up the beer cans, cigarette butts, and the assorted discarded underwear, I switched from Blogspot comments to Haloscan. In the process, all of the previous comment threads were lost…Fortunately through the miracle of intertubes nerdiness the Lost Commentinent has been rediscovered and you can go read them here.

TBogg insinuates that the Holoscan snafu is the reason that the restored comment thread is missing the Jaques comment, but he does not actually say it, and for good reason. The Jaques deletion had nothing to do with any comment system switchover.

A commentator at Alec’s Error Theory blog looked up TBogg’s site on the Wayback Machine. Turns out that Wayback was taking snapshots of Tbogg’s comment threads every week. Only Blogspot comments show up on Wayback, but that is all that is needed to tell the tale.

Throughout the period in question (spring and summer of 2006) all of TBogg’s Blogspot comment threads are stable except for the “infamous” one, which actually exhibits quite a bit of activity. Not only did TBogg hand delete Jaques comment, but he was apparently torn about it, changing his mind a number of times over a period of weeks.

Background, for those who don’t know what Kevin Jaques did

It is not known exactly when Kevin Jaques was asked by the Memorial Project to write an assessment of Alec Rawls’s warnings about Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the Crescent of Embrace design. Most likely he wrote it in late March of 2006, just before he posted it at the end of TBogg’s January 6, 2006 comment thread.

(If anyone wants to look, go open up the March 31st snapshot of TBogg’s site, then find the January 06 archive page. The Lunacy Abounds post is about a third of the way up from the bottom. Click on the permalink and the comment thread will appear, with the Jaques comment at the bottom. In the previous snapshot, March 28th, the Jaques comment has not yet shown up. Ditto for earlier dates.)

The Jaques comment is important because it shows the blatant dishonesty of the Park Service’s internal investigation. Jaques acknowledged that the giant Mecca-oriented crescent at the center of the design is similar to the Mecca direction indicator (called a mihrab) around which every mosque is built, then he told the Park Service not to worry because no one has ever seen seen a mihrab anywhere near this big before:

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.

The Park Service has released excerpts from Jaques’ comment, proving that the TBogg comment comes from Jaques, but it has never released the revealing parts, like where Jaques says not to worry because one has ever seen a mihrab this big before.

How to get rid of the body? TBogg has second, third and fourth thoughts

TBogg is THE source for the full text of Jaques’ analysis, with its blatant excuse-making for the giant mihrab. Having this analysis publicly available was a problem, both for Jaques and for the Park Service. Since TBogg had no way of knowing that on his own, it seems that somebody must have contacted him, because in the July 21, 2006 snapshot of Tbogg’s Lunacy Abounds comment thread, the Jaques comment is missing from the end.

Blogger allows blog administrators to hide and show comment threads, and it allows them to delete individual comments. Blogger also allows people who comment non-anonymously to delete their own comments. Jaques left his comment anonymously, so only a blog administrator could have deleted his comment. Unless TBogg got hacked, that would have been TBogg.

The August 21st snapshot of the Lunacy Abounds post shows shows TBogg having another thought. Here the entire Lunacy Abounds comment thread is hidden, while all the other comment threads on the archive page remain visible. (About half the posts in Wayback’s August 21st snapshot of TBogg’s January 2006 archive page do not have working permalinks, but of the pages that do come up individually, only Lunacy Abounds has the comment thread hidden.)

If “all of the previous comment threads were lost,” that was a separate incident. The archival record shows that a blog administrator went in and turned off the Lunacy Abounds comment thread by hand. Again, unless TBogg got hacked (or the Wayback Machine is wacked), that was TBogg.

Of course TBogg did not say anything about getting hacked. He insinuated that Haloscan is the culprit. Nope. Haloscan is innocent. Does TBogg want to try pointing the finger anywhere else?

On August 28, 2006, the “infamous comment thread” reappears, again without the Jaques comment. Wayback doesn’t have TBogg snapshots for 2007, but for most of this year the comment thread was again turned off (the Haloscan snafu?), until sometime recently TBogg himself retrieved the comment thread (without the Jaques comment) from the wayback machine and linked it to his original Lunacy Abounds post.

Not quite Hamlet. TBogg consistently wants the Jaques comment “not to be.” He just can’t decide how he wants it not to be.

TBogg’s Monica Lewinsky choice

To complete his Clintonian deception, TBogg makes an over the top admission, pretending it is all a joke:

So, yes. I have been busted. I’ve been getting more payoffs than Bill Bennett with a roll of nickels at Circus Circus. Between George Soros and Osama bin Laden I’ve received so many Miatas, that some of them are still sitting around in the blister packs.

At least he makes it amusing, but the joke is on the Bogglings. TBogg actually meant the “I have been busted” part.

Will TBogg’s legions of vitriolic followers take this Clintonian lie kneeling down? What’s it going to be TBoggers: spit or swallow?

TBogg will have to suffer some embarrassment for duping his readers, but so what? The man embarrasses himself every day. The important thing is that he is in a position to actually be of help in exposing the cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the Flight 93 memorial.

Who contacted him? What did they say? Did he knuckle to a plea from Jaques alone, or was he actually contacted by the government?

TBogg could well have been duped himself. Maybe someone at the Park Service told him that this was an internal government document that was not supposed to be available to the public and asked if he could please remove it. Now that he knows a) that the Park Service is accused of perpetrating a cover up, and b) how the document that he himself covered up contains clear examples of dishonest excuse making, TBogg is in the same position as his army of Bogglings. He knows that he has been used.

Is he going to swallow it, or spit it out? Spit TBogg. You’ll feel much better in the morning.

Can’t we all just be against planting a terrorist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site?

There is no reason for a left-right divide over the Flight 93 Memorial. It isn’t the critics of the crescent design that politicized the issue, but the defenders of the crescent, starting with newspapers like the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that knew about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent back in 2005 and decided not to publish it. They were too busy using their editorial page to slam critics of the crescent as right wing bigots. Inconvenient facts could not be allowed to interfere with their chosen story line.

Then there are people like TBogg who politicize everything. Instead of checking the facts, he starts with his presumptions about which side he should be on, then looks for smarmy ways to characterize the opposition. That is not a rational thought process, but he can more than redeem himself if he will just stop deceiving everybody and start helping to expose the facts.

He could also give his moron brigades a chance to redeem themselves by asking them to actually check a couple factual claims about the crescent design:

Is the giant crescent is really oriented almost exactly on Mecca?Is the 9/11 date really inscribed on a separate section of Memorial Wall that is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent, placing it in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag?

Is it true that every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign?

This is what the blogosphere OUGHT to be good for. If TBogg is too busy to check the facts, why not put his minions to work?

For more on who TBogg has been covering up for, see last week’s post on Dr. Jaques 2001 article, where he argued that we should formulate our response to the 9/11 attacks in accordance with sharia law. How did this advocate for Islamic supremacism become the Memorial Project’s sole consultant on the warnings of Islamic symbolism in the crescent design during a crucial period when the Project’s dismissive posture was set in stone?

If TBogg would tell us what he knows, it might help answer that question, or pose others equally important. No more deception. Just tell the damned truth.

Stop the Memorial Betrayal Blogburst

Nod: Cao

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.

Stop the Crescent Memorial Blogburst

Thanks, as always, to Cao.

TBogg deleted evidence of cover up at the Flight 93 Memorial

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 the TBogg 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 the usual 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 Memorial Project.

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 is geometrically 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 fraudlent 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 a plot 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.

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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.

See the sidebar for the current roll of outraged Blogbursters, then add your voice.

Stop the Memorial Blogburst: Murdoch’s mosque supporters play word games

Nod: Cao

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.

Don’t take Flight 93 to Mecca, blogburst 3

Thanks to Cao.

When Tom Burnett Sr. was helping to pick a memorial to Flight 93, he objected vehemently to the planting of a huge Islamic shaped crescent on the crash site. The Project asked if he would be okay with the Crescent of Embrace design if they didn’t call it a crescent. He said no way:

What the hell? You change words. A pig is a pig!

No doubt about that.

“How about if we don’t CALL it a crescent?” (Click pic for larger image)

See that Memorial Plaza that is situated roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag? It marks the crash site. It doesn’t have to be CALLED an Islamic star for this placement as the star on an Islamic flag to be inappropriate.

Mountain Goat and the 44 blocks

From PJ Country comes news of the Memorial Project’s latest effort to help architect Paul Murdoch adjust the disguise on his terrorist memorializing design, just enough for him to slip through gate security.

“Mountain Goat” called the Memorial Project a few weeks ago to ask about the 44 inscribed translucent blocks that are to be emplaced along the flight path. (There were 40 heroes and 4 terrorists on the flight.)

The person he spoke to said that the three translucent marble blocks that were to be inscribed with the 9/11 date are going to be replaced with a single block, “roughly the length three of the other blocks would have been.”

That would reduce the block count from 44 to 42, but would it actually fix anything?

Whether the 9/11 date is inscribed on three blocks or one, these blocks are to be built into a separate section of Memorial Wall that is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent. That is the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag. Thus the date goes to the Islamic flag–the date goes to the terrorists–no matter how many blocks are used.

See that trail that enters the Memorial Plaza (the star on the flag) from the left? It divides the Memorial Wall into separate upper and lower sections. The upper section has the 9/11 date inscribed. You can see that this upper section of wall is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent (the exact position of an Islamic star). Click for larger image.

End it, don’t mend it

No amount of tweaking the design can alter its terrorist memorializing intent. “Fix” every one of the half dozen large scale terrorist memorializing features in the design by making them all a little bit “off,” and it only establishes the long term Islamo-fascist goal of one day restoring the Crescent mosque to its intended configuration, the same way the jihadists now use re-possession of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem (the Dome of the Rock) as a motivation driving the Jews out of Israel.

Most ridiculous of all is the Bowl of Embrace redesign, which leaves every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design completely intact, only adding some surrounding trees.

http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z36/AlecRawls/CrescentandBowlstacked65.jpg

“Here, put on this burka, then you can sneak your bomb on board the airplane.”

The proper answer, when someone is caught trying to sneak an Islamo-fascist plot through gate security, is not to tell him to go back outside and try again. It is to cart him away.

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If you want to join us outraged protesting bloggers

1. in objecting to planting an Islamic symbol instead of an American one on the crash site,
2. in objecting to its pointing to Mecca and the terrorists’ intended target,
3. in objecting to dishonoring the memory of the people who fought the terrorists on Flight 93
4. in pointing out how Paul Murdoch cleverly and symbolically cast the passenger and crew out of the Islamic heavens in the design while the terrorists are inside the Islamic heavens
5. in pointing out how the date and the site are dedicated to the terrorists
6. in pointing out the numerous redundant mosque design features
7. in pointing out the terrorist memorializing features
8. and post along with us on Wednesdays,

please contact caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com with your website url. She will, in turn, add you to the email list, send you the blogroll code (if you want to put it in your sidebar), and will send you the prewritten text to post. You should receive the email from Cao a day or two prior to the Wednesday it should be posted, and tracked back to Cao’s blog and Error Theory, if your blog has that capability. This will help us track who in the blogroll is posting the blogburst.

The exact Mecca orientation of the Flight 93 Memorial

Nod: Cao

A person facing directly into the giant central crescent of what was originally called the Crescent of Embrace will be facing 1.8° north of Mecca. Defenders of the crescent have used the inexactness of its Mecca orientation to dismiss concern.

•Patrick White, Vice President of Families of Flight 93, argues that the giant crescent cannot be seen as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of its Mecca orientation would be “disrespectful to Islam.”

•Both major Pittsburgh newspapers are denying that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca.

•The internal investigation conducted by the Park Service denies that there is any such thing as almost:

…mihrab orientation either points to Mecca or it does not … [it] cannot be off by “some” degrees. [From page 2 of report summary. Page 1 here.]

[An aside here – this is ridiculous, since a Muslim praying must face Mecca…are they implying that since a praying Muslim is almost assuredly not pointing EXACTLY at Mecca that they’re doing it wrong? – GdB] 

All of this willful blindness about the simple orientation of the crescent structure has been effective in keeping public inquiry from reaching a second startling fact: that the crescent design also contains a hidden exact Mecca orientation, corresponding to architect Paul Murdoch’s own description of how the crescent structure should be interpreted.

Physical crescent tip vs. thematic crescent tip

What points not quite exactly at Mecca is the physical Crescent of Embrace structure (every particle of which remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign). Connect the most obtruding tips of the physical crescent, form the perpendicular bisector to this line (the bisector of the crescent), and it points 1.8° north of Mecca:

Click for larger images. The green circle with “qibla” direction marked is from the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. “Qibla” is Arabic for “prayer direction,” which Muslims calculate as the “great circle” or “shortest distance” direction to Mecca.

But Paul Murdoch has also given a thematic explanation for the crescent structure, indicating how the thematic or “true” upper crescent tip should be understood. In Murdoch’s description, the flight path breaks the circle, turning it into a giant crescent. Thus the thematic upper crescent tip is what is left of the crescent structure after the parts that are “broken off” by the flight path are removed. Take away the parts of the Entry Portal Walls that extend out beyond the flight path, connect the most obtruding tips of the remaining structure, and a perpendicular to this line points within a couple hundredths of a degree of Mecca (i.e. it points exactly at Mecca, as far as can be determined given the pixel resolution of the graphics).

The flight path is represented in the Crescent/Bowl design by the Entry Portal Walkway, which comes down from the NNW. The Walkway passes through the Entry Portal Walls and projects out into the crescent:

Take away the parts of the crescent structure that are “broken off” by the flight path, and the remaining crescent structure is oriented exactly on Mecca.

[The above graphic was created by laying the Crescent of Embrace and the Bowl of Embrace site plans on top of each other. This was done to accurately capture the one real change that Murdoch made in the Bowl of Embrace redesign: the lengthening of the Entry Portal Walkway. (See “Memorial riddle #2: Why did Paul Murdoch lengthen the Entry Portal Walkway?) So that the new Walkway length can be seen, the low resolutionBowl of Embrace site plan is enhanced by overlaying it with the high resolution Crescent of Embrace site plan.]

The 44th inscribed translucent block on the flight path

At the end of the Entry Portal Walkway (marking the thematic or “true” upper crescent tip, according to Murdoch’s own description), sits a large glass block, inscribed with LAFD Captain Stephen J. Ruda’s dedication: “A common field one day. A field of honor forever.”

This will be the 44th inscribed translucent block emplaced along the flight path, matching the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists. 40 will be inscribed with the names of the 40 heroes (despite Tom Burnett’s demand that Tom Jr.’s name not be used). Three three more will be built into a separate section of Memorial Wall that is centered on the bisector of the giant crescent (the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag). These three blocks will be inscribed with the 9/11 date. Thus the date goes to the Islamic star. The date goes to the terrorists.

By having the 44th glass block mark the thematic “true” upper crescent tip, and by having that thematic crescent tip create a hidden exact Mecca orientation for the giant crescent, Murdoch is able to tie his Islamic and his terrorist memorializing design features together into a perfect bin Ladenist embrace.

TACKLE THE BARE NAKED HIJACKER!

After all, it does not get much more naked than this:

Or this:

Or this:

The Walkway riddle: When Paul Murdoch extended the Entry Portal Walkway, he was doing more than just perfecting the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. This slight adjustment in the placement of the 44th block also perfected two other terrorist memorializing elements of Murdoch’s mosque. Anyone who can figure out either of these elements before looking at the answer wins a glorious prize.

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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.