Posted on 09/12/2005 12:10:14 AM PDT by spycatcher
Today is September 11.
Michelle Malkin and other bloggers are buzzing about the proposed Flight 93 memorial, which bears a striking resemblance to an Islamic crescent. Zombie produces an animated image consisting of the memorial (rotated so the arms of the crescent point to the right) overlapped with the crescent of the Tunisian flag. The juxtaposition is nearly perfect.
Zombie also links to this image credited to "Etaoin Shrdlu". What you're seeing is an azimuthal equidistant projection of the globe centered on the Flight 93 crash site. On such a projection, the concentric circles represent a fixed distance from the center, and the angle of a straight line from the center to any point represents the azimuth between the two points. Etaoin's image shows that a line perpendicular to the endpoints of the crescent (that is, the direction the crescent faces) appears to pass very close to Mecca. Mecca sits near Saudi Arabia's western coast with the Red Sea, and as Etaoin's image shows, the crescent points right at it.
But I've always been one to go for cold calculations over pretty pictures, so I set to find out if indeed the crescent points towards Mecca. Here's what I came up with:
According to this site, the latitude/longitude coordinates of Mecca are 21.4234, 39.8262 and the coordinates of the Flight 93 crash site are 40.052, -78.8963. Using the calculator from this site, I determined that the azimuth between the two points is 124.80°.
Next I went to the Flight 93 National Memorial website and found the biggest overhead view of the memorial I could find with north oriented up. I measured the distance from tip-to-tip of the crescent and came up with 64px east-west and 90px north-south. The arctangent of 64/90 is the angle between north and a line drawn between the tips, which works out to 35.42°. Adding 90° to this angle gives the direction the crescent faces as 125.42°.
Conclusion: the crescent points towards Mecca with an error of 0.62°, or 0.17%. If you take a circle and divide its circumference into 580 equal arcs, the angle subtended by one of those arcs is the error. (Bear in mind that any error in my figures could change this value; the figure most open to interpretation is the distance in pixels between the tips of the crescent.)
I don't know if the architect deliberately made his design look like an Islamic crescent, or if it's coincidental. I don't know if the architect deliberately made his crescent point almost directly towards Mecca, or if it's coincidental. What I do know is that a memorial in the shape of a swastika would never be permitted, whether the resemblance was intentional or a coincidence. Nor would a memorial resembling a Confederate battle flag.
The strong resemblance of this memorial to an Islamic symbol, whether intentional or accidental, is grossly insensitive to those of us who find it offensive. The commission needs to go back to the drawing board.
From the descriptions of the memorial, it appears that the purpose of the crescent was to envelope the debris field... from the pictures, it does not.
Nothing could be more different as opposed to a "Tower of Voices" "calling to prayer" inside a "Crescent of Embrace".
Yes.
Heck, the Temple Owls had a better chance of beating the Wisconsin Badgers Saturday than this does of being anything other than a Leftist sell-out to the Islamokazis.
It's also pointing toward Albany, NY!
Maybe the passengers helped bring FL93 down, OR...Sure, it could have been shot down....
How do you perceive this as a "phony issue"?
Do we have names?
There's one family member who is on FR and likes the design.
This has to be the most insulting thing the designer could think up.
Do they have islam-apologists working on this memorial?
Why is it that this, and the PC-memorial at the WTC, have to be tainted like this?
This cannot be allowed.
I should clarify that from what I can tell the flight path does not appear to be coincidentally alinged to Mecca. But the crescent does embrace the "sacred ground" in the exact direction of Mecca. So it looks like it was an optional symbolic design.
Calling to prayer was my term. They're are using the modern minaret "tower of voices" for essentially that purpose though. Except the prayer is not called for 5 times a day but 24/7.
What it comes down to, is that it doesn't matter what D-fendr thinks, or I think, but that Allah-infused 'memorial' is now going to change. I give the over/under on the announcement of the scrapping of the current design at three news cycles, depending on when Hume/Rush/Hannity pick it up.
There are 2 ways to Mecca...the short way and the long way...the long way is the opposite ot the short way bearing...
I think the statement you quoted is as far as I am going to go on the subject.
Sorry, it is a big monster. I downloaded it before viewing in Acrobat. Perhaps this would work for you too?
Yes, but except for the crescent I think they are a stretch.
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