May I rant for a little bit?
There has been a storm brewing in the right-wing blogs, with Michelle Malkin leading the charge, over the winning design for the memorial that will be built in honor of the passengers and crew who died in United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001 after its passengers wrestled control of the plane from its hijackers.
The winning design is a semi-circle of maple trees, whose leaves will turn red during the fall. Critics immediately seized upon the fact that the semi-circle of red-leafed maple trees eerily resembles the Muslim Crescent, which can be seen on the national flag of Turkey. Blogger Zombie produced this animation which illustrates the similarities. And the proposed name of the memorial, Crescent of Embrace, did not make things any better.
Other bloggers disagreed, most notably my fellow cat fancier and blog friend Sissy Willis. Perhaps the whole thing has gotten a little out of hand, although as a blog commenter at Captain's Quarters pointed out, architects take a daily bath in symbolism; everything they design has known symbolic elements in its form.
What bothers me about all this is that we can't simply have a memorial that commemorates an event, or pays homage to those who died bravely. No, we must sympathize, we must "embrace." Why on earth would we want to embrace the ideology or the memory of the hijackers who caused the deaths of these innocent civilians? I love the people of the Middle East as I do all mankind, and I pray for their welfare and for their deliverance from religious and societal bondage. But I have no desire to "embrace" the 9/11 hijackers' way of life, nor its nihilistic death cult of a religion, no matter how much I may like hummus and pita bread or doe-eyed Arab beauties.
I don't know how we did it, but somehow Oklahoma City escaped foolish post-modern cultural relativism and managed to build a memorial to the 168 Murrah Building bombing victims that did not blame the US government, or attempt to show how we have mistreated natives and minorities over the course of our nation's existence.
But the September 11th people just can't seem to get things right. First they had to kill the proposal for a statue commemorating the famous photo of three NYC firemen raising the American flag because the firemen weren't "red and yellow, black and white." Nope -- can't portray three "white" people standing within 18 inches of each other - that would be discrimination. Then they planned to build a "why they hate us" pavilion on the remains of the World Trade Center, which explored the inequities of mankind and the exploitation of various peoples throughout history, naturally culminating with the exploitation of other cultures by the Christian West. And now this. God help us all.
Of course CAIR (the Council for American-Islamic Relations) has to go and make things worse by issuing a clumsy defense of the proposed memorial, describing it as "a memorial to those aboard a plane that crashed in Pennsylvania." Crashed. Not "hijacked by terrorists" - crashed. If that is the way that Islamic special interest groups want flight 93 to be memorialized -- a complete white-washing of the fact that Islamic radicals caused the "crash" -- then we have much more serious problems on our hands than just the shape of the memorial.
If you want to make your voice heard, you can contact the Gail Norton, Secretary of the US Department of the Interior, who must issue final approval for the memorial. Michelle Malkin has provided the contact information:
Her email: gale_norton@ios.doi.gov.
Her phone: 202 208-7351.
Her mailing address: Department of Interior 1849 C St, NW, Washington DC 20240.
UPDATE: via Michelle Malkin's blog, the AP is now reporting that the memorial will be redrawn by its designer in order to "satisfy critics."
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