So, guys...who here has heard what they're doing with the Flight 93 memorial?

[Bluesman]

It is really kind of stunning. If you haven't heard yet, check this out (but be warned: if you have high blood pressure, expect the top of your skull to blow off):

Crescent of Embrace

[dalem]

It is really kind of stunning. If you haven't heard yet, check this out (but be warned: if you have high blood pressure, expect the top of your skull to blow off):

Crescent of Embrace

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to go impale somebody on a spear and listen to them gurgle.

-dale

[Bluesman]

I just fired this off to General Tommy Franks, who, incredibly, is involved in fundraising for this travesty:

General - We were very disturbed to learn that the winning design for the Flight 93 memorial is to be in the shape of a crescent, and a red one at that. I know the symbolism of this design is not lost on you, and we were further distressed to discover that you were connected with fundraising for the memorial. Perhaps we are being over-sensitive, but we don't think so, and we are interested in knowing what possible explanation there could be for such a glaring and offensive choice for memorializing the brave passengers aboard that aircraft four years ago. Do you not agree that something else - almost ANYthing else - should be chosen? We would appreciate your response, because if there is any reason we and all other patriotic Americans should not be grossly offended by this unfortunate choice, we are certainly ready and willing to know it.

[Bill]

Don't bother me any to be honest.

[barrowaj]

I didn't notice the similarity until they superimposed the crescent on the memorial. I don't think it really looks all that similar. Not something to get that worked up about.

[giggs88]

Was it planned and announced to be a crescent? It doesn't even look like one.

[Confed999]

Calling it "Crescent of Embrace", is pretty bad...

[giggs88]

Calling it "Crescent of Embrace", is pretty bad...

OK, that is pretty bad..

[pingingpuss]

It is really kind of stunning. If you haven't heard yet, check this out (but be warned: if you have high blood pressure, expect the top of your skull to blow off):

Crescent of Embrace

hmmmmm i not sure about this one

[Bluesman]

Okay, I'd expect barrowaj to be clueless about this. But really, who else doesn't understand this? Who here really thinks that Muslims around the world aren't going to immediately see this and recognize it for what it is?

Will this be claimed as a victory by Islamists around the world? Of course, it will be. To claim anything else is absolutely ignorant.

It's a CRESCENT. It's RED. It's a RED CRESCENT. That is, when it's not GREEN. Seriously, I want to read your posts if you think this is a fitting memorial.

Tell me why you think this is 'nothing to get worked up about'.

And here's something for the rest of us to read while we're waiting for the most clueless of our posters to try to defend this:

FLIGHT 93, RE-HIJACKED

At 9.58am Eastern time, Tuesday September 11th 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

Why?

As UPI’s Jim Bennett wrote, “The Era of Osama lasted about an hour and a half or so, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty.”

Exactly right. Six decades earlier, the American people had to wait four months between Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid. But September 11th was Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid wrapped up in 90 minutes. Flight 93 was supposed to be the fourth of Osama’s flying bombs, its destination either the White House or the Capitol. Had it reached its target, the following morning’s headlines would have included “The Vice-President is still among the missing, presumed dead”. Had Flight 93 sheared the top off the White House, that would have been the day’s “money shot”, as it was in the alien-invasion flick Independence Day - the shattered façade, smoke billowing, the seat of American power reduced to rubble.

But the dopey hijackers assigned to Flight 93 were halfway across the continent before they made their move and started meandering back east. And, by the time the passengers began calling home on their cellphones, their families knew what had happened in New York. Todd Beamer couldn’t get through to his wife, so the last conversation of his life was with the GTE telephone operator, who stayed on the line with him and overheard his final words: “Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll!” And then a brave group of passengers jumped their hijackers and, at the cost of their own lives, prevented that day’s grim toll rising even higher. At a terrible moment for America, their heroism was the only victory of the day.

Four years on, plans for the Flight 93 National Memorial have now been revealed. The winning design, chosen from 1,011 entries, will be built in that pasture in Pennsylvania where those heroes died. The memorial is called “The Crescent of Embrace”.

That sounds like a fabulous winning entry - in a competition to create a note-perfect parody of effete multicultural responses to terrorism. Indeed, if anything, it’s too perfect a parody: the “embrace” is just the usual huggy-weepy reconciliatory boilerplate, but the “crescent” transforms its generic cultural abasement into something truly spectacular. In the design plans, “The Crescent of Embrace” looks more like the embrace of the Crescent – ie, Islam. After all, what better way to demonstrate your willingness to “embrace” your enemies than by erecting a giant Islamic crescent at the site of the day’s most unambiguous episode of American heroism?

Okay, let’s get all the “of courses” out of the way – of course, the overwhelmingly majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists; of course, we all know “Islam” means “peace” and “jihad” means “healthy-lifestyle lo-carb granola bar”; etc, etc. Nevertheless, the men who hijacked Flight 93 did it in the name of Islam and their last words as they hit the Pennsylvania sod were no doubt “Allahu Akhbar”. One would be unlikely even today to come across an Allied D-Day memorial so misconceived in its spirit of reconciliation as to be called the Swastika of Embrace. Yet Paul Murdoch, the architect, has somehow managed to produce a design whose two most obvious interpretations are a) a big nothing or b) a splendid memorial to the hijackers rather than their victims.

Four years ago, most of us understood instinctively the courage of Flight 93. They were honoured not just by chickenhawks and neocons and Zionists and the usual suspects but even by celebrities. The leathery old rocker Neil Young wrote a dark driving anthem called “Let’s Roll” that began with cellphones ringing. Then:

I know I said I love you
I know you know it’s true
I got to put the phone down
And do what we gotta do

One’s standing in the aisle way
Two more at the door
We got to get inside there
Before they kill some more…

Granted, even then, there were a lot of folks eager to “embrace” their enemies. The day after September 11th, Robert Daubenspeck of White River Junction, Vermont wrote to my local newspaper advising against retaliation: “Someone, someday, must have the courage not to hit back but to look them in the eye and say, ‘I love you’.” That’s not as easy as it sounds. If you try to look Richard Reid the shoebomber in the eye as he’s bending down to light the fuse sticking out of his sock, you could easily put your back out.

But each to his own. If Mr Murdoch sincerely believes in a “crescent of embrace”, let him build one – at the headquarters of a “moderate” Islamic lobby group, or in the parking lot of your wackier colleges. To impose it on Flight 93 – to, in effect, hijack those passengers a second time – is an abomination. Flight 93 is about what happens when you understand that some things can’t be embraced. Perhaps Mr Beamer and his comrades did indeed “look them in the eye” and saw there was nothing to negotiate, nothing to “embrace”. So they acted – and, faced with a novel and unprecedented form of terror, they stopped it cold in little more than an hour. Todd Beamer asked that telephone operator to join him in reciting the 23rd Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” He knew there would be no happy ending that day, but in their resourcefulness and sacrifice he and his fellow passengers gave their country the next best thing: a hopeful ending. That’s what the Flight 93 Memorial should be honouring.

Instead, in its feeble cultural cringe, the Crescent of Embrace hands the terrorists of Flight 93 the victory they were denied on September 11th. And it profoundly dishonours Todd Beamer, Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and other forgotten heroes of that flight.

Most of us are all but resigned to losing New York’s Ground Zero memorial to a pile of non-judgmental if not explicitly anti-American pap: The minute you involve big-city politicians and foundations and funding bodies and “artists” you’re on an express chute to the default mode of the cultural elite. But surely it’s not too much to hope that in Pennsylvania the very precise, specific, individual, human scale of one great act of American heroism need not be buried under another soggy dollop of generic prettified passivity. A culture that goes to such perverse lengths to disdain its heroes cannot survive and doesn’t deserve to.

Four years ago, Todd Beamer’s rallying cry was quoted by Presidents and rock stars alike. That’s all that’s needed in that field: the kind of simple dignified memorial you see on small-town commons saluting Civil war veterans, a granite block with the names of the passengers and the words “LET’S ROLL.” The “crescent of embrace”, in its desperation to see no enemies and stand for nothing, represents the precise opposite of Beamer, Glick, Burnett and co: Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll over.
The Irish Times, September 12th 2005

~ Mark's "Happy Warrior" column can be read every two weeks in National Review. In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on media coverage and the perception of the perception, only in the print edition of National Review , on sale now - or save over 40% and subscribe .

Document copyright Steynonline.com. All rights reserved.

[dalem]

I think it should be more along the lines of the monument the French erected for the brave U.S. Army Rangers who scaled the bluff at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day under fire and routed the defending Germans:





It's about 15 feet tall.

Now THAT'S a monument to heroes.

-dale

[Bluesman]

Beautiful. Strong. Emotive (in the RIGHT way).

Completely agree, dalem.

[thesaint]

It's a CRESCENT. It's RED. It's a RED CRESCENT.

The Red Crescent is the Red Cross in Islamic countries. Not really a symbol of AQ terrorists.
Also the "let's roll" story is apocryphal.

How about them Egyptian pyramids on the $1 bill, anyway ?

[dalem]

Also the "let's roll" story is apocryphal.

So the plane crashed by accident?

-dale

[thesaint]

So the plane crashed by accident?

-dale

I don't know, do you ? I wouldn't be surprised if it was shot down.
Anyway, what I was saying is that the phrase "let's roll" was never pronounced.