Crescent shapes with and without Islamic intent: the Obama logo example

For those of you that worship Obama, you may want to take a look at this:


THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BY: ALEC RAWLS

The two most widely recognized symbols of Islam are the crescent and the sword. Kind of amusing that Barack Hussein Obama’s campaign logo can be seen to feature both a crescent and a curved Islamic scimitar:



The crescent shape in Obama’s logo has the round part on top, just like a traditional crescent shaped mihrab (the Mecca direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The animation shows the two most famous mihrabs in the world: the mihrab from the Great Mosque in Cordoba, and the Prophet’s mihrab in Medina.

The lighter vertical column in the center-bottom of the logo, presumably meant to indicate reflected light, even conveys the full vertical shape of a traditional mihrab. The scimitar in the animation is from the flag of the Bosnian regiment of the Nazi SS.

If Obama himself had come up with this crescent logo, one might suspect Islamic intent, given his Islamic heritage. But the logo was not designed by Obama. It was designed by a Chicago based branding firm named Sender, which claims credit for coming up with: “a white sunrise against a blue sky, over a landscape implied by red and white stripes.”

Obama definitely deserves to be made fun of for having a fairly obvious crescent shape in his logo, given his efforts to convince the public that he is not Muslim. This is already an uphill climb, when both his grandmother and his cousin are telling documented lies about their religion, claiming to be Christian in one venue while professing themselves Muslim in another. Lying about being Christian: it’s an Obama family tradition!

Still, there is no indication that the crescent and scimitar shapes in Obama’s logo are intended to convey any Islamic meaning. A genuine coincidence apparently. At the opposite pole is the Crescent of Embrace design for the Flight 93 memorial:



Contrast 1: Architect Paul Murdoch CALLS his crescent shaped memorial a crescent
The Crescent of Embrace name proves that the Flight 93 crescent was and is intended to be seen as a crescent. Only very reluctantly did the Memorial Project change the name, and the changes they made to the design are purely cosmetic. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign.

Contrast 2: The Islamic symbolism is overt
It is not plausible that an architect, designing a memorial to people murdered by Islamic terrorists, could be oblivious to the fact that his memorial design is laid out in the shape of a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag, readily identifiable as a crescent and star flag to airliners like Flight 93 passing overhead.

The Memorial Project simply assumes that the Islamic symbol shapes CAN’T be intentional, which is about like seeing an airliner fly into the World Trade Center and assuming it CAN’T be intentional. Do these people even remember the day they are supposed to be memorializing?

Contrast 3: The Flight 93 crescent contains still further Islamic symbolism
It turns out that the giant crescent points to Mecca. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is a well known structure in the Islamic world. It is a mihrab (as seen in the above animation), which gives the direction that Muslims are to face for prayer.

Everyone at the Memorial Project is fully aware that a person facing into the giant crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca. This according to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird. Again, they all just assume that this MUST be an innocent mistake (the equivalent of seeing as SECOND airliner fly into the Trade Center, and STILL assuming it can’t POSSIBLY be intentional).

Contrast 4: Proof of intent
Paul Murdoch PROVES that the Mecca orientation is intentional by repeating it in the crescents of trees that surround the minaret like Tower of Voices. Below is an animated run-through of the repeated Mecca-orientations (2 minutes).

You can restart the animation by refreshing the page:















Animated GIF: copy and paste. You can email it! (Animation restarts each time email is opened.) Click image for larger animation, if your connection is fast enough (1MB).

Crescent of Embrace site-plan, showing both the central crescent and the Tower of Voices, here.

Contrast 5: the designer's own thematic description is clearly terrorist memorializing
The designers of Obama's logo offer a clearly innocent thematic description of their creation. You can tell just by looking at it what it is MEANT to signify: a white sun coming up into a blue sky over red and white rows of fruited plain. Even the uncanny intimation of the vertical sides of a traditional mihrab is fully explained by the “sun” reflecting off the red and white “landscape.”

In contrast, Paul Murdoch's thematic account of his design is as nakedly pro-terrorist as his crescent and star layout. Murdoch says that the crescent comes from the terrorists breaking the circle. That is, they broke our liberty-loving circle and turned it into a giant Islamic-shaped Mecca-oriented crescent.

As Tom Burnett Sr. put it in his letter to American people, asking for help with our petition to keep the crescent design off of his murdered son's gravesite:

I don’t want to celebrate the terrorist’s circle-breaking crescent-creating feat.

And lest anyone thinks that the giant crescent is no longer present, the Park Service website makes clear that, while the redesign looks more like a circle, the circle is still broken:

The circle is broken in two places that mark the southeastern path of the plane to the crash site. The circle is broken at the entry to the memorial and at the crash site.

The breaks are in the exact same places as before and the unbroken part of the circle (the crescent) remains completely unchanged. It it still points to Mecca. It is still the world's largest mihrab by a factor of a hundred. The only difference is that now a chunk of the broken off part of the circle is included in the design, which is perfectly consistent with its original terrorist memorializing theme. The terrorists still break our liberty-loving circle and still turn it into a giant Mecca-oriented crescent.

So there you have it. Dueling crescents! Obama’s crescent logo exemplifies innocent coincidence (however guilty Obama may be of lying about his religion). In contrast, the Flight 93 crescent exemplifies proven intent. (More of architect Paul Murdoch’s endless proofs of intent here and here.)

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Saudi Authorities Contradict U.S. Park Service: Mihrabs DO NOT Have To Point Exactly At Mecca

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THIS ARTICLE WRITTEN BY: ALEC RAWLS

A Muslim consultant told the Park Service in 2006 that the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 cannot be seen as a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), because the giant Islamic-shaped crescent does not point exactly at Mecca:

Mihrab orientation is either correct
or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

Saudi religious authorities recently had to address this question when observers noted that some 200 mosques in Mecca itself do not point directly at the Kaaba (the
“Sacred Mosque” that all Muslims are supposed to face for prayer). Meccans who worried that their prayers might not count were href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7984556.stm">assured by the
Islamic Affairs Ministry that “it does not affect the prayers.”

The necessity for such a rule is obvious. Throughout most of Islam’s 1400
year history, Muslims who were any significant distance from Mecca had no
accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it became established
religious principle that what matters is intent. It is the
mind of the believer that needs to face directly towards the Kaaba,
and directly towards God. This principle applies in Mecca the same as
anywhere else.


All the great mosques of the ancient world point well away from
Mecca

Older mosques often point 10, 20, 30 or more degrees away from Mecca. The
most famous mihrab in the world, the mihrab of the Great Mosque in Cordoba
Spain, points more than 45° off of Mecca:







The Cordoba mihrab points south, while Mecca is east-southeast of Spain.


In contrast, the Crescent of Embrace points a mere 1.8° north of Mecca, ±
0.1°, which is highly accurate by Islamic standards.





The Muslim consultant who lied to the Park Service was a classmate
of architect Paul Murdoch!


Who told the Park Service that a mihrab has to point exactly at Mecca to be
legitimate?

It was Nasser Rabbat, a professor of Islamic architecture at MIT
and an expert in the history of mosque design. No one knows better than
Professor Rabbat that mihrab orientation DOES NOT have to be exact.

There is only one reason why Rabbat would lie to the Park Service about such
a basic fact. He recognizes that the giant Mecca-oriented crescent at the
heart of the Flight 93 memorial IS a legitimate mihrab, and he wants this al
Qaeda sympathizing plot to succeed.

A look at Rabbat's background shows that he was a classmate of Crescent of Embrace architect Paul Murdoch, both getting masters degrees in architecture from UCLA in 1984 and both doing their masters work on Middle Easter subjects. (Murdoch wrote a “masters project” titled: “A museum for Haifa, Israel.” Rabbat wrote a
master thesis on house design in Cairo and Damascus.)

This prior connection between Murdoch and Rabbat raises the possibility that
Murdoch himself was able to orchestrate the Park Service investigation into
warnings about his own design. By the same token, having the two classmates
both show up in the Flight 93 memorial raises the possibility that Rabbat
was Murdoch's source of expertise on how to incorporate the full complement
of typical mosque features into his Crescent design. (For the dozen typical
mosque features, see Crescent of Embrace, chapter 5.)

The Crescent of Embrace also includes an exact
Mecca-orientation!


While exact orientation on Mecca is not a traditional requirement, modern
mosque designers do generally employ now-available techniques for orienting
their mihrabs more precisely on Mecca than was previously possible. Murdoch
satisfies this modern norm (and provides hidden proof of intent) by
including a true thematically-defined crescent that does point
exactly at Mecca.

Murdoch's thematic explanation for his crescent design is that the circle was broken on 9/11 by the path of Flight 93. The terrorist-piloted airplane smashes our peaceful circle, turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent(that just happens to point to Mecca). The terrorist-memorializing implications of this theme are hardly less overt than the Islamic symbol shapes themselves. Nothing particularly subtle here folks.

The symbolic breaking of the circle occurs at the upper crescent tip, where
the fifty-foot tall, thousand-foot long Entry Portal Wall is parted by the
Entry Portal Walkway, which follows the flight path through the wall:



The section of wall to the right of the walkway in this image is
symbolically "broken off" by the flight path. Remove this symbolically
broken off part, and the remaining crescent structure points EXACTLY at
Mecca, ± 0.1°:




What symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11: a giant
Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca.

Rabbat knew about this too, since the original report that Rabbat was
commenting on detailed both the slightly inexact Mecca-orientation of the
full Crescent of Embrace, and the exact-Mecca-orientation that results when
the symbolically broken-off parts are removed. Same for the Park Service. As
the original recipient of Alec Rawls' report,
the Park Service knew about both orientations. They also knew, because it
was also in the original report, that a mihrab does NOT have to point
exactly at Mecca. Yet they still publicly touted Rabbat’s claim that the
crescent can’t be seen as a mihrab because it doesn’t point exactly at
Mecca. A veritable web of self-conscious lies by Rabbat AND the Park
Service.

The design is called a broken circle now, but the circle is still broken in
the same place as before (where the flight path crosses the upper crescent
tip). The unbroken part of the circle, what is symbolically left standing in
the wake of 9/11, remains completely unchanged. It is still a giant-Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing exactly at Mecca.

To join Alec Rawls' Blogburst List, just send your Blog Name and Blog Url to: caoilfhionn1@gmail.com ~and~(cc)to: alec@rawls.org Subject=Blogburst List. Thank you.

Error Theory: Two Memorial Project commissioners quit over the Project’s bad behavior

Error Theory: Two Memorial Project commissioners quit over the Project’s bad behavior