Everyone involved with the Flight 93 Memorial knows that the Crescent of Embrace points to Mecca

In 2007, Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird told Alec Rawls (the author of these blogburst posts) that everyone at the meetings he attended is fully aware that the giant crescent, originally named the Crescent of Embrace, really does point almost exactly at Mecca. Professor Baird says they all just assume (himself included) that the Mecca orientation must be an innocent coincidence.

Pretty crazy, when they have also been told the meaning of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca. Every mosque is built around a Mecca-direction indicator called a mihrab, and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Geometrically, the Crescent of Embrace is the world’s largest mihrab.

However honestly Project Partners believe that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence, this is not what they tell the public. When reporters asked Memorial Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley about the Mecca orientation, she denied it:

"The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site," she said.

Thinking that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence in no way justifies lying to the public about this explosive information. If Baird’s account is accurate—that the dozens of Memorial Project Partners all know that the giant crescent actually does point to Mecca—then the Memorial Project has a lot of explaining to do. Now an overlooked article from 2007 corroborates Professor Baird’s information.

Dr. Glenn Kashurba

It turns out that a Pennsylvania psychiatrist who has been intimately involved with the memorialization of Flight 93 (writing two books on the subject) argued to a reporter before the July 2007 Memorial Project meeting that the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent (which he took as a given) should be seen as coincidental:

“When you calculate angles to Mecca - I'm going to be in Washington, D.C., this week, and I'm sure if I calculate angles of the monuments, at least one points to Mecca,” Kashurba said. “I don't know if it will be the White House or the Lincoln Memorial, but at least one will. People looking for a way to support their way of looking at things will look at this in this way for ever and ever.”

If Dr. Kashurba was getting his information from the Memorial Project’s public statements, he would have denied that the crescent points to Mecca. Here is what Memorial Project Partner Patrick White told the press 9 days before the Kashurba story:

Rawls, of Palo Alto, Calif., contends that the centerpiece of the design points toward Mecca.

Rawls’ claims are untrue and “preposterous,” according to Patrick White, Families of Flight 93 vice president. “We went through in detail all his original claims and came away with nothing.”

Kashurba knew better, as did Patrick White himself. The week after his public denial, a local woman asked White how he could be okay with the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. This time White did not deny the Mecca orientation, but argued that it cannot be seen as honoring Islam because the inexactness of the Mecca orientation would be "disrespectful" to Islam.

Mecca orientation takes literally 2 minutes to verify, starting from source documents

It is not surprising that these Memorial Project insiders would know that the giant crescent does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (1.8° north of Mecca to be precise, ± 0.1°). After all, they had by the summer of 2007 been examining Rawls’ report, and answering questions from the press about it, for over a year, and the near Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is trivially easy to verify.

Just use any of the online Islamic prayer-direction calculators to print out the direction to Mecca from Somerset PA. Place this graphic over the Crescent site-plan on your computer screen, and you will see that the Mecca-direction line (which Muslims call “qibla”) almost exactly bisects the crescent:



The green circle in this image is from the qibla calculator at Islam.com (down at the moment, but you can use the one at Qibla.com, or QiblaLocator.com). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca.

Patrick White knows this and deceives the press and the public about it. Dr. Kashurba knows it and stands by as White and others deceive the press and the public about it. These deceptions have been blatant.

Everything points to Mecca?

The Project even went to far as to dig up an academic fraud from Texas, willing to deny that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round.

Was the reporter embarrassed to ask Muslims if they can really face any direction to face Mecca? Hard to blame her. Just to ask such a stupid question is to answer it, but the obviousness of the fraud is no excuse for letting it stand.

According to Professor Baird, every Memorial Project member who saw these denials knew that they were fraudulent, yet not one of them has tried to tell the public about the Project’s dishonest cover-up. When the truth does get out to the broader public, Project members are going to have a lot to answer for, which is presumably why they are keeping their mouths shut now. They have done a very bad thing and they don’t want it exposed.

What proves Islamic intent is the architect’s elaborate repetition of the Mecca orientation

No one ever claimed that the almost exact Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace proves Islamic intent. Architect Paul Murdoch proves intent in a different way: by elaborate repetition of his Mecca orientations. His first confirmation of intent is to include an exact Mecca orientation.

In Murdoch’s explanation, the flight path breaks the circle, turning it into the giant crescent. To find this thematically defined crescent, remove those parts of the full Crescent of Embrace that extend out past the point where the flight path breaks the circle. The resulting true or thematic crescent points EXACTLY at Mecca:



At the upper tip of the crescent, the flight path comes down from the NNE and symbolically breaks the circle. What symbolically remains standing is the true or thematic Crescent of Embrace, pointing exactly at Mecca.

Murdoch’s next confirmation of intent is to exactly repeat this entire multi-Mecca oriented geometry in the vast array of crescents of trees that surround the Tower of Voices part of the memorial. Setting aside the chance that an architect could in the first place design a memorial to Flight 93 out of nothing but crescents just by innocent coincidence (which must be close to zero), the odds that these crescents would by random chance manifest Murdoch’s repeated Mecca orientations are 1 in 131 billion:

The only change was to include an explicitly broken off part of the circle

The original Crescent of Embrace design included the symbolically broken off parts at the upper crescent tip. When the bare naked Islamic-crescent shape caused a public uproar, the Memorial Project added another broken off part of the circle, floating out in front of the mouth of the original crescent.

They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, the symbolic result of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. That makes it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque.


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