Deliberate, Thoughtless Or Just Stupid?

Crescent of Disgrace

"A crescent is part of architectural vocabulary. It's a generic form used in design. We don't see any one group having ownership of it." (source)

That's Paul Murdoch, the architect whose controversial design was selected for the Flight 93 memorial in Pennsylvania, talking out his butt.

If he were Mohammed bin Murdoch, a designer in Riyadh, tasked to design a tribute to the martyrs of Islam, and he came up with a design with a dominant gold cross, couldn't you hear him saying as he was led to the executioner, "The cross is part of architectural vocabulary. It is a generic form used in design. We don't see any one group having ownership of it."

Really?

• In Islamic countries, the Red Cross is called the Red Crescent.
• The last great Islamic empire, the Ottomans, used the cresent. Here's what one historian of the subject says about the genesis of the symbol: "In 1299, conquering what is now Turkey, Sultan Osman had a vision of a crescent moon stretching over the world; it thus became a symbol of the Ottoman dynasty, and when Constantinople fell to Muhammad II in 1453, the crescent came to represent both Islam and the Turkish empire. The star was added by Sultan Selim III in 1793 (its five points being established in 1844)."
  
• The star and crescent motif is found on the flags of Algeria, Azerbaijan, Comoros, Malaysiz (with snappy red and white stripes), Maldives, Maurutania, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- Islamic nations all.
  

The crescent may be a bit more of a political symbol than a religious symbol, but in that sense it's even worse for the memorial, tied as it is to Ottoman Islamic expansionism. It is about the imperialism of the religion; it is about the growth of that religion by forced imposition on other religions.

Murdoch goes on:

"You can call it all kinds of things. We can call it an arc. We can call it a circle. We can call it the edge of the bowl. The label doesn't matter to us in terms of intent. We have no objection to calling it something else."

It is not about what we call it; it is about what it stands for. It doesn't matter if the natural contours of the land might have called this out to him. He should have rejected the idea out of hand, and gone back to his dictionary of generic design forms for a different shape.

He should understand that the memorial is not about design, it's about remembrance and honoring heros.

But Murdoch spounds like the voice of reason when compared to Rabiah Ahmed, spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations:

"People forget Muslims died [in the attacks], too."

Of course, she's not talking about the hijackers, but about the innocent victims of Jihadist terror. But even so, CAIR wants us to forget they died because of Muslims.

h/t Michelle Malkin