Blogoland

The crazy-assed nutjobs who squinted hard and saw a Victory for the Terrorists in the Flight 93 memorial have extracted their pound of flesh:

PITTSBURGH Nov 30, 2005 — Designers of a Flight 93 memorial have made a bowl-shaped piece of land its centerpiece, replacing a crescent-shape design that some critics had said was a symbol honoring terrorists, officials announced Wednesday.

The new design for the memorial, to be built on the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, crash near Shanksville, features most of the details of the original, which was unveiled in September after a worldwide design competition.

But a round, bowl-shaped area would replace a "Crescent of Embrace," a crescent-shaped cluster of maple trees.

In September, Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., criticized the design in a letter to the National Park Service Director, saying many questioned the shape "because of the crescent's prominent use as a symbol in Islam and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists."

Paul Murdoch, president of Paul Murdoch Architects, which designed the memorial, had called the criticism of the crescent an "unfortunate diversion," but said they were sensitive to the concerns.

Whew. Thanks the Gods. I mean, if that crescent thing had been built, I just might've strapped me on a bomb belt and headed to Shanksville.

[via an exultant and, I believe, panting Michelle Malkin]

UPDATE: Oh, this is too rich. Apparently, this guy still thinks it looks like a crescent.

The redesigned flight 93 memorial, announced today, still contains all of the features that made it a terrorist memorial. Architect Paul Murdoch's infamous red crescent is still there, still planted with red maple trees, still inscribed in the exact same circle as before, and with the same two crescent tips still intact. Thus the crescent bisector defined by these crescent tips is also the same as before. It still points almost exactly to Mecca, making the crescent a Mihrab (an Islamic prayer station, where the believer faces into a crescent, towards Mecca, to perform his ritual prostrations).The design still incorporates a separate upper terrorist-memorial wall, centered precisely on the red-maple crescent. There are still 44 translucent blocks on the flight path to the crash site, matching the total number of dead, instead of just the forty translucent blocks that are dedicated to the forty murdered Americans. Lastly, the Tower of Voices part of the memorial is still an Islamic prayer-time sundial.

Kooks. And just follow that last link, which seems to suggest that the "44 translucent blocks" are meant to memorialize the four dead hijackers. It has a lot of anaylsis of "pixels" and other flim-flammery, but comes down to this: The designer has said that the date of the crash will be inscribed on the "four blocks" not the names of the terrorists. But a dumbass like this, of course, calls this a "cover story." (For what, printing the date of the crash?) What a nut.

[via the ever-credulous Corner]