And you should to.

It's time once again to mobilize what Glen Reynolds called An Army of Davids. Once again, it is time to take on the National Park Service over the design of the Flight 93 Memorial.

The original design selected for the site came under heavy criticism for it's very close resemblance to the Islamic Crescent. The National Park Service listened and sent the designers back to fix the problem.

Their solution was to plant a few more trees in the background of the red crescent. They also seem to have removed any use of the word crescent in the descriptions on the web site.

You can find detailed information at among others:
Little Green Footballs
The Belmont Club
Error Theory

Read them all. Then go to the Flight 93 Memorial web site where they are accepting comments on the design. Impassioned reason is good. Flaming them, however tempting, is probably not going to get results. My comment is included below. Leave your comment to the Park Service in the comments here, or email them to me and I will add them to the post.

When the original design of the Flight 93 Memorial was published I was among the many shocked and offended by its use of symbols adopted by the people responsible for the death and destruction of 9/11. Like many I was heartened that the National Park Service heard our concerns and called on the designers to make changes to address them.

What the designer has done in response to those concerns is essentially nothing. I do not know, nor do I care, if the use of Islamic symbols to memorialize the victims of Islamic terrorists is intentional or coincidental. I do know that is appallingly offensive.

The addition of a few trees and the change of the name from Crescent of Embrace to Bowl of Embrace does nothing to mitigate the monstrous impact of this design concept. I do not think this is a design that can be modified to eliminate the offense it gives. The Islamic symbols form the essence of the design.

I urge you to abandon the Preferred Design Alternative and begin again. We should not memorialize the heros of Flight 93 with the symbols of those who took their lives.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 05:00 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment