Mark Steyn has exposed (for all who can stand reading about it) the Islamic implications of the proposed memorial to Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. It's called the "Crescent of Embrace":

Four years on, plans for the Flight 93 National Memorial have now been revealed. The winning design, chosen from 1,011 entries, will be built in that pasture in Pennsylvania where those heroes died. The memorial is called “The Crescent of Embrace”.

That sounds like a fabulous winning entry - in a competition to create a note-perfect parody of effete multicultural responses to terrorism. Indeed, if anything, it’s too perfect a parody: the “embrace” is just the usual huggy-weepy reconciliatory boilerplate, but the “crescent” transforms its generic cultural abasement into something truly spectacular. In the design plans, “The Crescent of Embrace” looks more like the embrace of the Crescent – ie, Islam. After all, what better way to demonstrate your willingness to “embrace” your enemies than by erecting a giant Islamic crescent at the site of the day’s most unambiguous episode of American heroism?

Okay, let’s get all the “of courses” out of the way – of course, the overwhelmingly majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists; of course, we all know “Islam” means “peace” and “jihad” means “healthy-lifestyle lo-carb granola bar”; etc, etc. Nevertheless, the men who hijacked Flight 93 did it in the name of Islam and their last words as they hit the Pennsylvania sod were no doubt “Allahu Akhbar”. One would be unlikely even today to come across an Allied D-Day memorial so misconceived in its spirit of reconciliation as to be called the Swastika of Embrace. Yet Paul Murdoch, the architect, has somehow managed to produce a design whose two most obvious interpretations are a) a big nothing or b) a splendid memorial to the hijackers rather than their victims.

Already, the people involved in selecting the symbol are (together with the Islamist CAIR) showing clear signs of obfuscation:

The jurors recognized there could be some backlash because of the crescent. That's why, in their recommendations, they wrote: "Consider the interpretation and impact of words within the context of this event. The crescent should be referred to as 'the circle or arc,' or other words that are not tied to specific religious iconography."

But Rabiah Ahmed, a spokeswoman with the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., said there is no one official symbol associated with Islam.

She acknowledges that the crescent has come to represent the religion. But, she continued, it does not hold the same significance, for example, as the cross does to Christianity.

Ahmed says she can understand why the crescent would be associated with Islam, which has 7 million followers in the United States and more than a billion worldwide.

"People forget Muslims died [in the attacks], too," Ahmed said. "Islam, as a religion itself, was hijacked on 9/11." (Via Charles Johnson.)

I'm with Steyn; if they want to build such a thing, let them put it somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Steyn concludes:

.... in its feeble cultural cringe, the Crescent of Embrace hands the terrorists of Flight 93 the victory they were denied on September 11th. And it profoundly dishonours Todd Beamer, Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and other forgotten heroes of that flight.

Most of us are all but resigned to losing New York’s Ground Zero memorial to a pile of non-judgmental if not explicitly anti-American pap: The minute you involve big-city politicians and foundations and funding bodies and “artists” you’re on an express chute to the default mode of the cultural elite. But surely it’s not too much to hope that in Pennsylvania the very precise, specific, individual, human scale of one great act of American heroism need not be buried under another soggy dollop of generic prettified passivity. A culture that goes to such perverse lengths to disdain its heroes cannot survive and doesn’t deserve to.

No wonder I hadn't read about it in the Philadelphia Inquirer until the outcry in the blogosphere. Today, the Inquirer likens blog criticism to "finding demonic messages in Beatle's songs played backwards" and concludes,

But [the architect] shouldn't surrender his artistic vision to willful misinterpretation.

The designer has created a fitting tribute to Flight 93 that honors the living and the dead. Anyone who can't see that chooses to be blind.

It makes no difference now whether the crescent was designed by a clueless team who never thought about the religious implications. Nor does it matter whether the religious implications were the product of hyperactive paranoia by right wing bloggers. What matters now is that the Islamic religious implications are there for the world to see -- just as much as would be the Christian implications of a cross.

If we go ahead with the crescent design, not only will it tend to dishonor the brave passengers of Flight 93, but our enemies will see us as wimps and cowards.

Not a good thing in war.