The “openness” brigades take over the Flight 93 Memorial

Michelle Malkin is all over the crescent shaped memorial to Flight 93 and there’s no question she’s right: the proposed memorial’s resemblance to the Islamic crescent is deliberate. She quotes the architect, Paul Murdoch:

“This is not about any religion per se,” Murdoch said in a telephone interview with the Tribune-Democrat in Johnstown. “It’s a spiritual space, and a sacred place, but it’s open to anyone.” [emphasis added by Malkin.]

The “per se” is a dead giveaway. The 44 doomed Americans on Flight 93 courageously and successfully fought back against Islamic fanatics and saved our nation’s capital from a horrible catastrophe. But this liberal jerk Murdoch has turned the memorial to those heroes into a symbol of New Age-style openness—by which he really means openness to Islam.

If the passengers on Flight 93 had followed the dhimmi spirit of Murdoch’s memorial, they would not have fought back, they would not have said, “Let’s roll.” Instead, they would have remained “open” to the experience, they would have sat back in their seats and allowed the hijackers to fly the plane into the U.S. Capitol. This memorial is a sickening distortion and violation of the event and people it is supposedly honoring.

There are further points to be made about this. As a correspondent points out, even more offensive and disgusting than the shape of the memorial is its title: “Crescent of Embrace.” This is supposed to be a memorial honoring valor. The heroes in question were fighting, not “embracing,” the Crescent.

Also, while I called the architect a “liberal jerk,” the fact is that he’s simply a liberal. Modern liberals cannot honor a courageous fight against an evil enemy, since they reject the very notion that there can be such a thing as evil or an enemy (or, rather, they reject it if the purported enemy is non-white or non-Western). For liberals, the organizing idea and the highest value of society is openness and niceness towards the Other. Therefore they will translate the concept of fighting an enemy into the concept of embracing the Other. The decision to do so may not even be conscious. By an insensible process, they translate the idea of defending one’s country, which is so alien to themselves, into language and symbols to which they can comfortably relate.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 10, 2005 10:27 AM | Send