NYC Letter: Idiot Stockholm Syndrome Maudlinism

Idiot Stockholm Syndrome Maudlinism, or ISSMism. (Hat tip to LGF for putting us onto the scent.)

FLIGHT 93, RE-HIJACKED

September 12, 2005 (The Irish Times) - 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”.

How more ass-backwards could this be? Is the descriptive choice of "Crescent" coincidental with the Islamite's red crescent? Here is the official National Park literature: "A curving arc of maple trees [shown as bright red maples] along a walkway unites the Ridge and forms an edge to the Bowl with a focus on the Sacred Ground."

Can you connect the big dots? (Hint: The dotted line.)

The memorial jurors themselves connected the dots.

FLIGHT 93 MEMORIAL DECRIED AS ISLAM SYMBOL
Memorial's Crescent Shape Criticized As Inappropriate

September 10, 2005 (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) - Eight family members served on the second-stage jury that selected the final memorial design.

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."

Michelle Malkin has a more telling presentation for those struggling with the obvious.

At best “The Crescent of Embrace” is a grotesque lapse. At worst, well, Mr. Steyn continues.

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.

If Mr Murdoch sincerely believes in a “crescent of embrace”, let him build one – at the headquarters of a “moderate” Islamic lobby group, or in the parking lot of your wackier colleges. To impose it on Flight 93 – to, in effect, hijack those passengers a second time – is an abomination. Flight 93 is about what happens when you understand that some things can’t be embraced.

Instead, 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.

The “crescent of embrace”, in its desperation to see no enemies and stand for nothing, represents the precise opposite of Beamer, Glick, Burnett and co: Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll over.

You can e-mail the National Park Service regarding this memorial here.

Or, as the e-mail form seems faulty, call the NPS: Superintendent, Flight 93 NMEM: 814.443.4557

Fax the NPS: 814.443.2180

Write the NPS:

National Park Service
109 West Main Street, Suite 104
Somerset, PA 15501-2035