An excerpt from Mark Steyn on the Flight 93 Memorial shaped like the Crescent of Islam:
But each to his own. 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. Perhaps Mr Beamer and his comrades did indeed “look them in the eye” and saw there was nothing to negotiate, nothing to “embrace”. So they acted – and, faced with a novel and unprecedented form of terror, they stopped it cold in little more than an hour. Todd Beamer asked that telephone operator to join him in reciting the 23rd Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” He knew there would be no happy ending that day, but in their resourcefulness and sacrifice he and his fellow passengers gave their country the next best thing: a hopeful ending. That’s what the Flight 93 Memorial should be honouring.
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. A culture that goes to such perverse lengths to disdain its heroes cannot survive and doesn’t deserve to.
Four years ago, Todd Beamer’s rallying cry was quoted by Presidents and rock stars alike. That’s all that’s needed in that field: the kind of simple dignified memorial you see on small-town commons saluting Civil war veterans, a granite block with the names of the passengers and the words “LET’S ROLL.” 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.
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