9/11: Where's the memorial?

Each year I write a commemorative 9/11 article. This year my tone is just a little more angry and less introspective than in previous years...so be it.

For last year's article go here. For 2008, go here. And for 2007, go here.

"At Ground Zero there is the most eloquent statement about America in the early 21st century, and that is a seven-story hole. 9/11 was something that America's enemies did to us. The hole in the ground a decade later is something we did to ourselves. It is a mark of shame that that hole is still there in 2010." –Mark Steyn

The 55-story, 1200 foot tall, $1Billion Bank of America Tower.

The 1,046 foot tall, 52-story New York Times Building.

The nearly completed, 76-floor Beekman Tower in Manhattan, due to finish this year.

The 54-story , 806-foot Bloomberg Tower, housing the company owned by the mayor.

The $1.1 Billion twin towers of the Time Warner Center, each 55 floors and 750-feet tall.

The 749-foot tall, 44-floor Goldman Sachs Building at 200 West.

The 740-foot, 52-floor rebuilt 7 World Trade Center building.

The 726-foot, 47 story Times Square Tower.

The 684-foot, 52-floor Random House Tower.

The 673-foot, 56-floor Barclay Tower.

The 653-foot, 60 story twin buildings of the Silver Towers.

The 618-foot , 55-floor building at 425 Fifth Avenue.

The 615-foot, 58-floor building known as The Epic.

The 603-foot, 58-floor building known as The Orion.

Besides being on the list of New York City’s list of 100 Tallest Buildings, these structures are also on another list. Other buildings on that list include:

The $1.6 Billion new stadium at The Meadowlands for the New York Jets and New York Giants football teams, with seating for 82,566 fans, including 10,005 club seats and approximately 218 luxury suites.

The $2.3 Billion new Yankee Stadium (including $1.2 Billion in taxpayer subsidies), with room for 52,325 (including standing room), with 13,751 club seats and 68 luxury suites.

The $375 Million Prudential Center across the river in beautiful downtown Newark, NJ, home of the New Jersey Devils hockey team, and home of the New Jersey Nets basketball team until the Barclays Center opens for them to continue losing in. And speaking of the Barclays Center, that’s gonna be $800 Million over in Brooklyn as part of a $4.9 Billion sports, business, and residential complex.

These buildings, worth billions upon billions, are all on the same list. All of them are projects that either finished or completed, or started and mostly completed, SINCE 9/11. Yeah, all that steel and brick and glass and concrete was built since 9/11 right there in New York City or just outside of it.

I guess we can also add into this list the rebuilt/repaired buildings of the World Financial Center complex. ONE , at 577 feet and 40 stories; TWO, at 645 feet and 44 stories; THREE, at 739 feet and 51 stories; FOUR, at 500 feet and 34 stories; the 45,000 square foot, 10-story vaulted glass atrium of The Winter Garden; and the 16-story NYMEX Building, home of the New York Mercantile Exchange and NewYork Board of Trade.

So riddle me this: why is it that they can build all of this in proximity to that giant hole where the World Trade Center stood, and no one can seemingly put together a decent memorial for the thousands who perished in the attack?

Seemingly, gone are the days when we erected large memorials and monuments to those who came before us or who gave their lives. The Marine Corps War Memorial, most often called the Iwo Jima Monument, was one of the last large monuments built, I think. The troops themselves are 32 feet tall and the flagpole is 60 feet long. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is much less ostentatious, tapering downwards from a center height of just 10.1 feet. The accompanying monument The Three Soldiers shows the men pretty much life size, as are the three statues comprising the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. The walls of the Korean War Veterans Memorial seem even shorter, but the 19 service members depicted in the memorial’s statues range in height from 7’3” to 7’6”, a bit larger than life. Thankfully, the National World War Two Memorial is big, on a grand scale that befits the nature of the memorial and what it represents.

To my knowledge there is no dedicated national memorial for the troops of Operation Desert Storm, nor am I expecting anything any time soon for those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But as for the victims of the Islamic terrorist actions on 9/11….well, at the Pentagon there’s a small indoor memorial and construction continues on an outdoor memorial with benches, a pond, and maple trees. In Shanksville, Pennsylvania there is also a memorial of benches, for those who perished on Flight 93. The largest terrorist attack on our country’s history, and 9 years later all we have are some benches, trees, a couple plaques, and a seven-story deep crater.

By the time Flight 93 went down, those people on the plane knew what was going on. They made a conscious effort to stop the attack and gave their all. And here's their grave marker-sized memorial in Shanksville. We all say we'll never forget, but where are the larger than life memorials to these larger than life sacrifices? Fictional boxer Rocky Balboa has a statue in Philadelphia. There's a big statue of Michael Jordan in front of the United Center in Chicago. They made a giant statue of Michael Jackson to float on a barge down the Thames. Milwaukee boasts a life-sized bronze Fonz. Oddly enough, various towns in Serbia of all places are erecting statues to memorialize Tarzan, Rocky (again?) and Bruce Lee. Metropolis, Illinois boasts a 15-foot tall Superman and the University of Maryland has a statue of Jim Henson on a bench chatting with Kermit the Frog. A fictional muppet gets a statue, and American terror victims get trees and benches. A comic book character and a pop star made of plastic get giant statues, and America seems to want to forget to memorialize those she claims she'll "never forget."

What I don’t quite get is why the Flight 93 Memorial’s original design was in the shape of a red crescent that looks, either by accident or intentionally by design, remarkably like an Islamic crescent. I shit you not. Furthermore, it almost seemed to be on an azimuth pointing towards…..Mecca? That's peculiar....After much vociferous protest, the design has been changed. Yeah, the last thing we needed was all of Islam laughing each fall as a crescent red with autumnal maple leaves embraced the site where a planeload of people died to keep the plane from hitting another target.

Yeah, seriously...the original Flight 93 Memorial was in a crescent shape...

Next year , though, we’ll be close to the opening of an even bigger affront from The Religion of Peace if plans go ahead of building what’s become known as the Ground Zero Mosque. For all of you who cling bitterly to this notion that it’s just a coincidence that they want to build a 13-story mosque and “community center “ (Islamo-speak for “Terrorist Recruiting Office”), I ask this:what the hell is wrong with you? Are you really that bloody naïve? Given the long history of mosque-building following Muslim military victories, the building of the mosque on Ground Zero will be seen in the same light as the Muslim conquests of Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Constantinople.

They’re calling this little piece if Islam the Cordoba House Project…unfamiliar with Cordoba? It was once called Qurtaba in Arabic. It’s a city in Andalusia in northern Spain. An Iberian and Roman city in ancient times, in the Middle Ages it was capital of an Islamic caliphate. When the Muslim Umayyad Moors conquered the city, they opted in 784 AD to wipe away the Visigothic Christian cathedral, there since 600 AD, and replace it with their own Great Mosque of Cordoba. In its long history of conquest, Islam has habitually converted the sacred shrines of its enemies into mosques. A look at the world's most famous mosques lays bare the fact that many were former houses of worships of defeated enemies.

The sacred shrine of Islam in Mecca? Former pagan house of worship that predated Islam by hundreds of years. Mohammed himself, after his army's conquest of Mecca in 630, destroyed hundreds of idols, proclaiming the truth of his new religion. Since then it has become the site of the annual Muslim pilgrimage, the hajj, and the core pillar of Islam. Following the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, the Ummayad Caliphate proceeded to build the Dome of the Rock, the Masjid Qubat al-Sakhra, on top of the Jewish Temple Mount in 689. Yeah, that Temple Mount…you know, where Jesus gave His sermon? Having defeated their Christian enemies, the Umayyads built a grand mosque on top of Judaism's most sacred site that contained a clear declaration of Muslim supremacy over their brother Abrahamic religions.

We come in peace...so peacefully embrace Allah or we shall kill you all...

The Grand Mosque of Damascus, also known as the Umayyad Mosque, was converted from a church dedicated to John the Baptist in 705. The world-renown Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, now a museum, was a thousand year-old Christian church before being transformed into a mosque following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Over the long history of Muslim territorial advance, thousands of mosques, from Spain to India, were built on sites of important religious or political value to their defeated foes. Inmdia, you say? Yeah, don’t forget the millions in India who became Muslims, later breaking away from the mother country to form the nations of Bangladesh and Pakistan. Indeed, the very first mosque known to have been built in India was built using stone from a Jain temple. (Jainism is an ancient religion that prescribes a path of non-violence towards all living beings. This explains why the mosque was built on ruins; they didn't fight back.) In Indonesia, what started as traders who brought Islam with them turned into fortified trading outposts and then forced conversions. How many Buddhist structures remain in Indonesia? Where are all the Hindu and Buddhist temples that once could be found everywhere in the East Indies, for they were Hindu and Buddhist enclaves until the forces of Islam conquered. Where did they all go?

Whenever the marauding Arabs (bringing Islam with them) conquered lands, they found established communities of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and, in Persia, Zoroastrians. These people did not disappear; they were not converted in large numbers overnight. It took centuries of having to endure Muslim rule, and the status of being reduced to tolerated dhimmis, that is, a status of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity, that led inexorably to more and more people converting to Islam, to join the group of permanent overlords and masters. The pace of such conversion quickened as those who had remained steadfast saw so many others convert, thereby changing their status and at once improving their treatment from being the slaves of Islam's practitioners to being slaves of Islam itself.

And before you say this was all stuff that happened a thousand years ago, I point out that Muammar Khaddafi, the dictator of Libya, converted 78 synagogues into mosques in the 1970’s. In 1975, the Great Synagogue of Oran was confiscated by the Algerian government and similarly transformed into a mosque. Need more modern reminders? Just look at the Islamic takeover in England….

And in Islam it’s a grave insult to show someone the bottom of your feet, as the foot walks through all sorts of unclean things like dirt, camel turds, and car-bomb residue, which is why they throw shows at people or were seen beating the toppled statues of Saddam Hussein with their shoes, and if you place a mosque 600 feet from Ground Zero, you know have the symbolic victory was hundreds of Muslims walking across Ground Zero and the areas where people died at the hands of Islamo-terrorists to get to their Victory Mosque, thinking all the while that they are trampling upon their enemies.

Is it the right of American citizens to build what they want on their own private property providing it falls legally within proper zoning? Yes. Is it the right of American citizens to freely worship as they wish? Yes. But when your wishes are prejudicial to the public good and to the keeping of otrder, then maybe you should reconsider? The same can be said for that Jed Clampett-looking preacher in Gainesville who wants to burn Korans when he’s not running a possible cult compound…is it his right to burn Korans? Yes. Should he? I doubt it.

On the same token, I don’t recommend excercising your freedom of speech to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. That’s prejudicial to good order and public safety and will likely get people hurt. I also don’t recommend burning American flags in protest around me. While it’s your right and I defend your right to do it, I’m also likely to stomp you in the genitals.

There’s also something not right about the funding of this mosque either. I mean, it’s fishier than Rosie O’Donnell’s boxer shorts. You’ve got a mosque foundation that’s got non-profit tax protections and has a bank account of barely $18,000 trying to put up a $100 Million building? Several people have tried to buy the property for outrageous sums to keep the mosque from being built, including a huge offer from media whore Donald Trump trying to get his name in the press, but somehow this little mosque project without a pot to piss in can buy it? Well, their Imam Rauf just got back from a massive fundraising tour paid for by American tax dollars under the thinly veiled bullshit disguise of more Muslim outreach for President B. Hussein Obama (Blessed Be His Name). Uncle Rauf is raking in millions from various nefarious sources in Saudi Arabia, a nation that is our ally until we turn our backs, supplying people to crash planes into buildings and millions in support to spread Wahhabism and Sharia Islam.

They want to open this mosque on September 11, 2011. I shit you not. They want to open their doors on the tenth anniversary of the attack. That takes enormous balls. And those without balls, spineless jellybacks like Bloomberg and Obama, are okay with this. There will be a 9-11 Ground Zero Victory Mosque long before we see a proper memorial at Ground Zero for the victims who were murdered there. Sixty years ago, with more primitive equipment, the Pentagon (still the world’s largest office building in floor space) was built in 18 months. So far, there is no memorial to those who were murdered at the World Trade Center. I’m sorry, but you have a seven-story deep hole as a memorial.

I have to send special thanks out there to a fellow named Andy Sullivan who called The Rush Limbaugh Show on Thursday, September 2, and made me realize all those projects were done since 9/11, and to Gabriel Scheinmann at Hudson and Hugh at Jihadwatch for some information contained herein.