Publication date for print version of Crescent of Betrayal pushed back. This is by my choice. So much information and craziness has come to light since the July 2007 Memorial Project meeting that I wanted more time to finalize the print edition of the book, now slated for 2009.

The delayed publication date does NOT mean that anyone has to wait for the book! My “director’s cut” draft will remain available for free download until the print edition comes out.

Crescent of Betrayal

Dishonoring the Heroes of Flight 93

By Alec Rawls

World Ahead press release (draft), June 29, 2007

Forthcoming in August 2007, a new book from World Ahead Publishing, Crescent of Betrayal, describes the many Islamic and terrorist memorializing elements in the winning Crescent of Embrace design for the Flight 93 Memorial. Most importantly, a person facing directly into the half mile wide central crescent (still present in the superficially altered Bowl of Embrace redesign) is facing almost exactly at Mecca. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab and is the central feature around which every mosque is built.



Author Alec Rawls started investigating the crescent site-plans after the winning design was unveiled in September 2005, and spent much of 2006 trying to get the Memorial Project to come to grip with his findings. Every element of the entire crescent design turns out to be a typical mosque feature, realized on the same epic scale as the half-mile wide central crescent. The minaret-like Tower of Voices part of the memorial turns out to be a gigantic Islamic prayer-time sundial. There are 44 memorial glass blocks emplaced along the flight path, exceeding the number of our murdered heroes by the number of their murderers. And on it goes, for over a hundred pages of Mr. Rawls’ 300 page exposé.



Architect Paul Murdoch’s crescent design is only the beginning of the crescent of betrayal. Murdoch’s emergence is actually the easy part of the story to understand. We hosted an open design competition in time of war. Of course the enemy would enter, and try to win a memorial to their heroes instead of ours. What is harder to explain is the year and a half now that the Memorial Project has spent avoiding and then covering up Murdoch’s plot. Those charged with memorializing “the flight that fought back” have struggled mightily to defend and protect their hijacker.

The truth avoiding behavior of the Memorial Project is itself part of a much larger phenomenon. Important parts of our society are only willing to see what they think it is in their interest to see. This failure to trust in truth creates a divorce from reality that allows people to think they are doing right, even as they twist all the way around to directly abetting our terrorist enemies. The same thing is happening on every terror war issue.



The New York Times has been directly abetting our terrorist enemies by publishing illegal leak after illegal leak of the nation’s top secret terrorist surveillance methods. Democrat leaders in Congress are striving with all of their power to surrender Iraq to Iran and to al Qaeda, even as the Iraqi people are rising up en masse to drive al Qaeda out. The Iraq war is “lost” and the Democrats will “pick up Senate seats” because of it, says Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, as he works feverishly to de-fund the war in time to insure these outcomes.

The Memorial debacle provides a revealing up-close look at this destructive mindset. It also illustrates the solution. Truth suppressors are always vulnerable to the truths they are suppressing. Exposure will stop Murdoch's mosque, and exposure of our anti-war media's dishonest attacks on the legitimacy and progress of the war in Iraq can stop the Democrats from achieving American defeat.



The most ruthless system of truth suppression belongs to our terror war enemies, who threaten death to every critic of their violent brand of Islam. But can a religion that repeatedly insists that those who forget the law of Moses will burn in hell forever really just go killing off all its critics? The Berlin wall of traditional Islam—its death penalties for blasphemy and apostasy—are in flagrant violation of the Ten Commandments. This too cannot stand, if we hold Islam up to its own proclaimed foundations.

The passengers and crew of Flight 93 confronted the harshest truths, and acted as love required. It is that spirit of truth and love that allowed them, even in their tragically reduced circumstances, to still spend their lives as dearly as any of us could hope, saving the nation from another terrible blow. As the rest of us strive to carry that example forward, let us not neglect to properly honor its first resting place.



The Memorial Project was supposed to announce the fate of the crescent design last fall, and has been stonewalling ever since. On July 28, 2007 the Project will hold its first public meeting in a year. (It is required by law to hold them quarterly.) Mr. Rawls will be in Western Pennsylvania doing book publicity at that time. Visit CrescentOfBetrayal.com for more information, including graphical proof that the Crescent of Embrace is indeed oriented on Mecca, that this orientation is intentional (being repeated in the crescents of trees that surround the Tower of Voices), and that these features remain intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign.

For supplementary press release--enough evidence to constitute proof--click here.

For news and activism updates, click here.

For the temporarily available free download of the Director's Cut of the book, click here.

For downloadable flyers, posters and ad copy, click here.

Order Book here.

Alec can be contacted at alec@rawls.org.

The rest of the website

• For those who want abbreviated proof that the central crescent of the Crescent of Embrace is indeed oriented on Mecca, that this orientation is intentional, and that it remains in the Bowl of Embrace redesign, a short proof of betrayal has been posted.

• The website also has a page for news about the Flight 93 memorial, for Crescent of Betrayal reviews and commentary, and for things that people can do to help insure that a proper memorial is built. It includes downloadable flyers and posters than anyone can print out and post. If you have news to add, contact alec@rawls.org.

The following items will remain offline until Crescent of Betrayal is released on July 21st, 2007:

• All the graphics in the book will be available in color online, along with links to source graphics for the Crescent of Embrace and Bowl of Embrace designs.

• Full analysis of the crescent design is too voluminous to fit in the book, so a host of addenda are posted here on the Crescent of Betrayal website, including all of the original documents referred to in the book.

• Documentation of the larger phenomenon of truth avoidance and truth suppression is another subject that is too extensive to fit in the book. What the book tries to do is measure partisan dishonesty on terror war issues dimension by dimension. A single example (Joe Wilson's treasonous "Bush lied" lies) is used to measure what proportion of the mainstream media participates in partisan dishonesty (almost all). Then the book looks at the range of terror war issue on which the media is dishonest, documenting first a long list of dishonest attacks on the legitimacy of the Iraq War "Iraq war hoaxes," then documenting a long list of dishonest reporting on the progress of the Iraq War.

These compendiums are filled out with additional examples here online. World Ahead has very graciously given me permission to put this whole part of the book online, so that online readers can access the parts of this documentation that are included in the book alongside the web-only documentation, allowing the website to serve as a semi-comprehensive compendium of anti-war dishonesty.

The online contents page for these compendia indicate which are from the book and which are web-only, so if you have already read the book, you can easily distinguish the additional materials, and if you want a taste of the book, you can find a portion of it here.

If you have an additional sub-heading of anti-war dishonesty you would like to document and add to the compendium, contact: alec@rawls.org.

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