FLIGHT 93, RE-HIJACKED

The same idiotic America-hating nimrods who are trying to make the Ground Zero Memorial into a diatribe excoriating the victims and showing liberal love for the attackers are now at work turning the Flight 93 Memorial into something that appears to praise the Islamofacist killers. Mark Steyn sets 'em up and knocks 'em down.

Flight 93 was supposed to be the fourth of Osama’s flying bombs, its destination either the White House or the Capitol. Had it reached its target, the following morning’s headlines would have included “The Vice-President is still among the missing, presumed dead”. Had Flight 93 sheared the top off the White House, that would have been the day’s “money shot”, as it was in the alien-invasion flick Independence Day - the shattered façade, smoke billowing, the seat of American power reduced to rubble.

But the dopey hijackers assigned to Flight 93 were halfway across the continent before they made their move and started meandering back east. And, by the time the passengers began calling home on their cellphones, their families knew what had happened in New York. Todd Beamer couldn’t get through to his wife, so the last conversation of his life was with the GTE telephone operator, who stayed on the line with him and overheard his final words: “Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll!” And then a brave group of passengers jumped their hijackers and, at the cost of their own lives, prevented that day’s grim toll rising even higher. At a terrible moment for America, their heroism was the only victory of the day.

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.

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.

There are lunatics who actually froth at the mouth at the mention of Flight 93 and insist that it was shot down by an F-16 and it's been covered up and a myth promulgated in its stead. Of course, they're insane, but that's the state of the liberal mind these days: Rotted and pus-filled, devoid of truth and consumed by madness.