I've not said much about the controversy surrounding the design of the Flight 93 memorial. If you don't know anything about it yet, catch up here.

This is an animated image of the memorial which illustrates the problem:



The red crescent you see is, according to the plans, supposed to be a surrounding of trees around the memorial. Its called the "crescent of embrace," but a lot of people are ticked off by it. Why? Because the red crescent is a symbol of Islam, the ideology the extremists who crashed Flight 93 subscribed to.

I hadn't written anything about this because, honestly, I didn't think it was that big of a deal. I figured that the inclusion of the crescent was inadvertent (its hard to imagine anyone doing it on purpose) and that it would likely be changed once it got the public's attention. Some people, however, don't seem to think it needs to be changed. I disagree.

A memorial, by its very definition, is symbolic. It is intended to honor something. The memorial in question here is meant to honor the memories of those lost on flight 93. Unfortunately, where it was on purpose or not, the shape of the memorial seems to symbolize the ideology of the murderous tyrants who killed the people on flight 93 and not the people themselves.

So while I think the shape of the memorial was probably a mistake or an oversight, it does need to be changed. Its just plain inappropriate. After all, we wouldn't create a holocaust museum in the shape of a swastika, would we?