A Stitch in Haste

Political correctness or Third Millennium common sense?

The Swiss government is hosting two days of talks in Geneva in an effort to agree on a new emblem for the International Red Cross.

At the moment, the only two emblems recognised under the Geneva Conventions are the red cross and the red crescent.

Some countries are reluctant to use either symbol and want a new emblem which has no religious connotations.

There is a proposal for a neutral emblem: a red diamond on a white background, called the Red Crystal.

If the talks in Geneva go well, the Red Crystal is likely to be adopted at a diplomatic conference later this year.

It seems to me that the Red Cross isn't a cross at all but a red "plus sign." Is the Swiss flag offensive? Or how about all those Scandinavian flags with sideways crosses on them?

And I have far more indignation towards a flag with a sword on it than a red crescent.

And I also tend to be more indignant about what countries do than with what their flags look like.

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Meanwhile, some very silly bloggers (I won't post links) are all in a huff about the memorial for the victims of Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11.

The problem is that the memorial is called the "Crescent of Embrace." That's the problem; the psychosis is that some conspiracy theorists are convinced that the memorial actually projects the Islamic Qibla, the direction to face when praying to Mecca:



Sorry, I don't see it. The supposed Qibla doesn't bisect the ring, or even the portion truncated by True North. What exactly are the conspiracy theorists seeing?

The designer insists that the orientation was based on an attempt to maximize the length of time that sunlight shines inside the memorial.



Here's the sad part of this whole debate: It's not even a crescent — it's a broken ring, a fragment of a circle. A crescent goes from a point to a thicker width to a point. This isn't that. (Note: Apparently "crescent" is a generic architectural term that in fact means any curve; an Islamic-style "crescent" is more correctly referred to as a "lunar crescent." I defer to any architects among my readership who can explain it better.)

Perhaps it was indelicate, even foolish, to name the memorial the "Crescent of Embrace" in the first place. I would not have voted for that name. But a grand, subversive, Islamic sick joke?

As comedian Lewis Black has noted, the single biggest problem with Islamofascists is that they don't have a sense of humor. Why are we losing ours?

Similar thoughts from Republic of T.

POST SCRIPT: New Orleans is the "Crescent City." Discuss.

The Flight 93 National Memorial announced that it has redesigned the main feature of the park in response to some rather bizarre criticisms that the original arc design was in fact a "crescent." (In strictly technical architectural terms it was indeed classified as a "crescent," but to laymen it was clearly nothing of the kind — it was an arc. And it was only "red" because of the trees.)

So now rather than critiquing Islam itself (which we cannot do because it is actually a "religion of peace" that has merely been co-opted by a handful of radicals), we instead choose to adopt an irrational and worthless zero-tolerance policy for crescents. Never mind the substance, just fight the symbol, even when it's not really a symbol and doesn't even look like the symbol.

Brilliant.

You can't have it both ways, simultaneously chiding the ACLU and others for attacking any and every expression of "God in the public square," while inventing crescent-shaped windmills to tilt at.

Consistency is neither foolish nor the hobgoblin of little minds.

Other thoughts at California Yankee.

I was doing really well in my quest not to know exactly who Rachel Ray was. Something about kitchens and television. That's it.

So much for my willful obliviousness:

Dunkin' Donuts pulled a television spot featuring talk show host and Food Network personality Rachael Ray this weekend after a Fox news commentator associated it with terrorists.

In the ad, Ray is wearing a scarf that Michelle Malkin said in her nationally syndicated column resembled a kiffiyeh, Middle Eastern garb that is "popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos."

Ah yes, Michelle Malkin, the radical conservative bigot who has turned celebrating two-digit IQs and eighth-grade educations into an art form — or fashion statement, as the case may be.


It's a scarf. Deal with it. Or better yet: don't deal with it (i.e., just shut up).

This inane kerfuffle reminds me of some similar idiocy a while back over the Flight 93 National Memorial. I chronicled the stupidity in a 12 September 2005 post titled, "Crosses and Crescents and Memorials, Oh My..."

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Some very silly bloggers are all in a huff about the memorial for the victims of Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11.

The problem is that the memorial is called the "Crescent of Embrace." The psychosis is that some conspiracy theorists are convinced that the memorial actually projects the Islamic Qibla, the direction to face when praying to Mecca:


Sorry, I don't see it. The supposed Qibla doesn't bisect the ring, or even the portion truncated by True North. What exactly are the conspiracy theorists seeing?

The designer insists that the orientation was based on an attempt to maximize the length of time that sunlight shines inside the memorial.


Here's the sad part of this whole debate: It's not even a crescent — it's a broken ring, a fragment of a circle. A crescent goes from a point to a thicker width to a point. This isn't that. (Note: Apparently "crescent" is a generic architectural term that in fact means any curve; an Islamic-style "crescent" is more correctly referred to as a "lunar crescent.")

Perhaps it was indelicate, even foolish, to name the memorial the "Crescent of Embrace" in the first place. I would not have voted for that name. But a grand, subversive, Islamic sick joke?

As comedian Lewis Black has noted, the single biggest problem with Islamofascists is that they don't have a sense of humor. Why are we losing ours?

POST SCRIPT: New Orleans is the "Crescent City." Discuss.

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The National Park Service capitualated to the whackos and tinkered with the design of the Memorial; the whackos were not satisfied and to this day continue to screech about the design, the number of memorial stones, the number of windows, whatever they can concoct to feed their paranoia.

Dunkin Donuts capitulated and scrapped the Rachel Ray ad. You know the whackos will not be satisfied and will continue to screech about something. It is their raison d'etre. Maybe they'll be lucky and learn that Dunkin Donuts sponsors gay pride events.

In the meantime, at least I still don't really know who David Archuleta is.