Beirut Baghdad Babylon — One reason to hate us so much (with one hectare skypark)

A STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS RAMBLE: Most Americans don't understand Middle Eastern politicis and culture. Right now it's looking like you'd have to include most of the Bush administration in that group: we won the Iraq War, but we're looking like fools in the Iraq Occupation. President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld told us that Iraqi oil would pay for everything within 3 to 6 months. Iraqi oil is mainly paying for terrorist activity.

There must be some logic to the current Hezbollah attack on Israel. But how many of us understand it, or why so many support a group that implants itself in populated areas before bombarding Israel, knowing that they are dooming those around them to a violent death? Or understand what seems to us like the 14th century fundamentalism behind the attacks on the World Trade Center* and the London underground?

One thing I know is that in my field, architecture and urban design, we (the West) seem to be selling them the shallowest, most materialistic Modernism possible. It is an empty but full frontal attack on their culture and their fundamentalism, and who can 't understand being angry about that?

Look at our latest contributions to the Middle East (below). It looks like a few New York housing projects with the new Freedom Tower from the World Trade Center - first Al Qaeda blows up the original, then we sell the replacement to Dubai, the place with the "world's only seven star hotel" (that's where they paid Western tennis stars to play on a helipad hundreds of feet in the air). I've never been there, but they're sure not making it look like a place where I'd want to go anymore. It looks like a place that has lost its cultural compass. (Update: "The Biggest Building Site On Earth")

Radical Muslims thought the old WTC was a symbol of Mammon.* What do they think now that we've built a copy of the new one near Mecca?

* "Riches are called by the name of a devil, namely Mammon, for Mammon is the name of a devil, by which name riches are called according to the Syrian tongue."

— Pierre Lombard, Medieval theologian & Bishop of Paris

"In the 2005 Warner Bros. motion picture Constantine (based on the main character from the DC Vertigo graphic novels Hellblazer), Mammon is the name of the Antichrist, the son of Satan. Mammon's goal was to cross over to the mortal plane using the Spear of Destiny in order to bring a worse dominion to the world than that of his father in Hell."

Wikipedia

For hell on earth with a one hectare skypark, see below.

(continued)

The world's tackiest only seven star hotel.

The most populous Muslim state is Indonesia, in Southeast Asia. Next door in Singapore, the the Las Vegas Sands Company has just announced this monument to Mammon:

Marina Bay Sands is a new type of urban place that integrates the Waterfront Promenade with a grand, multi-leveled retail arcade combining civic space, shopping, indoor and outdoor spaces endowed with city skyline views, daylight and plant life, providing an abundance and variety of activities. It is a place that is vibrant and dynamic, a place that transforms from hour to hour, from day to night, and is evocative of the great urban places. It is here that the imaginings of a global city become a reality. Marina Bay Sands, to be open in 2009, will feature three 50-story hotel towers containing 1,000 rooms each, crowned by a two acre Sky Garden bridging across the towers, offering 360-degree views of the city and the sea, outdoor amenities for the hotel such as jogging paths, swimming pools, spas, and gardens; an iconic Arts and Sciences Museum on the promontory; one-million square feet of integrated waterside promenade and shopping arcade; a state-of-the art one-million square foot convention center; two 2,000-seat theaters; a casino; and a 4,000 car garage.

It is called "Singapore's first integrated resort," which means it combines three hotels, a casino, and two shopping malls. It is scaleless, ugly and anti-human. Soon after it's built, it will show up in Matrix IV as an example of the dystopian future computers have built for us. And what is the banana-shaped park in the sky?