To Shari’a And Beyond?
Some things are so bizarre, so far out of the boundaries of normative behavior, that they beggar the sane man’s mind. If the Administrator of NASA, Charles Bolden is telling the truth, then Obama’s view of the world and NASA’s role within it is one of those bizarre things.
It’s utterly nonsensical to think that NASA should be used as a Muslim Outreach program.
According to President Obama’s appointee, however, using NASA as just such a Muslim Outreach program was set forth by President Obama as one of Bolden’s primary goals as NASA’s Administrator. At least that is what Bolden to Al-Jazeera.
Details from Fox News:
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.
Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA’s orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.
“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering,” Bolden said in the interview.
The NASA administrator was in the Middle East last month marking the one-year anniversary since Obama delivered an address to Muslim nations in Cairo. Bolden spoke in June at the American University in Cairo — in his interview with Al Jazeera, he described space travel as an international collaboration of which Muslim nations must be a part.
If one assumes that Charles Bolden spoke the truth to Al-Jazeera, and there’s little if not no reason to believe otherwise, President Obama’s attitude toward NASA’s role is a stern detriment to our nation’s space program and his overt dhimmitude is a clear and present danger and existential threat to the men, women, and children of the Civilized World.
The very last thing that we need to do is get the Muslim World involved in America’s – or any other nation’s – space programs. Given the religious mandates, ideologies, and attitudes of these wholly or dominantly Muslim nations, encouraging them or, as is likely planned by Obama, actively helping them to improve their grasp of the sciences and technologies involving space flight – nearly all of which have direct and horrible military or terrorist applications – is utterly and dangerously irresponsible.
These Muslim nations and the Muslim terrorists they spawn and sponsor across the globe can already do quite enough damage. Increasing their rocket and missile technologies is only going to make things far, far worse and costs the lives many innocent civilians.
It gets a little bit safer in the short-term but not a great deal better in the mid- to long-term if one strips the nuance from Bolden’s assertions about President Obama wanting NASA to focus on becoming a Muslim Outreach program and takes it completely at face value. There is little immediate incremental risk in finding, “a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.”
That is, on the other hand, a disturbingly fatuous goal. Taken at purely face value, Bolden’s statement of President Obama’s intent is filled with an implicit condescension that will likely enrage these already violence-prone Muslims and shows childish lack of concern over- and respect for the damage and deaths that they can engender.
Charles Krauthammer sums up this dangerously farcical idea far better and more concisely than I can:
This is a new of fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep us there. This idea of ‘feel good about your past’ scientific achievements is the worst kind of group therapy, psycho-babble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy.
No matter how one takes Bolden’s statements there’s little good that can come from the ideas that they present.
Tags: Bolden | Dhimmitude | Islam | Islamists | Muslims | NASA | Obama | Politics | Space Travel | Spaceflight | Technology | Terrorism | Terrorists | War On Terror
July 7th, 2010 at 7:18 am
Being an avid NASA fan, I found this piece of news quite disturbing. While I haven’t dug too deeply into it, I immediately took it as some sort of spin. I just find it hard to believe that Obama would direct NASA as a Muslim outreach program … where is the logic? I simply can’t see a correlation in any way.
With that said, I firmly believe that Obama is terribly underfunding NASA, and by doing so America is falling behind in many new cutting edge technologies. Of course, most presidents before him did exactly the same, but that is no excuse. NASA is a great American asset and needs to be used as such.
July 9th, 2010 at 5:51 am
zhann,
I’m very much not a fan of NASA, though I’m a staunch proponent of American space research. Perhaps that’s because NASA hasn’t been especially been especially good at such research or, rather, has never been allowed to be so.
Still, redefining NASA goals as little or nothing more than a program to reach out to our enemies, the Muslims, and – likely to my mind, but as yet unproven – using it as a cover for giving them technologies that would be dangerous to us and our allies for them to have is asinine and self-destructive.