NASA's New Mission: To Boost Muslim Self-Esteem

From The American Thinker:

2010


NASA to boost Muslim self-esteem?

Rick Moran



This is a truly remarkable video found at Powerline of NASA administrator Charles Bolden telling al-Jazeera that NASA is now tasked "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."



The agency that sent a man to the moon has been enlisted to improve the self-esteem of Muslims.





The steely-eyed missile men who launched a 37 story rocket generating 7 million pounds of thrust to the moon are going to become multi-cultural ambassadors in order to make the Muslim world feel like their contributions to science were responsible for American triumphs in space.



I don't mean to be culturally insensitive but which Muslim (Arab) assisted Isaac Newton in writing his seminal work on gravity "The Principia?" Or perhaps helped Einstein get over the rough spots in writing his General Theory of Relativity?" Or helped Max Born and others develop quantum mechanics? Or whispered in the ear of Robert Goddard when he was inventing the liquid fueled rocket?



Science is a process. It builds upon the work of those who came before. The last significant contribution by Arab scientists to spaceflight probably occurred in the medieval period. And even those contributions were almost exclusively based on the work of ancient Greeks. To their credit, the Arab Muslims probably gave a boost to the scientific revolution that swept Europe during the Renaisance by their rescuing the ancient works of the Greeks from the ravages of the European Dark Ages as well as developing a rudimentary scientific method for solving problems.



But why NASA? Why not let the State Department "reach out" to the Muslim world and make them feel better about being left behind when the scientific revolution culminated in manned spaceflight?



One might note that the Iranian bomb is being developed by scientists almost exclusively educated in the west, as well as western educated scientists from Pakistan and North Korea, with the possible assistance of Russian engineers. Those educated in Muslim countries are using texts written by westerners, and are doing science that was first performed in Europe and America.



That's ok. I'm sure NASA will make up some kind of multi-cultural nonsense to turn history on its head in order to make our Muslim brothers and sisters feel better about the fact that Islam is incompatible in many ways with modern scientific inquiry. To those who would argue otherwise, I give you a nation of Holocaust deniers despite the overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary.



Those who reject evidence for religious purposes haven't advanced very far from the Medieval period anyway.