NASA Director Charles Bolden, in an interview with Al-Jazeera English, claims NASA's major goal under Obama is to reach out to the Islamic world. I agree with what Charles Krautheimer had to say on Fox news about that.
"This is a new height in fatuousness," Krauthammer said. "NASA was established to get America into space and to keep is there. This idea to feel good about their past and to make achievements is the worst combination of group therapy, psychobabble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy."
I can't put it any better than that.
The Obama White House, though, claims that Bolden misspoke. Our main mission will always be to boldly go where no man has gone before, its just that as it happens, the moon no longer qualifies. Been there done that. On to Mars and beyond. Some day. And when we do, we will have the cooperation of the Muslim world, and in fact, the whole world. That is the Obama space program, in a nutshell. That's what the outreach to Muslims via NASA is all about.
However, recognition of their contributions in science and math notwithstanding, I'm thinking there might well be a cultural sensitivity issue at work here as well, one that might well go beyond appreciation of the science and math traditions the Muslim world mostly lifted from the Chaldeans and other ancient cultures whom they conquered, many of who have strangely all but disappeared from the face of the earth. No, they did not journey off to another galaxy. Another dimension, perhaps, one somewhat of a spiritual nature, but that's another issue of ethnic and cultural genocide best reserved for a future post.
In fairness, the Islamic world did supposedly make one important contribution, in the invention of Algebra, but that's not exactly what I'm getting at either.
Some of the greatest insults in all Islam involve the lowly shoe-showing the heel, or throwing a shoe, or striking a person or image with a shoe, or walking upon a person's face or image with the soles of one's shoes.
Therefore, it stands to reason that in going to the moon lo, these many moons ago, we committed a grievous insult to Islam by-walking on the moon, which is sacred to their God Allah, for this you see is the sacred boat in which he sails across the heavens.
We Americans are such outrageous and disrespectful infidels. Our tax money sponsored Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and more who followed on their insensitive journey to what may well the holiest place in all of Islam. And in so stepping on the surface of the moon, these satanic people thus pressed the accursed soles of their space shoes-in a very real way, mind you-onto the face of Allah himself.
Is it any wonder God-fearing Muslims the world over despise us so much?
Hat Tip-NewsBusters
