Muslims In Space

NASA Adminstrator Charles Bolden Jr says his orders from President Obama are “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, math and engineering.”

This very strange use of a space program, this extra-planetary multiculturalism, has a lot of people rolling their eyes.  But it is precisely in line with Obama’s statement to an Arab television channel last year when he said, "My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives." This caused an Asia Times columnist to ask, "Who are the 'extraordinary' Muslims?"

“Where are the Muslim scientists, novelists, entrepreneurs, athletes and musicians?  Apart from [mostly corrupt] political leaders, a reasonably diligent reader of a quality newspaper in the West will not be able to name a single Muslim distinguished in any field of human endeavor. Excluding the politically awarded Peace Prize, Muslims have won only three Nobel prizes since their inception more than a century ago, or one for every 450 million Muslims alive today. By contrast, there have been 169 Jewish Nobel Laureates (excluding the Peace Prize), or about one for every 89,000 Jews alive today. During the past century, a Jew was 5,000 times more likely to win the Nobel than a Muslim."

The last person born in an Islamic country to receive the Nobel Prize was the novelist Orhan Pamuk, who now lives in exile in New York because he fears being killed if he returns to his native Turkey.

Islam is most often in the news for violence and barbarity. This week, aside from the atrocious suicide bombings, so frequent as to be banal, the Muslim news item of note has been the planned stoning in Iran of a mother of two for a charge of adultery. Although the Islamic Republic of Iran now says Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani will not be stoned, her family fears she will be hanged instead.

How powerful is your imagination? Try hard to imagine an American president who actually believed, as our founding fathers believed, that Christian civilization has been a gift to the world; a president who would tell his NASA administrator to demonstrate to the Muslim World how Christianity has allowed science and knowledge and freedom to thrive as never before in human history. With all of its many flaws and failures, the Christian ethos in what are now post-Christian western nations has been the greatest liberating and modernizing force in history.

I have known a lot of wonderful Muslims who appear to be happy with Islam. There’s no need to sugarcoat reality or history for them. When was the last time the Left sugarcoated anything about Christianity? It would be enough if the Left simply stopped telling lies about Christianity. 

And President Obama’s storytales about Islam only help keep hundreds of millions of Muslims trapped in the medieval age.