Ethnic Studies in Space: NASA's New Mission - Muslim Outreach

Powerline:

OBAMA TASKS NASA WITH BUILDING MUSLIM SELF-ESTEEMIn the video below, Charles Bolden, head of NASA, tells Al Jazeera that the "foremost" task President Obama has given him is "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." Thus, NASA's primary mission is no longer to enhance American science and engineering or to explore space, but to boost the self-esteem of "predominantly Muslim nations."

Watch the video. He's so ernest. Charles Krauthammer is not impressed.

The brilliant Michael Ramirez illustrates.

Captain Ed:

NASA’s spaced-out mission no longer includes … space

Jules Crittenden:

NASA chief says his “foremost” mission is to explore old worlds, to seek out global jihad and 14th-century mentalities, to go boldly where man has spent the last millennia trying to get the heck out of.

OK, that’s not exactly how he put it . . .

Maybe it’s like a time-travel project. The best way to learn how to exploit intergalactic wormholes is to dive headfirst into our own local time warp.

Some people might see it as a little patronizing, patting the Muslim world on the head and telling it what a good mathematician it used to be 800 years ago. But I dunno, I’m wondering how the Muslim world is going to feel about being treated like an alien planet that we need NASA to get in touch with. Seeing how the Islamic world glommed onto that Avatar thing, I’m not sure encouraging them to view the United States as a visiting space power is such a great idea.

Tim Blair:

Forget space travel. Iran is still trying to cope with mullets. . .

Another contribution to science, math, and engineering:
Muslim fanatics in Kerala on Sunday chopped off the right hand of a college lecturer, accusing him of setting a question paper with a derogatory reference to the Prophet.

I left a comment on the Australian's site:

This whole “Muslim self-esteem through identification with ancient, more successful relatives” thing reminds me of the worst of the Ethnic Studies myths which came out of the 60s and 70s in the US: Like the one where black and brown people are warm, wonderful “sun people” and white people are cold, murderous “ice people” who steal the inventions of the “sun people”.

The child psychologist Haim Ginott, decades ago, identified “desirable” types of praise which would help children develop self-esteem and “undesirable” types of praise which could lead to distrust of the praiser, anger and insecurity. The type of esteem-boosting proposed here falls in the second category.

Do we really need more distrustful, angry Muslims?

SOME COMPREHENSIvE COMMENTARY: Mona Charen:

It’s not really surprising that President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden that his highest priority should be “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.” It fits with so much that we already knew about the president.

It is consistent with his wildly exaggerated concept of governmental and presidential power and competence. Samuel Johnson wrote: “How small, of all that human hearts endure / that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Mr. Obama believes the opposite — that his presidency can be a transformative moment not just for the nation, but for the world. . .

Read the whole thing. More:

To treat the Muslim world as a vast ocean of African Americans in need of respect and encouragement from us is both arrogant and incredibly solipsistic. In fact, large swaths of the Muslim world feel inexpressibly superior to us — particularly morally and spiritually. . . . . Osama bin Laden boasted in 2000 that he had defeated the Soviet Empire and that it would be a small matter to defeat the American one. Again, he may have been deluded, but he was not a candidate for assertiveness training. Nearly every Muslim child is instructed that his is the true faith, superior in every way to the errors that came before — Judaism and Christianity — and infinitely above paganism or atheism. Jihadis are taught that their shining pure religion requires no less than the mass murder of infidels and unbelievers.

It might just be that Muslim self-confidence is more dangerous to us than imagined Muslim feelings of inadequacy. . .

"There are a lot of people with high self-esteem. Mass murders, prisoners, gang members, and delinquent children all have higher self-esteem, on average, than people in the general population of a similar age."

Elliot Abrams gives some history of NASA, then says,

This quote is entirely believable. Mr. Bolden was not told that he must advance American interests in space, but instead to become part of the big Obama program of engagement with the “international community.” His achievements will be measured by whether he can “reach out” to make people “feel good,” and those people aren’t even Americans; no, his “perhaps foremost” job is to make Muslims around the world “feel good” about their past.

A more serious task might be to make them feel terrible about the present level of education in Muslim lands, not least for women and girls, in the hope that we could spur them to reform and improvement. The dismal state of science, math, and engineering in Muslim nations is quite clear, but Mr. Bolden isn’t assigned to improve their performance (which would presumably be the job of USAID, but whatever). No, he’s to be another Dr. Feelgood, a sad assignment for this former astronaut. Mr. Bolden should not be criticized for telling the truth about his job, for the problem is at the top, not at NASA. The space program is being transformed into a tool of Obama foreign policy, which views American national greatness as an anachronism.

Rand Simberg, aerospace engineer, has been involved in an "ongoing quixotic campaign to persuade conservatives and Republicans that Obama’s space policy actually is a huge improvement over the Bush policy . . The administration hasn’t made it easy for me . . . ". He says:

As I noted above, we need to have a policy discussion based on the policy itself and its features and bugs, rather than its ostensible author (a form of the ad hominem fallacy). And such a discussion should start with a discussion of what our goals for American human spaceflight are. Do we want the continuation of the state-centralized program that we inherited from the Cold War, with a few astronauts going to space at a cost of billions each, or do we want a space program with traditional American values, in which (and for which Bolden has vocally yearned in the past few months) hundreds and thousands are leaving the planet, for their own purposes and dreams, at a cost affordable to them? Should we continue to take the failed collective approach or the individualistic one?

It is ironic that such a radical change came in this administration, which is collectivist in all else. . . Let’s just hope that Obama doesn’t realize what he’s done, or actually get interested in it.