New logo needed for MASA (Mohammedan Aeronautics and Space Administration); and what Pipes thinks about the new direction in America’s space program

Michelle Malkin’s readers have been submitting candidates for a new NASA logo to express NASA’s new foremost mission of reaching out to the Muslim world and raising Muslims’ self esteem by telling them that Islam has as big a role in space exploration as the U.S. Here’s one of the entries:

But here’s something that’s not a parody, though it looks like one. NASA is already taking on student interns from Muslim countries. Posted at Daniel Pipes’s site is this photo of three from the United Arab Emirates:

Meanwhile, why does Pipes find objectionable about the NASA effort to make Muslims feel good about their scientific accomplishments? He was on Sean Hannity’s TV show yesterday:

HANNITY: … Daniel, help me out here. It seems to me that the president has taken what was once one of the great American programs and turned it upside his head to advance a political agenda.

DANIEL PIPES: And an exceedingly patronizing agenda. The notion that you develop an affirmative action project for Muslims and bring them on, and that, somehow, this will modernize their societies and make them look at the United States more favorably. How patronizing can one get?

Thus Pipes says that what’s wrong with turning America’s space program into a Muslim outreach program is that doing so is “exceedingly patronizing” to Muslims. Not that it’s a perversion of the very idea of NASA, not that it means treating countries that have made zero contribution to science and space exploration as though they have something to contribute, but that it means putting Muslims down. This is exactly like the main neocon criticism of nonwhite racial preferences, that they constitute the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Not that they are unjust and destructive of quality and lower the whole level of our society for the sake of racial equality of outcomes, but that they are “racist” toward blacks. But of course the blacks don’t see minority racial privileges as racist. To the contrary, they expect them and demand them as an absolute entitlement, and regard the slightest criticism of them as a racist threat to their well-being. So the neocons, ignoring both the reality of racial differences in abilities and blacks’ intense desire for affirmative action, pretend that the races are equal in abilities and that affirmative action is keeping blacks down, rather than, as the blacks themselves well understand, giving them enormous benefits. And America’s best known conservative writer on Islam engages in the same phony dance when it comes to affirmative action for Muslims. Do the Muslims themselves regard NASA’s Muslim outreach as insulting to themselves? No, they want it. See how the Muslim spokesman on the Hannity program warmly defends NASA’s new direction. But Pipes doesn’t listen to what the Muslim says, just as the neocons never listen to what blacks say, because in both cases it would mean acknowledging that these groups are fundamentally unlike ourselves and do not share our standards. Blacks and Muslims do not believe in quality, accomplishment, truth, and justice in our sense of those words. They want whatever material or symbolic advantage they can wangle out of us, period.

Later in the interview, Pipes asks, “Why are we wrecking this glory of American governmental achievement?” That’s getting closer to the truth of the matter. It remains the case, however, that his first and primary argument, which he stated twice, was that the Muslim NASA outreach is bad because it is “exceedingly patronizing” toward Muslims.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 07, 2010 04:43 PM | Send