July 7, 2010, - 2:50 am
Reagan/Bush Used NASA for Muslim Outreach Before Obama
I’m surprised everyone is shocked that Barack Obama’s NASA Chief, Charles S. Bolden, Jr., announced that one of his three primary missions at NASA is Muslim outreach.
“Payload Specialist” Prince Sultan: Reagan/Bush Beat Obama to the Muslim NASA Outreach Punch
In fact, the Obama administration is not the first to waste tax-funded NASA resources and space program on Muslims. Ronald Reagan and his VP, George H. W. Bush, were. But they just wouldn’t say so publicly. At least Obama’s people are finally open about this outrageous behavior that isn’t new to his administration. Sad, though, that it took Al Jazeera to get it out of them.
There’s an old cheesy joke that Yasser Arafat complained to Gene Roddenberry that there were no Muslim crew members on “Star Trek’s” Starship Enterprise. Roddenberry tells him that’s because it takes place in the future. But, in fact, in real life, the future has already happened in space for Muslims, and it wasn’t perpetrated by Barack Obama.
When I was an intern on Capitol Hill in the summer of 1985 and still in high school, Saudi Prince Sultan Bin Salman Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud held a giant party for all of the young interns on Capitol Hill. He and the Saudi Arabian Embassy rented out the Capitol Center and hosted free food, music, belly dancers, and other entertainment, trying to reach out to America’s future leaders and convince them of the modernity, hipness, and “appeal” of Saudi Arabia. The was the real purpose. But the ostensible purpose was to celebrate Prince Sultan’s trip into space, courtesy of NASA–Ronald Reagan’s NASA. While ultimately this was Reagan’s move, it was carefully orchestrated by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, a close friend to the Saudi Royal family.
There were exhibits all over the Cap Center party honoring Prince Sultan’s space trip. And, at the time, everyone in the U.S. space program knew what a joke it was, what an obvious sop to the Saudis, given that the Prince didn’t have an iota of the years of training and skill it takes to become an American astronaut. He had the title of “payload specialist,” but the only payload for which he was actually skilled was “pay the lady.” Only months earlier, the Prince was the acting Saudi Information Minister and had zero space knowledge.
Everyone knew that this was a PR stunt that was outreach to Muslims in the form of fulfilling this spoiled Saudi Prince’s only unfulfilled Walter Mitty fantasy, courtesy of the Bush family that feted these people for decades. The real American astronauts laughed that the pretentious Prince Sultan insisted on wearing his Islamofascist get-up for the group picture of the STS-51-G Space Shuttle Discovery crew, yet he dressed in space gear for his individual shot. At the time, Sultan was the youngest person to fly in a space shuttle and not because he earned it. Even worse, U.S. taxpayer dollars helped finance Sultan’s launch and deployment of the Arab Satellite Communications Organization’s ARABSAT-1B satellite in space, the ostensible reason Sultan was aboard the flight. Yes, the Saudis supposedly paid a token amount. But it didn’t cover the overwhelming costs incurred. And that’s not the point.
Will Barack Obama also put a Muslim in space? I don’t know, but it’s irrelevant, since Ronald Reagan–with Bush, the father, pulling the strings–already topped him in this absurdly excessive bow to the Islamic world. They started this, not Obama. And George W. Bush, the son, reportedly tried to top both Pops and Reagan. Until he and his wife started to come under extreme scrutiny (but zero repercussions) for funding the U.S. stays of at least two of the 9/11 hijackers, the rotund Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and his family members were talked up as possible space shuttle passenger candidates. Prince Bandar was, after all, so close to the Bush family that just after the 9/11 attacks, Bandar Bush–as he was affectionately called by the Bush family–smoked stogies with President Bush on the Roosevelt Balcony of the White House at night.
That’s not to mention that both Bushes and President Clinton allowed Dr. Ghanim Al-Jumaily, a top official of the Muslim Brotherhood and agent of Saddam Hussein, to reach staggering heights as a NASA scientist and to be installed as an Ambassador for “the new Iraq.” It’s an exclusive story I broke on this site. Jumaily even worked on the Mars Pathfinder Landrover. And after his years scaling and infiltrating NASA, Al-Jumaily ran a HAMAS/Al-Qaeda charity in the Detroit area which was raided by the FBI and which apparently funded terrorists killing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Bush Administration not only refused to indict him for terrorist money-laundering and financing, but okayed the new Iraqi government’s choice of Al-Jumaily as its Ambassador to Japan. Among those who signed off on the outrageous Al-Jumaily appointment was Dan Senor, the consistently incompetent U.S. official in Iraq who is the false hero of many clueless Jewish political conservatives. At the time, persecuted Iraqi refugees and victims of Saddam Hussein protested outside the offices of his charity. But, because of people like Senor and Grover Norquist running the Bush show, nothing came of it. Jumaily continues to live it up as Iraq’s Ambassador to his benefactors in Saudi Arabia. (To his credit, at least Bush didn’t put the kabosh on the mission of the only competent/qualified Middle Eastern astronaut ever on a space shuttle–the late Israeli, Ilan Ramon, of blessed memory.)
Yes, Barack Obama is not the first to seek out Muslims for NASA or even to wish to fly them into orbit on the U.S. dime.
It’s been done before. And no one cared. But the lumpenconservative proletariat is ignorant and seems to eat up anything against Obama like vampires to raw human meat. Where were they, though, when the Bushes and Reagan did it first?
Yes, it’s an outrage that Obama’s NASA guy told Al-Jazeera it’s one of his main missions. But where were they when the Bushes and Reagan actually perpetrated a worse outrage by actually carrying out that mission and creating the precedent?
Crickets chirping.
Tags: administrator, Al-Jazeera, Arab Satellite Communications Organization, ARABSAT, ARABSAT-1B satellite, astronaut, Bandar Bush, Barack Obama, Bush, Charles Bolden, Charles S. Bolden, Charles S. Bolden Jr., George Bush, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Ghanim Al-Jumaily, Ilan Ramon, Islam, Islamic outreach, Muslim, Muslim world, Muslims in Space, NASA, NASA Administrator, outreach, payload specialist, President Reagan, Prince Bandar, Prince Salman, Prince Salman Bin Sultan Bin Abul Aziz Al Saud, Prince Sultan, Prince Sultan Bin Salman Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, Reagan, Ronald Reagan, space, Space Program, STS-51-G Space Shuttle Discovery, Vice President Bush
NASA really has no future. It will slowly disappear.
Worry01 on July 7, 2010 at 3:44 am