President Obama has told NASA Administrator Bolden that his foremost job is to improve relations with Muslim nations. THat seems to me to be a curious mission for the head of NASA since Muslim nations have nothing to offer. Obama talks about the outstanding achievements of Muslims in science, mathematics, and engineering. There actually are not many, and most of those happened a long time ago. There were some advances made by Muslims in astronomy and mathematics 900 years ago. The Persian Omar Khayyam is better known in the west for his poetry, perhaps due to the translations of FitzGerald, but he was the premier mathematician of his day, being the first to solve the cubic equation. But Muslim dogma has shut off scientific inquiry since then. To me this is another example of Obama's partiality toward Muslims. Bush wanted to induce Muslims to adopt democracy: Obama seems to want us to adopt Islam.

Here are some views on this issue from the blog Flopping Aces.