Harvard jerk and ISIS apologist Noah Feldman
Posted on 08/21/2015 12:31:48 PM PDT by jazusamo
Sapping the public's will to fight evil.
One key reason why so few Americans are aware of the full nature and magnitude of the jihad threat is that the academic and media establishments labor so assiduously to cover it up.
Those who are deemed the best minds of this generation devote their energies to convincing people that the threat is not as large as it is, or that it can be neutralized by adjustments to U.S. foreign policy (particularly the abandonment of Israel), or that the West is really just as bad, so we are hypocrites for opposing the jihad.
Harvard professor Noah Feldman, last week in Bloomberg View, provided a sterling example of the latter in an egregious piece trying to mitigate the horror of the Islamic State’s practice of sex slavery.
The bio accompanying Feldman’s piece describes him as, among other things, “a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University” with “a doctorate in Islamic thought from the University of Oxford,” who “as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq … contributed to the creation of the country’s new constitution.”
Given the blood and chaos that engulfs contemporary Iraq, one might think he wouldn’t be all that proud of that particular resume item anymore, especially since in 2008 he downplayed and ignored the aspects of Sharia that have made life hell for so many of the nation’s non-Muslims.
In a lengthy exposition of Sharia that Feldman published in the New York Times, he never once mentioned the Sharia provisions mandating second-class status (dhimmitude) for Christians and conversion or death for non-Muslims not considered “People of the Book,” such as Yazidis.
Now, in his Bloomberg View piece, Feldman actually acknowledges that in taking sex slaves, the Islamic State is “following the practices of the era of the Prophet Muhammad” and wants “to go back in time, to the days of the earliest Muslims and the Prophet’s companions.”
He does not, of course, tell his readers that sex slavery is called for in the Qur’an (in the “captives of the right hand” passages, 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, and 33:50), or that sex slavery doesn’t just go back to Muhammad’s era, but was practiced by Muhammad himself, who is the supreme model for emulation for Muslims (cf. Qur’an 33:21). Muhammad did it, so it is right, and Muslims should do it as well.
Feldman compounds that omission by likening “one interpretation of classical Islamic law” — as if there were any mainstream interpretations of Islamic law that forbid sex slavery; there aren’t — to the U.S. Constitution in the course of building an argument in praise of progress.
Our horror at this self-conscious neo-medievalism should teach us a lesson about the evolution of our beliefs and what it means to be modern. Begin with the sober acknowledgment that we aren’t light years ahead of Islamic State — more like a century and a half. Slavery in the U.S. isn’t a distant relic. We’re still dealing with its aftereffects, in the form of persistent racial inequality and long-lived symbols of the Confederacy.
This is a fundamentally dishonest comparison. The U.S. Constitution is a human construct, whereas those who believe in Islamic law believe it not to be a human invention able to be amended and revised, but divine law that is perfect and unchangeable.
Mainstream Muslims would no more revise the Sharia than Jews or Christians would revise the Ten Commandments. “Progressive” Muslims in the U.S. who depart from normative Sharia interpretations don’t have any appreciable influence in the Islamic world.
Noah Feldman, with his doctorate in Islamic thought from the University of Oxford, should be honest enough with his readers to tell them about that difference and its significance.
But his piece is just one more in a steady stream of articles that downplay and deny jihadist atrocities, or tell Americans that what their own country has done is just as bad. Not only do such claims blunt the force of the human rights indignation that should be rising worldwide against the Islamic State for its brutalization of Yazidi and Christian women, they also sap the will of the West to defend itself.
And that may be the larger objective.
Harvard jerk and ISIS apologist Noah Feldman
And we have to get off our high horse, per Obama, about criticism of Islam, because look at what went on with the Crusades and what happened in medieval Europe with inquisitions and all that.
Moonbats like that are what’s wrong with “higher education” in the USA
Typical ivory tower idiot.
So this justifies what ISIS does?
The debt for slavery was paid by more than 600,000 American dead, countless injured, crippled and maimed, and whole states laid to ruin.
Not in this century you brainless turd! Get a real job you bum!
It still does in the form of social programs and taxation.
Academia is full of idiots. Not just Ward Churchill and Elizabeth Warren.
Do you think these professors realize that same people selling people into slavery today, their ancestors were doing the same thing 400 years ago. Nobody ever talks about that.
Hope fairyface visits a ROP country soon to see in person what they do.
Amen to that.
Why blame America for slavery when really it was the DEMOCRATS who were responsible for keeping it in force as long as it was?
Jews that are apologists for Islam really must be the most clueless group on the planet.
I mean, for Christians, at least Islam gives us the option of conversion before they kill us. Jews? They’re going to kill you one way or another, if they get the chance. Why wouldn’t you fight tooth and nail against such an enemy?
how can liberals all have that stupid look on their faces?
This cretin should be run out of the country!
Doooooshbag is worried bout about past tense. But present atrocities can be shelved as “well.....you did it”.
My family came from Italy.....should I be Ashamed because the ancient Romans fed the Early Christians to the lions? Or does the PC NY Slimes consider Christian killing an OK thing because of the crusades.
Can’t make this crap up
He’s never left school.
I am sick of the pasty faced white losers apologizing/condemning at every turn. They need to travel over there and experience life away from Starbucks, toilets, and the opera.
I was watching a movie once, when I was younger and much stupider about politics, and it showed a coup and government takeover. The first thing they did was gather up college professors and shoot them.
I always wondered why they did this, and now it seems so totally obvious. You need them to support your side so the next generation of children gets indoctrinated correctly.
Same thing happened here in the 60s and 70s, only the Bolsheviks didn’t shoot them.
They simply harassed them until they quit — and put their Leftists pals in to the teaching positions.
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