NY Times Noah Feldman Shills for Shariah: Mosque & State!

Last month, The New York Times was extolling the cultural wonders of the Islamic practice of cutting off the clitorisesof liitle (and big) girls,  now they are encouraging the  fusion of mosque and state.

Sounds like the Times is whoring itself out for some Wahaabi investment bucks to keep that dog afloat.
The author,  Noah Feldman is a Jewicidal Harvard profesor, who ought to be excommunicated from the shul (why don't we have that?) as he pimps for Islam and is thoroughly dishonest about it. It is shocking. My friend Norman opined, "I think we can expect another article "Nazism -  did we misunderstand it? The sanitary benefits of gas chambers & cultural benefits of living in a ghetto."

WHY SHARIAH? Noah Feldman, New York Times Magazine
[...]
In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed.

Uh, you mean like this?

By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them — hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

Feldman is reaching back to the 17th century Endglish law to find some analogous outrage.

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system — like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases — are routinely ignored. We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.

In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them — hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system — like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases — are routinely ignored.

He is comparing stonings to jail time for drug use.

We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.

In the Muslim world, on the other hand, the reputation of Shariah has undergone an extraordinary revival in recent years. A century ago, forward-looking Muslims thought of Shariah as outdated, in need of reform or maybe abandonment. Today, 66 percent of Egyptians, 60 percent of Pakistanis and 54 percent of Jordanians say that Shariah should be the only source of legislation in their countries. Islamist political parties, like those associated with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, make the adoption of Shariah the most prominent plank in their political platforms. And the message resonates. Wherever Islamists have been allowed to run for office in Arabic-speaking countries, they have tended to win almost as many seats as the governments have let them contest. The Islamist movement in its various incarnations — from moderate to radical — is easily the fastest growing and most vital in the Muslim world; the return to Shariah is its calling card.

Feldman's lips must be brown. read it all and puke.

UPDATE: Bostom, sagacious ...always

Delusions of Islamic Democracy

By Andrew G. Bostom FrontPageMagazine.com | 6/2/2003

Young Professor Noah Feldman is the latest high profile academic evangelist for "Islamic Democracy". The crux of Feldman's views can be readily gleaned by reading his sole book, or short writings.  I believe his apologetics regarding the application of the Shari'a (Islamic Holy Law)- past, present, and potentially in the future- are delusional and corrosive.

My major concerns are the following:

(I) A completely uncritical acceptance of the most sanitized, sacralized version of “classical” Islamic history, from Muhammad’s consolidation of control over Arabia, through the extensive jihad conquests of Asia, Africa, and Europe

Feldman's writings are disturbingly reminiscent of Professor John Esposito’s presentations, which suffer from these inappropriate biases, as lucidly described by the scholar Bat Ye’or: 1) historical negationism, consisting of suppressing or sketching in a page or a paragraph, one thousand years of jihad which is presented as a peaceful conquest, generally "welcomed" by the vanquished populations;  2) the omission of Christian and, in particular, Muslim sources describing the actual methods of these conquests, and the rule of the conquered peoples, as sanctioned by the classical jihad ideology written by numerous Muslim jurists since the 7th century: pillage, enslavement, deportation, massacres, and the imposition of dhimmitude;  3) the mythical historical conversion of "centuries" of "peaceful coexistence", masking the processes which transformed majorities (i.e., vast Christian populations,  in particular) into minorities, constantly at risk of extinction.

(II) Moral equivalences that range from the deliberately disingenuous, to the frankly absurd; just a few examples:   

· The contemporary Anglican Church is deemed comparable to those Shi’ite clerics (including, one must assume, Khomeini disciples) calling for the creation of an Islamic state in Iraq.

· The application of  Halachic law in Israel is highlighted trying (most unpersuasively) to argue that the imposition of Shari’a would be no worse- an utterly absurd comparison given the truly circumscribed application of Halachic Law in Israel, relative to the far reaching repression of basic rights for all women and all non-Muslims under Shari’a law, or Shari’a-inspired law in Muslim countries, or even Muslim-dominated provinces (eg., in Northern Nigeria) that apply the Shari’a.

· Apologism for barbaric hudud punishments (stoning to death for adultery; mutilation for theft) under the Shari’a.

There is so much more . Go

UPDATE More Times taqiya:  SPAINS MANY MUSLIMS FACE DEARTH OF MOSQUES

The mosque shortage stems partly from the lack of resources common to any relatively poor, rapidly growing immigrant group. But in several places, Muslims trying to build mosques have also met resistance from communities wary of an alien culture or fearful they will foster violent radicals.

Distrust sharpened after a group of Islamists bombed commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004, killing 191 people, and in several cities, local governments, cowed by angry opposition from non-Muslims, have blocked Muslim groups from acquiring land for mosques.

The result, Muslim leaders say, is that some Muslims feel anchorless and marginalized.

“A proper mosque would act as a focus, a reference point for Islam here,” said Mohammed Halhoul, spokesman for the Catalan Islamic Council. A quarter of Spain’s Muslims live in Catalonia, the northeastern region that is home to Lleida, but the area has no real mosques.

“I feel like a Catalan,” Mr. Halhoul said, “except when it comes to the question of the mosque.”

Muslims ruled much of Spain for centuries, but after they were ultimately vanquished in the 1400s, their mosques were either left to ruin or converted into churches. Since then, fewer than a dozen new mosques have been built to serve Spain’s Muslim population, which has grown in the past 10 years to about one million from about 50,000 as immigrants have poured into the country.

The Times has found their niche, the advancement of Islam. But check out what these two Spaniards had to say when I chatted them up at CPAC a couple of weeks ago.

Comments

[Timur]

Feldman's brain must be oxygen deprived from having his head stuck up some moslem's ass. Or maybe Feldman is rabbi Feinberg's wife?

[alcibiades]

Hmm. I think rather he's enjoying his new notoriety as the enfant terrible of the formerly Orthodox world. I don't think it's brown nosing, so much as exorcising all those residual Orthodox demons, which is going to be providing him with material for years to come, seemingly.

He's enjoying the heresy of it all far too much. And also the perch it's given him at Harvard.

[alcibiades]

Young Professor Noah Feldman! LOL.

Well, he was kind of boy genius at one point in his life.

[Underzog]

As regards excomunication, I know Henry Kissenger was excomunicated for being a threat to the Jewish people by my former pewmate, Rabbi Antelman. Also, a black rabbi named Eves excomunicated Dr. Kissinger along with another whose name I forget.

Noam Chomsky was also excomunicated for being a threat and mortal antagonist to the Jewish people.

I don't know how respected those excommunications are. I do know that I thought they were a good idea.

[Shy Guy]

People who are of established ill repute are banned from synagogues and communities. This is nothing new.

"Young Professor Noah Feldman.....

Shouldn't that have simply been "Young Feldman", similar to "Young Frankenstein"?

With no offense to Marty Feldman.

[Doda McCheesle]

You mean these kind of "jews" actually go to Shul??? More than once a year?

[Shy Guy]

Maybe we're confusing the term "excommunication" here.

There is a simple form of excommunication, done through social shunning, rejection and isolation.

There's also a Jewish halachic excommunication, which is actually a combination of prayers and symbolic acts to request that someone drops dead ASAP.

I could make a list as long as the left and right columns of this webpage.

[allahlovesporkchops]

If Feldman thinks he can stomach shari'a, maybe he should look at this:

http://patdollard.com/2008/02/warning-graphic-shariah-law-deals-with-thief/

Certainly, he KNOWS NOT of that which he speaks.