Israel Matzav

Jewish day school grad shills for Sharia at Harvard

When we last met 'distinguished law professor' Noah Feldman, he was taking his alma mater - and mine - to task in the pages of the New York Times for allegedly refusing to include his non-Jewish fiancee in the class picture that was taken for his class' 10th reunion. That turned out to be a fraud.

The photographer, Lenny Eisenberg, told The Jewish Week Monday that he had difficulty capturing as many as 60 reunion participants within a single frame. Eisenberg ended up taking several shots from one side, then the other, and several people on the far side — not just Feldman and his fiancée — happened to be out of the picture when it finally appeared in the newsletter.

At the time, The Jewish Week reported that Feldman was aware of what had actually happened.

Today, Hillel Stavis reports at FrontPageMagazine that Feldman is trying to pass a much more nefarious fraud off on the public: That Islamic Sharia law represents the highest state of “the rule of law.”

If this seems like a bizarre role for someone who attended the Orthodox Maimonides School near Boston, it is in line with the career trajectory of a very bright young man who wants to be preeminent among the severely compromised academics inhabiting the Middle East Studies Association. Thus, one week after his article, “Why Sharia?” was featured in the Times’ magazine, Feldman presented his position at Harvard’s “Interfaculty Initiative on Contemporary State and Society in the Islamic World.” The initiative previously had featured UCLA’s Khaled Abou el Fadl, who set the tone for the series with his opening statement that “Whether Sharia complies – or does not comply – with fundamental human rights is vacuous and irrelevant.” So much for a thousand years of western humanist thought and liberal jurisprudence.

What made Feldman’s lecture different from his magazine piece was what he left out of the latter. Obviously, any discussion of Sharia must include what informs the law at its heart – The Koran, Sunna and, to a lesser extent, Sira. Writing for the Times, he at least traced the roots of Sharia to the Koran. But that was as far as he would go. At Harvard, his analysis of Sharia was limited to “the rule of law” as interpreted by “scholars” producing an Islamic “constitution,” all of which is refined and perfected by a “balance of power” between rulers and scholars.

In Feldman’s revisionist account, the evolution of Islamic law echoes the Western experience and is compatible with it. To Feldman, Sharia evolves from “higher law” to “the rule of law” in a neat conflation of the secular with the holy that places the Islamic code alongside the West’s rigorously evolved concept of secular justice. Feldman suggests that the dreaded huddud laws of amputation and other draconian penalties for apostasy and blasphemy are mere “worldly commands,” notwithstanding the fact that they are drawn directly from the Koran. For example, Sura 5:33 prescribes amputation of limbs “on opposite sides,” a dreadful penalty that has found new life in some of the Sharia ruled lands today. Indeed, the fundamental nature of Sharia law is inextricably connected to divine revelation, a concept with which the West did away centuries ago. The fact that a Nigerian woman, Amina Lawal, was recently spared the Hadithic-inspired penalty of being stoned to death for adultery, had more to do with international outrage and pressure than any “nuanced” application of traditional Sharia law.

All this was utterly missing from Feldman’s lecture. There was much else, too, that the professor obscured.

I wonder if we can expect Rabbi Shmuley ("Kosher Sex") Boteach to come to Feldman's defense again.

This whole episode proves what was obvious to me before. When a Jew marries outside his faith, he is betraying that faith and he will continue to betray it and his people in many other ways that have nothing to do with his marriage. Shmuley Boteach was wrong when he defended Feldman last July. Feldman deserves to be ostracized.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:53 PM