Jesse Kornbluth was again good enough to visit my post commenting upon his article lauding Andrew Sullivan as a blogger amongst bloggers.  If I was a guy, and he and I had met in person, I would have slapped up on the back with a cheery “Hey, Jesse man, great to see you again.”  I’ve discovered that I disagree with Jesse on a whole lot of things, but I certainly appreciate his willingness to come back here and take his stand on the things in which he believes.  So, welcome, Jesse, and let me get right to your points.

Because his is a short comment, I’ll first print it in its entirety here, and then take on what I believe to be its fundamental deficiencies.  As always, my answer will be longer, because I tend to develop my ideas at greater length.  I’ll assume that Jesse does not do so because he is being a polite guest at another’s forum, rather than because he lacks the energy, will or data.

One of your message board commenters has said you’ve heard the last of me. Not so. I was raised to write thank you notes, and I do want to thank you, Bookworm, for taking the time and thought to deal both with my piece and my defense of it.
And I also wish to encourage you. You say you were not among those who doubted Barack Obama’s citizenship, but you do want to investigate his alleged brilliance as a student. You write:
As for me, I’m much more interested in Obama’s college and law school grades. I’d be interested to see whether they support the narrative that he [is] an unusually brilliant man. Since I find his off-teleprompter speech limited, unmusical and ill-informed, I have my doubts.
I can only speak to this investigation as it refers to Harvard. Consider:
BARACK OBAMA
— He was the first African American president in the history of the Harvard Law Journal. [This is generally considered the highest honor you can get at Harvard Law School.]
ANDREW SULLIVAN
— Harkness Fellowship to the Kennedy School
— His Harvard doctoral thesis, “Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott,” won the government department’s Toppan Prize, for the best dissertation “upon a subject of Political Science.”
JESSE KORNBLUTH
— summa cum laude thesis, “The Contradictions of Commitment in the Work of George Orwell”
— magna cum laude Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature
Just on the record of those three Harvard guys, you should feel encouraged to persist in this effort.
All best.

One of the fundamental differences between Jesse and me is that he thinks Ivy League credentials cover a multitude of sins.  I do not.  Whether you went to Podunk Community College or Hah-vahd Law, if you’re a dishonorable man (that would be Sullivan) or man who fails to demonstrate a well-furnished mind or any analytical ability (that would be Obama), or perhaps a man who is too forgiving of or naive about those who share his alma mater (Jesse himself), my focus will be on the matter at issue, rather than some yellowing diploma.

Much has been written about Obama’s tenure at Harvard.  Indeed, I’ve written on the subject myself, so my regular readers will pardon me for the repetition here.

I attended a premier public, not private, law school at roughly the same time Obama was gracing Harvard’s halls.  I was a good student, and a sociable one, so I interacted with many lawyers who worked at huge, well-paying, reputable firms.  Rather consistently, they told me that they hired Ivy League grads for the cachet, not because they were any good.

The lawyers’ complaints were always the same:  the Ivy Leagues had done away with reliable grading, either because of massive grade inflation or because they’d switched to a pass/fail system.  This meant that all the Ivy League (plus the Boalt) graduates they interviewed presented themselves as top-of-the-class brilliant people.  For a large percentage of them, this was a lie.  From the lawyers’ perspective, hiring one of these grads was like buying a pig in a poke.  It was reasonable to assume that the grads were smart because they’d gotten into a cachet school in the first place, but it was fatal to assume that they had the knowledge, skills or attitude necessary to become a good lawyer.  If you were lucky, you hired someone wonderful; if you weren’t, you could still boast that your firm was a draw to Ivy League lawyers.

Now that Obama’s past is no longer untouchable, people are revisiting his law school experience.  As Ace shows, even absent actual grades, one can figure out a lot of things about Obama’s law school performance.

Using a variety of sources, Ace explains that, when Obama attended Harvard, neither grades nor Law Review were done anonymously.  This was quite different from my own experience.  At my law school, our tests didn’t have our names, just random numbers, so the professors graded based solely on the test’s quality, not the test taker’s relationship with the professor or the test taker’s skin color.  Law Review admission was based upon those same blind grades or upon an essay that was submitted anonymously.  Again, no favoritism based upon anything but the work’s quality.

At Harvard, however, grades were not anonymous, which left a lot of wiggle room for those professors committed to affirmative action.  Also, when Obama was there, in the interests of that same affirmative action, the Law Review had an explicit set-aside of spaces for blacks.  The obvious message to those blacks who made it to Harvard law was that, once there, they didn’t have to try very hard.  The driven ones worked hard because it was their nature.  As for the less driven ones, though, why bother?  You’d still get the perks and honors. Obama’s failure to publish anything of note while on Law Review is so unusual that, in the absence of his academic records, it’s reasonable to assume that he was not one of the driven ones and that he got his august position for reasons other than academic merit.

The magna designation beside Obama’s degree leaves me equally cold.  It turns out that about half the Harvard law class was magna.  Garrison Keillor must have been thinking of Harvard when he spoke of a place in which “all of the children are above average.”

Because Obama has refused to release any of his academic information, because his off-teleprompter speeches reveal a surprisingly ill-informed man (his is the opposite of a well-furnished mind), because his work history is invisible or lacking in any achievement beyond getting a series of  increasingly higher ranking jobs, and because racial preference was rampant in the grade-free environment that was Harvard law, I can’t pretend to be impressed by his diploma.  The diploma is a mere piece of paper when compared to a man whose most significant accomplishment seems to be impressing gullible liberals.

Andrew Sullivan’s academic credentials don’t move me either.  The world of academia is a hermetically sealed world in which having the right ideas (by which I really mean the Left ideas) regularly trumps the more important markers of decency, morality and common sense.  As only a sort of aside, my uncle was reputed to be the most brilliant student ever to graduate from the Jewish Gymnasium in pre-war Berlin.  He was also a miserable, angry Communist who ended his days, not in a haze of academic glory, but as a low-level civil servant pushing paper in a small government office in Denmark.  His embittered, ugly personality were of much more importance in his life than either his brains or his education (an education far exceeding in quality anything Harvard has to offer).

Sullivan is too old to point to his sheepskin as a mark of intellectual quality.  The true evidence of his intellectual and moral quality — or, as I argue, his striking deficiencies in both those categories — is his current work product.  As I’ve demonstrated in other posts, so won’t belabor here, that work product is dishonest, disingenuous, lazy, mean-spirited, defamatory, obsessive and antisemitic.  But other than that, he’s a great product of America’s finest school.

As for Jesse himself, as one of my readers commented, he graduated with high honors at a time before Harvard’s grading system was corrupted by the modern post-deconstructionist Marxist garbage that passes for education in this day and age (not to mention the fact that professors today are embarrassed to give bad grades to young people whose parents have coughed up $50,000 per year for them to hear the tripe that so often passes for knowledge at schools today).  For that, I commend him.  He’s clearly a bright man.  But my focus has been narrow:  I think Jesse betrayed his intelligence and education when he blithely praised Andrew Sullivan, a man with no moral compass and a vicious streak as wide as the Charles.

Back to you, Jesse.  You know you’re always welcome here.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land,
available in e-format for $4.99 at Amazon or Smashwords.

I’d like to analyze a Harvard’s law prof’s defense of a Harvard law dean.  The Prof (and ex-dean himself) is Robert Clark, who wrote an op-ed in the WSJ defending Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s approach to the military during her tenure as dean of Harvard Law.  He spells out the facts, which I’ll accept as true (although with significant omissions), that he contends proves that Kagan loves the military.  If his opinion piece passes for legal analysis at HLS . . . well, they’re all Obamas there, I guess.

Clark begins by explaining that, when Kagan came on board as dean of Harvard Law, Harvard already had a long-standing policy barring any recruiting by employers who hadn’t signed onto a statement that they didn’t discriminate:

As dean, Ms. Kagan basically followed a strategy toward military recruiting that was already in place. Here, some background may be helpful: Since 1979, the law school has had a policy requiring all employers who wish to use the assistance of the School’s Office of Career Services (OCS) to schedule interviews and recruit students to sign a statement that they do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.

(Just FYI, I have a big problem with forcing employers to sign that kind of stuff as a precondition for recruiting.  I don’t think Harvard should be narrowing the pool of prospective employers for their students who are, after all, adults.  Even more than being mere adults, since they’re graduates of Hah-vahd Law, one would think they’d learned a little about analyzing their own needs and the type of employer they wanted.  Had I been in charge, I would simply have required that all comers inform prospective employees what their non-discrimination policies are.  But then again, unlike a liberal, I prefer more information, not less.  But back to Clark’s Kagan narrative. . . .)

In the early years after Harvard started censoring prospective employers, the military circumvented its inability to sign this statement (a Congressionally imposed inability, I might add), by appearing on campus as the guest of a school organization:

For years, the U.S. military, because of its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, was not able to sign such a statement and so did not use OCS. It did, however, regularly recruit on campus because it was invited to do so by an official student organization, the Harvard Law School Veterans Association.

Eventually, the Air Force, fed up by its second class treatment, challenged Harvard for violating the 1996 Solomon Amendment (which, like “don’t ask, don’t tell,” passed during a Democratic administration).  That Amendment says that a school can’t take federal money and than ban the American military from its campus. (Or as we used to say in Texas, you dance with them what brung ya’.)

The symbolic effect of this special treatment of military recruiters was important, but the practical effect on recruiting logistics was minimal. In 2002, however, the Air Force took a hard line with Harvard and argued that this pattern did not provide strictly equal access for military recruiters and thus violated the 1996 Solomon Amendment, which denies certain federal funds to an education institution that “prohibits or in effect prevent” military recruiting. It credibly threatened to bring an end to federal funding of all research at the university.

The Law School is so damn rich, Clark says, it could survive without federal money, but other colleges at Harvard might have been hurt by losing your and my taxpayer dollars.  Although it violated every liberal principle in the faculty’s collective body, Harvard Law bowed to Mammon and gave the military a pass on its (Democratically mandated) inability to sign the school’s (Nanny state) non-discrimination pledge. The liberals, of course, made their usual “we love the military” speech, even as they sought to undercut its efficiency.

This penalty would not have hurt the law school, which has virtually no such funding. But it would have hurt other schools at Harvard, principally the medical school and the school of public health. It would have eliminated about 15% of the university’s operating budget.

After much deliberation with the president of Harvard and other university officials, we decided to make an exception for the military to the school’s nondiscrimination policy. At the same time, I, along with many faculty and students, publicly stated our opposition to the military’s policy, which we considered both unwise and unjust, even as we explicitly affirmed our profound gratitude to the military. Virtually all law schools affiliated with large universities did the same.

Kagan rolled with this new policy favoring the military, but complained about it vociferously. That is, at the beginning of each recruiting season, she went out of her way to pay lip service to the military, and then to attack it for following a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — a policy, I might add, enacted by a Democratic Congress and signed by Bill Clinton, her former employer:

When Ms. Kagan became dean in July of 2003, she upheld this newer policy. Military recruiters used OCS services, but at the beginning of each interviewing season she wrote a public memorandum explaining the exception to the school’s nondiscrimination policy, stating her objection to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and expressing her strong view that military service is a noble and socially valuable career path that should be encouraged and open to all of our graduates.

Kagan was not happy with the Solomon Amendment’s dictates, something made clear the moment the opportunity arose for her to block the military from Harvard Law.  When the Third Circuit said that the Solomon Amendment was unconstitutional, Kagan immediately kicked the military off campus again, depriving it off access to some of America’s best and brightest during time of war:

In November 2004, however, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Solomon Amendment infringed improperly on law schools’ First Amendment freedoms. So Ms. Kagan returned the school to its pre-2002 practice of not allowing the military to use OCS, but allowing them to recruit via the student group.

Unfortunately for Kagan, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately concluded that the Solomon Amendment was constitutionally sound and held that, unless schools taking federal money give access to the U.S. military, they can kiss their dollars good-bye. Despite the largest endowment in America, Harvard chose free money over principles, and once again opened its doors (complaining bitterly all the while):

Yet this reversion only lasted a semester because the Department of Defense again threatened to cut off federal funding to all of Harvard, and because the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Third Circuit’s decision. Once again, military recruiters were allowed to use OCS, even as the dean and most of the faculty and student body voiced opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

From this story, Clark reaches what is, to me, a bizarre conclusion (emphasis mine):

Outside observers may disagree with the moral and policy judgments made by those at Harvard Law School. But it would be very wrong to portray Elena Kagan as hostile to the U.S. military. Quite the opposite is true.

Do you think Clark’s conclusion makes sense.  As I read his own words, he is describing a woman who, at every opportunity, tried to block the military — a military at war — from having access to people who are presumably the nation’s top law students.  She did so because she doesn’t agree with a federal policy put into place by her own own political party and signed by her former boss, Bill Clinton. Not only that, when she was forced to give the military access to these students, she repeatedly voiced her hostility to the military’s program, ignoring the fact that the military was constrained by a political compromise enacted under the aegis of her Democratic party.  Would you remind me where this falls into the “not hostile to the U.S. military” category?

And while I’m at it, let me add a few salient facts that Clark conveniently forgot to mention in his little narrative.

First, as Clark’s narrative tells, every year when Kagan reluctantly allowed military recruiters onto campus, she sent out a formal announcement bemoaning the fact that she was forced to do so.  These were no dry statements.  They were emotionally charged, and the emotions hit the wrong target:

Consider these words in particular from her letters to “All Members of the Harvard Law School Community”: On Oct. 6, 2003, Kagan explained that she abhorred “the military’s discriminatory recruitment policy….The military’s policy deprives many men and women of courage and character from having the opportunity to serve their country in the greatest way possible. This is a profound wrong — a moral injustice of the first order.” On Sep. 28, 2004: “…the military’s recruitment policy is both unjust and unwise. The military’s policy deprives…” etc. And on March 7, 2006: “I hope that many members of the Harvard Law School community will accept the Court’s invitation to express their views clearly and forcefully regarding the military’s discriminatory employment policy. As I have said before, I believe that policy is profoundly wrong — both unwise and unjust…,” etc.

Notice, time and again: “the military’s discriminatory recruitment policy,” “the military’s policy,” “the military’s recruitment policy,” “the military’s discriminatory employment policy.”

But it is not the military’s policy. It is the policy of the U.S. Government, based on legislation passed in 1993 by (a Democratic) Congress, signed into law and implemented by the Clinton administration, legislation and implementation that are currently continued by a Democratic administration and a Democratic Congress. It is intellectually wrong and morally cowardly to call this the “military’s policy.” Wrong for obvious reasons. Cowardly because it allowed Kagan to go ahead and serve in the Clinton administration that enforced this policy she so detests, and to welcome to Harvard as Dean former members of that administration, as well as Senators and Congressmen who actually voted for the law–which is more than the military recruiters whom Kagan sought to ban did.

Even liberal commentators, most notably Peter Beinart, who deeply disapproves of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” have recognized that Kagan loaded, aimed, and then shot the wrong target:

The military, like Congress, the courts and the presidency, is one of our defining public institutions. To question its moral legitimacy is not like questioning the moral legitimacy of General Electric. And that’s exactly what banning the military from campus does. It suggests that Harvard thinks not just that the military’s anti-gay policy is immoral (which it emphatically is) but that the institution itself is immoral. It’s like refusing to sing the national anthem because you’re upset at the Bush administration’s torture policies or refusing to salute the flag because of the way Washington responded to Hurricane Katrina. It’s a statement of profound alienation from your country, and will be received by other Americans as such.

Beinart’s absolutely right.  He recommends that Kagan apologize, but I don’t think an apology will cut the mustard with Americans who recognize in her a profound disdain for the military, one that can’t be swept away with a muttered, “I’m sorry I said that.”

Second, Clark’s narrative also misses the fact that Kagan didn’t just complain about the Solomon Amendment — she acted upon her complaint.  By doing so, as Scott Johnson explains, she proved herself to be in a clear minority as a legal thinker (although comfortably in lockstep with America’s Ivory Tower elites):

When the Supreme Court accepted the Department of Defense’s appeal from the Third Circuit decision, Kagan got on board. She was one of 40 Harvard Law School professors who signed a friend-of-the-court brief written by Walter Dellinger supporting the FAIR plaintiffs.

In the brief Dellinger argued that the Solomon Amendment applied only to schools that specifically prohibited military access on campus, not to schools’ whose policies simply had the (allegedly) incidental effect of doing so. Dellinger distinguished the law schools’ contemporary anti-discrimination policies from Vietnam-era academic anti-military policies.

Dellinger’s argument based on the language of the Solomon Amendment was, to say the least, strained, and the Supreme Court gave it the back of its hand in the Court’s 8-0 opinion upholding the Solomon Amendment. Even Justice Stevens rejected it.

Here we have Kagan herself, as Dean of the Harvard Law School, signing off on a brief making an argument so far out that not a single member of the Supreme Court found it worthy of adherence. This would seem to provide some evidence for the proposition that Kagan’s views lie somewhere outside the mainstream of Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Perhaps the institutional imperatives to which she gave voice as dean of the Harvard Law School overrode her common sense. For other reasons, Kagan has noted she didn’t write the brief; she merely signed it.

Kagan’s side decisively lost the FAIR case in the Supreme Court. I wrote while the case was pending in the Supreme Court that some lawsuits deserve a fate worse than failure. While decent military recruiters suffered the rudeness of their purported betters at Yale Law School and elsewhere in silence, the armed services of the United States were (and are) actively defending the freedom of those schools from peril. The rank ingratitude of those who should know better is a disgrace that deserves to be widely recognized as such.

So, not only does Clark’s conclusion that Kagan is a proud supporter of the American military fail to mesh with his own facts, it also fails to mesh with the facts he excluded from his summary of her approach to the military.

Kagan is certainly not a rabid anti-military person.  As far as we know, she never took to the streets, and she never said anything intemperate.  Nevertheless, during her war-time tenure as Harvard Law’s dean, she actively worked against the military, in violation of rather explicit federal law.  In addition, when the opportunity came along, she signed her name to a brief so contrary to constitutional law that even the liberal jurists on the Supreme Court could not support her position.  (This might not be surprising.  She seems to be careless and unprepared when it comes to acting like a lawyer, something worth considering in light of her Supreme Court nomination.)

Although this post touches heavily upon “don’t ask, don’t tell,” it is not about the merits of that government policy.  It is, instead, about the fact that Kagan’s defenders will obfuscate the record to hide the fact that, as Michael Gerson has said, “many Americans will find her acts offensive”:

During a pastel career, Kagan made one neon decision — to ban military recruiters from the Office of Career Services when she was dean of Harvard Law School, based on her strong opposition to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Legal experts understand that this is a controversy at many law schools. Kagan will explain that she followed the law and the ruling of the courts, even while arguing to overturn the policy.

I suspect, however, that many Americans will find her actions offensive — with far more intensity than the White House expects. Kagan not only took this controversial action, she publicly attacked the policy as “deeply wrong,” “unwise and unjust” and “a moral injustice of the first order.” It will be hard to downplay an issue on which Kagan has a history of grandstanding. Blocking military recruiters may seem normal in academic circles, but it will seem radical in much of the country — like banning the American flag from campus to protest some policy disagreement with the government. This controversy will add to a broader narrative that “Manhattan’s liberal, intellectual Upper West Side” is disconnected from the views and values of Middle America.

From the every first paragraph of a lengthy New York Times Magazine article about Sharia law, you know you’re in for an intellectually dishonest voyage through the multi-culti mindset of the New York Times, this time as put forward by Noah Feldman who is, unsurprisingly, a law professor at that bastion of liberal think, Harvard. It’s a long article, so I won’t Fisk the whole thing, but I can’t resist tackling at least the first few paragraphs:

Last month, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a nuanced, scholarly lecture in London about whether the British legal system should allow non-Christian courts to decide certain matters of family law. [Well, not really. He gave a muddled, incomprehensible lecture that vaguely waffled about Sharia, without actually giving anyone a clear sense of what he was talking about -- although, maybe, at Harvard, that passes for nuance. It was in a contemporaneous TV interview, though, that Williams let the cat out of the bag, and admitted that he wasn't talking about private judicial systems with voluntary participation -- assuming the beleaguered Pakistani women, forced into marriages and killed for "honor," can voluntarily participate in anything. Instead, he admitted that he thought Britain would actually have to accept Sharia law.] Britain has no constitutional separation of church and state. The archbishop noted that “the law of the Church of England is the law of the land” there; indeed, ecclesiastical courts that once handled marriage and divorce are still integrated into the British legal system, deciding matters of church property and doctrine. His tentative suggestion was that, subject to the agreement of all parties and the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women, it might be a good idea to consider allowing Islamic and Orthodox Jewish courts to handle marriage and divorce. [As I noted in an earlier post on the subject, that's not what he was proposing in his "nuanced" speech. While it's absolutely true that we in America allow people to resolve disputes privately, whether through arbitration, mediation, rabbinical courts, working with their minister, or confiding to the bartender, these are optional systems. People can avoid these systems, however, and instead choose to go use the ordinary civil and criminal laws of America. These American courts will not apply rabbi-made law, or sharia-law, or bartender's wisdom. Williams, however, stated that sharia law should be, and I quote, "incorporated into the British legal system" -- in other words, there's no escape. And even worse, while it may first be applied only to Muslims, one can well imagine some PC judge thinking it would be useful to apply it to other Brits, as well.]

Then all hell broke loose. [No surprise there since people seem to have understood what Williams actually said rather than having listened to some PC channel, as Feldman did, where he heard what he wishes Williams had said, rather than what Williams actually said.] From politicians across the spectrum to senior church figures and the ubiquitous British tabloids came calls for the leader of the world’s second largest Christian denomination to issue a retraction or even resign. [Yeah, 'cause he showed himself to be a dupe, a dhimmi and an idiot.] Williams has spent the last couple of years trying to hold together the global Anglican Communion in the face of continuing controversies about ordaining gay priests and recognizing same-sex marriages. [One wonders, in this regard if Feldman or Williams have given any consideration to the fact that, under sharia law, homosexuality is a hanging offense, or at least one deserving of torture (and we know that the torture the sharia clerics contemplate goes beyond have rock music blasted at you or even waterboarding).] Yet little in that contentious battle subjected him to the kind of outcry that his reference to religious courts unleashed. Needless to say, the outrage was not occasioned by Williams’s mention of Orthodox Jewish law. For the purposes of public discussion, it was the word “Shariah” that was radioactive. [Yeah, it was radioactive, because Williams didn't mention incorporating Orthodox Jewish law into the British system, but he did say, and I quote, that sharia law should be "incorporated into the British legal system." Does Feldman really think everybody is either as credulous or dishonest about this as he is?]

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. [Surprise! Surprise! as Gomer Pyle would say. It's funny how that happens, although it might be tied to all those silly little news stories about homosexuality being illegal in Muslim countries, with homosexuals routinely tortured and hanged; women killed because they were prevented from leaving burning buildings wrongly clad; women stoned to death for adultery; rape victims executed; women prevented from driving or being seen with men; school teachers arrested and threatened with whipping for naming teddy bears after toddlers; forced marriages; thieves' hands cut off; slavery; etc. I could fill dozens of lines in this post describing the horrors of life under sharia law, but I think you get the idea.] 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. [Is this a stupid argument or what? What he's saying is that, because in pre-modern times we in the West were just as bad as Islam is today, we are not allowed to judge Islam by modern standards. This is what happens when multi-culturalism takes over. When your country's current legal system is manifestly superior to another country's current legal, you're flogged with your country's far distant past as a way to shut you up. Last I looked, we in the West don't have slavery, women have property rights, thieves aren't hanged, torture isn't routine, etc. Indeed, I think we can comfortably separate ourselves by more than 150 years from these types of punishments. In strict Muslim countries, they can only separate themselves by a few minutes under the next horror comes along.]

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. [Again, the same stupid argument. That Islam looked good compared to the law in the Middle Ages is a straw man argument. I'm not comparing Islamic law to medieval or even pre-Enlightenment law. I'm comparing it to 21st Century America or Europe.] Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses [handful!? Homosexuality; driving; consorting with men; wearing anything but a tent; leaving the house alone; stealing; adultery. In what parallel universe is Feldman living?], 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. [Somehow this high level of proof hasn't worked too well for the women standing accused, has it?] The extremes of our own legal system — like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases — are routinely ignored. [Again, a straw man. That our system is not perfect does not relieve the sharia system of its manifest awfulness and abuse.] We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. [Yeah, but Prof. Feldman -- we have improved them. Sharia hasn't.] 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. [Don't you love being psychoanalyzed by an ignorant buffoon?]

I’m exhausted. How many stupid statements and dishonest rhetoric can you pack into just four paragraphs? Feldman does go on to ask an interesting question which is why is sharia law growing in popularity. However, given his rhetorical stance in the first four paragraphs, who can trust his analysis in the rest of the article? I know I can’t. He’s established himself as a confabulator, a trickster, a con artist and an ignoramus. Why would I believe anything he says?

I do know that Islam does tend to be attractive in anarchic places, because it promises stability and tight control. (Witness the rise of the Taliban after the chaos left in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.) It’s the “strong man” syndrome, except it plays out as the “strong religion” syndrome. That sharia doesn’t deliver on its promises, that it provides a theocratic totalitarianism, coupled with hate-filled rhetoric (aimed at Jews, Israel, America, homosexuals, women, etc.), will never stop the masses from seeking something that they believe will provide them with greater safety with and control over their day to day lives. Also, sharia, unlike our Western legal system, is inextricably intertwined with salvation. If you tell people that their eternal salvation is dependent on following a certain system, no matter how dreadful, and how medieval, that system is, many will do that — as was certainly the case in the ancient world for many thousands of years.

As for Feldman’s basic argument, which is that, if everyone is doing it, it must be okay, it’s manifest that his mother, when he was a child, never asked him that most basic of parenting questions: “If everybody jumped of a cliff, would you jump too?”

Hat tip: JL

UPDATE:  My friend Patrick has written a very interesting post that dovetails nicely with my attack on Feldman’s spurious comparison between pre-modern Western law and current Islamic law.  In it, he both agrees with a Sister Toldjah post and disagrees with it:

My friend Sister Toldjah has a long post up arguing that it is muddle-headed for the political Left to defend Barack Obama’s cozy relationship with an anti-Semitic racialist conspiracy theorist on the grounds that there are kooky pastors on the Right as well. In that thesis, I agree with her completely. From a logical and rhetorical point of view “So’s your mother” and “everybody does it” are bankrupt defenses.

I take issue with other parts of her post, however, because I think she’s too fine a person to carry water for the ignorant likes of megachurch pastor John Hagee. Any man who believes as Hagee does that “the Roman Catholic Church…plunged the world into the Dark Ages,” and thinks Pope Piux XII “never, ever slightly criticized” Adolph Hitler is a bigoted maroon of the first order.

The rest of his post is a spirited defense of the Catholic church in times past.

I think Patrick makes an excellent point, one of which is that information needs to be examined in context.  Looking back from modern times, there are things that we can’t like about the Dark Ages and Medieval church (the burnings, for one thing).  However, we in the modern era stupidly forget that you cannot measure past institutions — especially institutions that flourished in the distant past — against our own times. Instead, you have to measure them against their own times. For example, much as it’s trendy now to praise Druids and other pagan religions, Christianity was light years ahead of the competition if only one for one reason: it stopped human sacrifice. To me, that’s a biggie.

In the same way, it’s utterly ludicrous for Feldman to defend the horrors of certain aspects of sharia law by saying that, once upon a time, we were just as bad.  We aren’t as bad now, but sharia still is.