Liberals in academe say the darnedest things. Take Harvard University’s Noah Feldman … please! Feldman, who teaches constitutional and international law, has a piece at Bloomberg intended to help the reader understand the barbarism and depravity that inform the actions of the Islamic State by comparing it with another terrorist entity.
Here is his take on the IS:
Islamic State’s goal isn’t primarily about money or sex, but about sending the message that they are creating an Islamic utopia, following the practices of the era of the Prophet Muhammad. They want to go back in time, to the days of the earliest Muslims and the Prophet’s companions. The more medieval the practice, the more they like it.
He doesn’t delve into the particulars of how the Islamic State works toward achieving these goals, but he does argue that they don’t have a monopoly on inhumanity:
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.
And we would do well not to forget that American slavery, particularly in its last half-century before abolition, was one of the most brutal slave systems in recorded human history. In comparison, the history of Islamic slavery is relatively mild.
Slaves of African descent were not only tortured to increase cotton yields, but also, in the case of the women, subjected to systematic and lawful rape.
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