Why Is the NYT Allying With Islamists Against Women? [incl. Noah Feldman, Tariq Ramadan]

And who is Noah Feldman? What does choosing him as an expert in the impeachment hearings tell us about the current Democratic Party?

Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman last week stated in his testimony before the star chamber style impeachment hearing that:

“The framers provided for impeachment of the president because they feared that a president might abuse the power of his office to gain personal advantage; to corrupt the electoral process and keep himself in office; or to subvert our national security.

• High crimes and misdemeanors are abuses of power and public trust connected to the office of the presidency.

• On the basis of the testimony and evidence before the House, President Trump has committed impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors by corruptly abusing the office of the presidency. Specifically, President Trump abused his office by corruptly soliciting President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations of his political rivals in order to gain personal advantage, including in the 2020 presidential election.”

Who is Noah Feldman? And what does choosing him as an expert tell us about the current Democratic Party?

I once challenged Feldman to a debate about the Islamic headscarf. He did not rise to the occasion. I suggested that the New York Times, his bully pulpit, sponsor the debate. I did not hear from the Gray Lady either.

In 2008, Professor Feldman praised hijab, the Islamic headscarf, and claimed that if Erdogan (!) could lift Ataturk’s ban on it, that he’d bringing Turkey that much closer to democracy. Allowing the Islamic headscarf would be a “case study of religious freedom against coercive secularism.”

Feldman wrote this article in the New York Times, the very venue that devotes three separate front page articles about the impeachment hearing (favoring it of course), and four full pages about it continued within.

Thereafter, the New York Times published an article by a Turkish woman lawyer, Fatma Benli, titled “Under a Scarf, a Turkish Lawyer Fighting to Wear It.”

Feldman and the Times are totally out of touch with the reality of Muslim girls and women who are routinely beaten and sometimes honor killed because they refuse to wear hijab. To Feldman, the politically correct narrative is one which is pro-Islam and anti-Judaism.

Feldman once wrote a long and bitter article in the Sunday New York Times in which he excoriated his own Orthodox Jewish brethren for (accidentally, as it turns out), not including a photo of himself together with his non-Jewish, non-Orthodox, non-convert wife at a class reunion. He presents Judaism as primitive, xenophobic, hateful. To the best of my knowledge, Jews do not honor kill the girls and women who become dissidents nor do they murder apostates. Only Islam does that.

I have yet to read an article in the Times calling for the right of Christians or Jews to build churches and synagogues in Muslim countries; they focus more on the right of Muslims to build mosques in Europe and in North and South America. They do not demand that Jews not be beaten or cursed for wearing visible Jewish headcoverings or religious insignia.

Such views have propagandized entire generations of Westerners—and to our detriment. The way propaganda works its magic is through persistence, subtlety, photographic images, and Big Lies couched in acceptable and popular ways. Every week, sometimes every day, the Times has a piece which glorifies and normalizes Muslim customs, but not Christian or Jewish customs.

So, why is the New York Times making so powerful an alliance with Islamists against women?

In 2007, in the New York Times, Ian Buruma wrote an article that is so cleverly cobbled together than most readers do not understand that it is meant as a devastating attack on the heroic Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Tariq Ramadan, the genetic and intellectual heir to the man who founded the Muslim Brotherhood is, again and again, glowingly profiled, reviewed, published, and shown wearing trendy western dress in these same pages.

Young, attractive women wearing headscarves are shown and they are quoted saying sophisticated, friendly things.

Steadily, slowly, inexorably, Western readers have been softened for the “kill,” seasoned and habituated to accept the subordination of women as an inviolate cultural and religious reality.

An analyst of gender issues in the Middle East, a psychotherapist and a feminist, Phyllis Chesler co-founded the Association for Women in Psychology in 1969, the National Women’s Health Network in 1975, and is emerita professor of psychology at The City University of New York. She has published 15 books, most recently An American Bride in Kabul (2013) which won the National Jewish Book Award for 2013. Chesler’s articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the Middle East Quarterly, Encyclopedia Judaica, International Herald Tribune, National Review, New York Times, Times of London, Washington Post and Weekly Standard. Based on her studies about honor killings among Muslims and Hindus, she has served as an expert courtroom witness for women facing honor-based violence. Her works have been translated into 13 languages. Follow Phyllis Chesler on Twitter @Phyllischesler
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