Good points, all of them. I see it as this man is a danger to you me and all of us who are aware of the perils of islam, sharia law and the stealth jihad that enters into our society from the liberal cesspools of enlightened thought and the push to include, in order to show "diversity" at all costs to our freedoms and liberties.
Talk to some of the Jewish students at UC Irvine and see how this working for them. Feldmann is very smart,crafty, and is very good at manipulating himself in and out of tight spots. He can recognize when he is falling out of favor
in the academic and intelligensia groups. Do I like him, no not one bit.

Posted by: PatriotUSA at October 3, 2008 10:58 AM

In the first sentence above, the phrase "self-hating Jew" appears, but for some reason without the quotation marks with which I intended to enclose it. That phrase had been used by others, others who find that phrase unobjectionable - I find it intolerable -- and I was merely alluding to their use of the phrase, not using it myself. I regret the inadvertent disappearance of the quotation marks and the fact that, for technical reawsons, I am not able to correct the error right away. But I will do so as soon as I can.

Posted by: Hugh at October 3, 2008 11:43 AM

Noah Feldman is a Muslim. Academia is full of closet Muslims who pose as token Jews, and one can ride pretty far on that ticket in academia. Muslims love them most of all, and anyone who is hated by the few legitimate Jews sprinkled throughout academia (most of us, not coincidentally, with Ellis Island names) is de facto a hero. Just like the Chair of my department, Stuart Davis, Noah Feldman, along with Mearshimer and even Bernard Lewis (I believe anyway) in his senility are all Muslims, as their 'principles' and statements far supercede mere Daniel-Pipes-esque dhimmitude.

Sure-fire signs of a closet Muslim in academia:

1) Operates on the assumption that all kafirs are as ignorant as your average Muslim, who of course lives under pervasive milieu control, does not access real media, is taught to abhor literacy, does not discuss or debate ideas, does not associate with anyone who is reasonably intelligent, and more often than not comes from a country where college 'education' ends at age 17, and where 'college' graduates believe that the earth is flat, that the moon is lamp, that the sun revolves around the earth and sets in a muddy puddle, that sperm are produced all throughout the torso (male and female) and stored in the kidneys, etc. You invariably see this arrogance even by those who are openly Muslim, even in discussions with scholars of Islam like Robert Spencer, or ex-Muslims who have done their homework and lived for decades in an Islamic paradises like Ali Sina. This is the #1 sure-fire sign of a closet Muslim.

2) Speaks only in taqiyya, of 'moderate' Muslims, of 'the Islamic State,' but avoids discussion of Islam itself, jihad, or Sharia. When confronted about this, resorts to speaking in hypotheticals which he knows to not be true, not even hypothetically. Noah Feldman is particularly known for this, and in a patently Islamic fashion which supercedes mere academic dhimmitude, blames the West for everything, including every failure on the part of Muslim society and 9/11. All closet Muslims do this, but Noah Feldman has banked his career on it and doesn't even try to hide his leanings like Bernard Lewis.

3) Bends over backward to paint a rosy picture of that which he knows full-well no reasonable, decent, thinking, moral, ethical, civilized, evolved, outbred person could possibly regard as tolerable or defensible, such as Judeophobic and misogynistic hate speech by Muslims in the classroom, of stalking on the part of Muslims, of the treatment of women in Egypt, of the language of the Koran (woman = vagina, black person = slave, 'modesty' = pudenda, govern = suppress), etc.

4) Studies Arabic, a ridiculously abhorrent, difficult, and totally useless language, and does not have a career in counterterrorism. This does not just apply to academics. In order to see through the acquisition of Arabic as an L2 requires 10 years of effort and serious determination, particularly given the complete lack of literature in Arabic and the non-existence of an Arab culture (an oxymoron itself), the language's violent, cat-vomiting, goat-strangling phonological properties, its unmitigated lexical evil, and unattractiveness of the prospect of visiting an Arab land or of conversing with non-Westernized Arabs.

5) Treats all women like idiots, particularly those who readily hand him his ass during the course of a discussion.

6) There are way too many Arabs - not Muslims generally, just Arabs - in your department, all of them from countries whose higher educational quality ranks 119 out of 131 countries and scores 3.7 out of 7 where 4.5 is failing. These Arabs may not speak English at anything approaching a conversational level, may be obviously retarded, and may even actively terrorize Jewish students in the department. In any event, all students will sleep in the bed that the closet Muslim professor/admissions committee makes when admitting these 3rd-world- Arabs by having to attend extra Friday class sessions in order to compensate for all the time wasted on endless stupid questions by said Arabs, each of which of course takes 10 minutes to spit out.

7) Refuses to take responsibility for his own actions (i.e., the intentional ghettoization of the department), let alone the immensely toxic, incredibly dangerous, and quite potentially deadly consequences of those actions.

8) When confronted about the obvious violations of admissions policies and issues with being stalked and terrorized by retarded and mentally ill Arab students, will try to incite the murder of the complainant by contacting her advisor, who he knows will confront the malignantly narcissistic student, who is of course unable to handle anything that could be perceived as an insult or rejection, whom said professor of course knows personally and so is aware of the Arab student's obvious mental illness, misogyny, and Judeophobia.

9) Anytime you pass by his office, he is sitting there with an Arab student and they both stare at each other with characteristic dead-cow-cult-member eyes, and if you catch bits and pieces of the conversation, it is invariably an exchange between one narcissist and another, to the tune of:
'See me as I want you to, not as I actually am. I think you're great.'
'I think that's a great idea! I think that seeing you as you want me to, not as you actually are is fantastic.'
'Wow. We could just sit here jacking each other off all day and discussing nothing, couldn't we?'
'I think that's a great idea! I think you're great!'

10) If the professor's subject is not taught within university's Saudi Agenda Department, you can bet your ass he's an adjunct professor there anyway.

P.S., while I do think that Daniel Pipes is a dhimmi, I think that he will change his tune and publish a book along the lines of 'What I Really Thought but Couldn't Say While Employed in a Saudi Agenda Department' once he retires.

Posted by: jdamn at October 3, 2008 1:45 PM

Oh, and Hugh, who is offended by the phrase 'self-hating Jew?" I'm Jewish and it doesn't offend me. It's a real phenomenon and I believe in calling a spade a spade. Of course, in this case, we have different ideas of what a spade is. People who object to the phrase are, I believe, hypocrites like those who think that the n-word is offensive, but only when used by non-blacks. Either it's offensive or it's not, and 'self-hating Jew' isn't offensive as far as I'm concerned. Self-criticism, if not self-hatred, is part and parcel of being Jewish. We are the masters of self-deprecating humor (and insult comedy for that matter). We are also (not in my half-Italian case, obviously) often pacifistic to a fault, or as I like to say, 'Jewicidal.' Pam Gellar coined that one, as far as I know. I think Phyllis Chesler even has something to the effect of a 'self-hating Jew in academia' tag on her blog.

More often than not, I think that when self-hating Jews take it too far that they are either closet Muslims or closet Nazis, like Noah Feldman. Does anyone remember that Joachin Martillo asshat who kept posting to Islam in Europe last month until he got sick of Esther and me handing him his ass? He would be a closet Muslim or Nazi posing as a self-hating Jew.

And I forgot to throw Joel Beinin in my list of closet Muslims posing as token Jews. I think he converted at some point, just like Bernard Lewis, because he's gotten progressively more anti-West and Judeophobic.

Posted by: jdamn at October 3, 2008 1:56 PM

With the addition of the ventriloquent quotation marks and a few other words, I have properly distanced myself from the phrase in question.

Posted by: Hugh at October 3, 2008 2:24 PM

jdamn:

I do not think Arabic is abhorrent and useless. It has at least given us a cognate that makes it fairly certain that the "badgers' skins" mentioned in the Israelite tabernacle in the KJV translation were actually from the dugong, an Indian Ocean and Red Sea sirenian.

Perhaps you may have chosen to "sit in the seat of the scoffer" (as in Psalm One), but I do not. Anything that casts light on the Biblical languages is useful to me.

Still, I, too, am sick and tired of Westerners falling all over themselves to accommodate even the worst aspects of Islam.

Posted by: Kepha at October 3, 2008 2:54 PM

Actually Kepha, that's a valid point, and an interesting one at that. Arabic is useful insomuch as it casts light on something worthwhile, i.e., non-Islamic and non-Arab. As for literary exploits in Arabic? Well, they're not the most literate folks. That's why more books are translated into Spanish every year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1000. So what are the good aspects of Islam that we're falling all over?

Posted by: jdamn at October 3, 2008 4:15 PM

The Algerian writer "Yasmina Khadra," who writes in French (and has a native command of Arabic) but does not read English or other European languages with large literary heritages, has claimed that the tenth-century poet Al-Mutanabbi represents the summit of world literature. And others, who know no Arabic, claim that there is nothing worth reading in Arabic. Neither claim convinces.

Posted by: Hugh at October 3, 2008 9:36 PM

Arabic poetry is a pursuit unto itself in that it is characterized by the poet's ability to perform orthographic acrobatics, often whereby the poem reads the same backward and forward, but it rarely, if ever, concerns humankind or any relevant issue or perspective on anything. Good poetry will be appealing when translated, like Pablo Neruda for instance, who is just as good in Spanish as he is in English. That is rarely if ever the case with Arabic poetry. How surprising that an Arab Muslim would be an Arab supremacist, and would willingly stuff her head in the sand in order to uphold her crazy-ass beliefs and because Allah loves the ignorant. It's like believing that you're pretty just because you wear a veil and a garbage bag and never interact with men so as to never put oneself into any situation which would challenge that notion. Nothing proves it, but nothing one exposes oneself to disproves it, but one's unwillingness to be exposed to anything that might disprove it proves that the notion is shaky at best.

Posted by: jdamn at October 4, 2008 9:07 AM

Maybe he is a closet Nazi too? Come on, my guess is that he is an idealist who thinks if gets all excited about a few decent things about Islam and becomes friendly with them, he will get us all singng kumbaya.

Posted by: MorrisMinor at October 4, 2008 12:47 PM

Morris Minor, he's intimately acquainted with and informed about the realities and intricacies of Sharia. But I would agree that he's a Nazi, since he's obviously a Judeophobe who digs genocide and totalitarianism.

Posted by: jdamn at October 5, 2008 12:09 PM