President Trump recently called the establishment media “the enemy of the American people,” and the media, enemy of the American people that it is, is predictably outraged. But here is yet another example among tens of thousands of why it deserves the moniker: after Saudi-funded Muslim Georgetown professor Jonathan A. C. Brown defended Islamic slavery and rape in a recent lecture, the Post, instead of challenging him for sanctioning these abominations, gives him abundant space in this article to exonerate himself and explain away his comments — which he singularly fails to do in any case.

While Valerie Strauss of the Post includes comments from some Muslim scholars taking issue with Brown, she doesn’t bother to get any comment from even one of the supposedly “far-right” critics who called attention to Brown’s odious remarks in the first place. She also includes this: “Brown said that he was offering ‘a historical description of slavery as a global phenomenon.’ But he added: These people criticizing me don’t know the difference between the past and the present tense. The talk I gave was historical description.’”

A look at the quotes from his lecture in the article below is enough to show how far-fetched that claim really is. He was speaking about Islamic law and Muhammad’s example as normative. No believing Muslim believes that Muhammad’s example is a relic of history; it’s valid for all time. So when Brown says of Muhammad: “He had slaves, there is no denying that. Are you more morally mature than the prophet of God? No, you’re not,” he is saying that slavery is morally justified because Muhammad owned slaves. But all the WaPo offers in response to this is some weak Islamic apologetics from a Muslim professor who notes lamely that Muhammad freed some of his slaves.

Great. Anyway, the point here is this: when did you last see the WaPo devote an entire article to allowing a counter-jihadist, or any conservative, to attempt to clear himself of charges that had been made against him? That’s right: never. Nor will you ever see such a thing.

What’s more, Valerie Strauss, intrepid reporter that she is, not only didn’t bother to get a quote from any of the “far-right” people she lets Brown smear here; she also apparently didn’t challenge him about these Facebook posts condoning slavery and rape, clearly on Islamic theological terms and with no claim that he is making a historical argument:

So why is the establishment media the “enemy of the American people”? Because it is no longer a news source, if it ever was: it is a propaganda outlet for the likes of Jonathan A. C. Brown and his Saudi paymasters, a mouthpiece for the sinister agenda they want to advance. This ridiculous puff piece is just one of innumerable examples.

“Georgetown professor under fire for lecture about slavery and Islam,” by Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, February 17, 2017:

The director of Georgetown University’s Saudi-financed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding is under fire by some conservatives as well as liberal scholars of Islam for a lecture he gave about slavery and rape in Islamic history. Jonathan A.C. Brown, a professor of Islamic studies, gave a lecture on Feb. 7 at the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Va., titled “Islam and the Problem of Slavery.” The lecture — which ran more than an hour and 20 minutes — sparked some conservative critics to accuse him of supporting slavery and rape when he said, for example, “I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody,” and “[f]or most of human history, human beings have not thought of consent as the essential feature of morally correct sexual activity.” The tenured Brown, who is Muslim, said in a phone interview and on Twitter that the accusations that he condones slavery and rape are simply untrue and that his words were taken out of context. “I don’t know how they could say that I did,” he said. Scholars are at risk, he said, if “some de-contextualized quote of theirs is taken out and prompts a feeding frenzy that calls for them to be fired.” He said that after the lecture he and his family were threatened anonymously with rape and death.

Is that so? We have heard this before from Muslim spokesmen. I have been threatened numerous times. I’ve published many of the threats that I received via email here at Jihad Watch. I’ve reported them to the FBI and the police. Did Brown report these threats? If not, why not? Has he released their contents? If not, why not? And of course, the Post reporter doesn’t press him on this.

Other scholars of Islams [sic], he said, contacted him and said they were worried about the same kind of reaction if they discussed such issues. Brown said the criticism was coming from far-right commentators. But they were not the only critics. Some scholars of Islam, including Ayesha S. Chaudhry of the University of British Columbia and Sadaf Jaffer of Princeton University, said they have several problems with Brown’s presentation of the issues of slavery and sexual consent in Islam…. A number of stories from conservative magazines and websites wrote scathing stories about the lecture, saying that he was condoning slavery and non-consensual sex. For example, the American Conservative wrote a piece with this headline: “Georgetown Prof Defends Islamic Slavery.” American Thinker had a story with this headline: “Georgetown professor defends Islamic slavery and ‘non-consensual’ sex.” The Daily Banter wrote: “Islamic Studies Professor On Whether Rape and Slavery Are Wrong: It Depends” and “An Islamic Studies professor at Georgetown has taken academic obscurantism and cultural relativism to new heights.”Some critics noted that the Georgetown center where Brown is a director — the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding — is funded with money from Saudi Arabia, where women have few rights. The institute where he gave the lecture has in the past been under scrutiny by U.S. officials for having ties to anti-Israel terrorist financing, a 2004 Washington Post story said. Brown said that he was offering “a historical description of slavery as a global phenomenon.” But he added: These people criticizing me don’t know the difference between the past and the present tense. The talk I gave was historical description.” Brown said that he could have said things more clearly, or used one word for another, but that he is not guilty of what he is being accused of saying. In one controversial part of the lecture, Brown said: “I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody because we own lots of people all around us and were owned by people and this obsession about thinking of slavery as property.” Asked to explain that comment, he said in an email: “I never condoned slavery. My argument was that, by limiting our notion of slavery to owning someone, we’re blinding ourselves to institutions of exploitation in the past and present in which people are technically not “owned” at all, like incarcerated labor in US prisons. And there have been instances in history where people were technically owned by others but not exploited, like the grand viziers of the Ottoman Empire. Ownership is complicated in any legal system. Exploitation is easy to spot.” In the lecture, he said that Americans think of slavery as depicted in the film “12 Years a Slave,” but that it looked differently in other times and places in history. He noted, for example, that a concubine’s autonomy in early Islamic civilizations was not that much different from a wife’s because women married whom their family wanted. He concluded that “the word ‘slavery’ can mean so many things that it’s not very useful for accurate communication” because it “often ends up referring to things we don’t mean when we think of slavery, or it fails to match things we do associate with slavery.” He said that “we morally fetishize” the word “slavery” when “we should actually be looking at the condition” in which people live. He said: “Slavery cannot just be treated as a moral evil in and of itself because slavery doesn’t mean anything. The moral evil is extreme forms of deprivation of rights and extreme forms of control and extreme forms of exploitation. I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody because we own lots of people all around us and were owned by people and this obsession about thinking of slavery as property … it’s just inconceivable sin. I think that’s actually a really odd and unhelpful way to think about slavery. It kind of gets you locked in this way of thinking that if you talk about ownership and people that you’ve already transgressed some moral boundary that you can’t come back from. I don’t think that’s true at all.” He also said in the lecture: “For most of human history, human beings have not thought of consent as the essential feature of morally correct sexual activity. And second, we fetishize the idea of autonomy to where we forget, who is really free? … What does autonomy mean?” While answering a question from someone in the audience, Brown referenced Mohammad, the founder of Islam, saying to his questioner: “He had slaves, there is no denying that. Are you more morally mature than the prophet of God?” [sic] No, you’re not.” Brown wrote a long statement about the controversy in which he said he apologized to those hurt by the lecture. He also sought to clarify some positions. He said, for example, that “[r]ape in Islam is haram (prohibited),” and “a violation of the rights of a human and the rights of God.” He also wrote: Here the Shariah [Islamic law] historically worked differently from modern laws on marital rape, which originated in the 1970s. But the effect is similar: protection. Within marriage, wrongs regarding sex were not conceived of as violations of consent. They were conceived of as harm inflicted on the wife. And in Islamic history wives could and did go to courts to complain and get judges to order husbands to desist and pay damages. So yes, non-consensual sex is wrong and forbidden in Islam. But the operating element to punish marital rape fell under the concept of harm, not non-consent.”… Rachel Pugh, a Georgetown spokeswoman, provided this statement from the university: As an academic community, we are committed to academic freedom and the ability of faculty members to freely pursue their research and express their analysis. While we will defend this academic freedom, the body of a faculty member’s work does not necessarily represent the University’s position. The views of any faculty member are their own and not the views of the University.

Unless, of course, it’s a professor who discusses how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism (as if there were such a professor). That professor would be out on his ear in no time.