You may remember Prof. Jonathan Brown, a Muslim convert who teaches Islamic civilizations at Georgetown, from his prior defense of Islamic rape and slavery.

“I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody,” Jonathan Brown explained to attendees at his lecture. “Slavery cannot just be treated as a moral evil in and of itself.”

To a man who argued that slavery was wrong, Brown retorted, “How can you say, if you’re Muslim, the Prophet of God had slaves. He had slaves. There’s no denying that. Was he—are you more morally mature than the Prophet of God? No you’re not.”

When Brown had been asked in the past about the women and girls sold and raped by ISIS based on Islamic law, he defended the Islamic practice of sex slavery, “There is no doubt that the Quran and Sunna permit this.”

So too when defending Mohammed’s sexual abuse of a 9-year-old girl, Brown insisted, “You cannot say from a Sharia perspective that what the prophet did was wrong because the prophet can’t commit sins.”

“A male owner of a female slave has the right to sexual access to her… her ‘consent’ would be meaningless since she is his slave,” Brown had also explained in the past.

“Slave women do not have agency over their sexual access, so their owner can have sex with them,” he appears to have written on Facebook.

Had anyone tried to justify southern slavery, they would have been canceled until the end of their days, but defending Islamic slavery is okay and so Brown remains a respected scholar.

Now, Brown decided to pontificate on Islamic discrimination against non-Muslims. “So, in general, it’s correct to say that in Islamic civilization, both in theory and in practice, non-Muslims living under Muslim rule were called dhimmis and were lower in status than Muslims. But all they had to do to become part of this elite was say ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.’”

(Quote corrected to properly identify the deity worshiped by Muslims as ‘Allah’ without the misleading use of ‘God’ to imply commonality with pre-existing monotheistic religions such as Judaism and Christianity.)

All non-Muslims had to do to achieve equality under Islam was… to convert and stop being non-Muslims. Conversely, then Muslims can’t complain about discrimination since all they have to do is convert. But we know that logic only works one way.

Brown’s job is to argue that it’s no big deal that Islam had slaves or oppressed non-Muslims, but the shoe is never meant to go on the other foot.

Then Brown argued that discriminatory clothing was actually beneficial to non-Muslims. “In various eras and places Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians and Buddhists had to wear certain colors or items of clothing to identity themselves, but this was completely normal in a pre-ID world and was often embraced by those minorities as means of preserving/policing their own communal boundaries.”

Completely normal. Like slavery, genocide and oppression. What are you guys complaining about anyway?

Much of the postmodern business of evil is this sort of relativism. And Islamists turn that to their advantage. Rape, genocide and oppression are no big deal. But a cartoon of Mohammed? Now that’s an atrocity.