An eminently unteachable moment ushered forth from a Manhattan District Courtroom recently as Federal Judge, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, passed a life sentence upon the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad. Judge Cedarbaum, a Reagan appointee and close friend of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, attempted to provide a history lesson for the defendant, the jury and indeed the nation.

Judge Cedarbaum (Barnard, 1950, Columbia Law School, 1953) boasts more than 40 years of legal expertise, ranging from prosecutorial duties as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Manhattan to counsel for the Museum of Modern Art. Among her more high profile judicial moments was her presiding over the Martha Stewart 2004 trial and conviction. Nowhere in her CV, however, appears her training or vocation as a scholar of Islam or medieval history.

And yet, in the sentencing stage of the Shahzad proceedings, Judge Cedarbaum proceeded to spar with the self-admitted jihadist, devout Muslim and terrorist, lecturing him - and presumably the rest of us - about the irenic nature of the Koran and the chivalrous, 12th century conqueror, Saladin. According to Judge Cedarbaum, Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb " was a very moderate man" who "didn't want to kill people." We do not know how extensive Judge Cedarbaum's knowledge of Islam's holiest text is, nor do we know what influenced her encomium for one of Islam's most successful imperialists, Saladin, but we can guess.

Of all the belching platitudes surrounding "the religion of peace" which have served to attenuate the scores of jihadist and discriminatory passages in the Koran, none have proved more problematic and constantly intoned than Sura 5, verse 32:

Any beginning student of the Talmud will recognize the earlier Jewish thought from Sanhedrin 37a:

But note the stipulation within the later Koran:

Now that's a lot of wiggle room to comfort the afflicters. Obstruction of Dawa (Muslim proselytization), blasphemy, apostasy and a host of other perceived offenses against the propagation of the faith can negate the purported "mercy" of the passage, and, indeed, the bloody history of Jihad attests to the caveat's effectiveness. Or perhaps Judge Cedarbaum relied on the ad nauseam citing of Sura 2, verse 256:

followed by the later verse 9:29:

Somehow, this lovely commandment never makes it past the door of interfaith gatherings.

Of course, Judge Cedarbaum must be well-versed in the centuries-old tradition of Koranic Abrogation in which the Meccan or earlier Suras are superseded - or abrogated - by the later, more militant verses produced by Mohammed's reign in Medina.

As for the Judge's characterization of Saladin as "moderate", no doubt partly informed by the absurdly drawn 2005 Ridley Scott movie, Kingdom of Heaven, whose message of Christian and European perfidy vs. Islamic chivalry reeked of 21st century PC silliness, we can imagine that her paean to the Kurdish, Muslim 12th century conqueror was greeted with gales of laughter in the weapons bazaars of Waziristan: "It's working! Now a Jew judge in New York pays tribute to Saladin and honors our Koran!"

Second only to Osama bin Laden in adulation as the scourge of the West, Saladin is most often cited by Jihadists as the exemplum of militant triumphalism over the Crusaders and Zionists. What delicious irony the troglodyte mujahedeen devouts of the East must be experiencing to have a Jewish, American judge buy into all this self-deprecating and self-defeating nonsense.

Aside from Hollywood's endless exculpation of Jihad, Judge Cedarbaum's (and Ridley Scott's absurd film as well) assessment of the medieval Sunni Kurdish warlord is doubtless informed by Sir Walter Scott's 1825 flattering depiction in The Talisman and later, through the work of British orientalist, Stanley Lane Poole, whose Saladin and the Fall of Jerusalem published in 1898, set the tone for decades of apologists for Jihad. The murkiness of medieval historiography nothwithstanding, Saladin's gestures during the siege of Jerusalem in 1187 may be accurate or they may be embellishments by various of Saladin's associates, namely Imad al Din al Isfahani and Baha al din ibn Shadad, his secretary and qadi of the army respectively. It is fair to say, however, that modern Jihadists do not laud Saladin for his "moderation" but for his military skill and conquests, especially against the West.

On balance, given the more or less contemporary European accounts, Saladin's conduct in bello, given the barbarity of the times, was occasionally honorable. By no rational measure, however, can he be described as "moderate." He was ambitious, bold and clever in his pursuit of power and was arguably more brutal towards his Muslim rivals than to the Crusaders. Perhaps the stories of his chivalrous gestures are accurate up to a point in his dealings with the "Franks", but by modern standards his practice of slaughtering thousands of prisoners who refused the "invitation" to Islam is well documented as well as his practice of ransoming prisoners; following the Battle of Hattin in 1187, most of those who could not come up with the cash were sold into slavery.

Harsher still was Saladin's treatment of enemies within Islam in his drive to colonize parts of modern day Iraq and Syria and to establish his dynasty in Egypt. The Zangid rulers of Mosul were besieged and slaughtered just prior to his battle with the Crusaders. Compared with mass murderers like Mahmud of Ghazni whose annual campaigns against Hindus in the tenth century left hundreds of thousands dead, Saladin's conduct may not be considered genocidal, but hardly 'moderate."

In his groundbreaking work on Saladin, Andrew Ehrenkreutz notes the "monotonous pastiches presenting a noble portrait of the Sultan (Saladin) whose chivalry excited the admiration of the Crusaders." Similarly, Yaacov Lev stresses Saladin's skilled and relentless pursuit of power in replacing the Ismaili Fatimid rulers of Egypt with his own Ayyub dynasty. "Moderation" was not a tactic employed by him in extending his rule over much of the Middle East.

Perhaps the well-meaning judge in Manhattan should follow Joe Friday's advice in her pronouncements: "Just the facts, ma'm" As for her suggestion that the defendant "spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people.", we'd all better hope that Mr. Shahzad never gets out.