If it’s necessary to tear down statues of Edward Colston, shouldn’t it likewise be necessary to tear down mosques? After all, both are monuments to slave traders from centuries ago.
The BLM movement, and the left generally, focus exclusively on the slave trade as practised by white Europeans. Which seems odd, considering that white Europeans were probably the last culture to take up extensive slave-trading and the first to abolish slavery altogether.
But admitting the shocking extent of slavery as practised by non-white, non-European, non-Christians isn’t on BLM’s agenda.
Because European slavery is only the motte; the damnation and genocidal erasure of white, European Christian culture is the bailey.
It is one thing to hold dead white men historically culpable for the transatlantic slave trade and argue against their veneration in the public square. It is quite another to use the distant past as a weapon of collective guilt against one ethnic group, especially when members of that group rose up to end slavery not only in the West but across the world.
As Jordan Peterson says, applying collective guilt to a group is “an absolutely terrible thing to do…It’s murderous, pushed to its extreme. And we’ve seen that many, many times.”
The fuller history of slavery shows it arises from human nature, not race. Many ethnic and religious groups traded in slaves. The Arab slave trade lasted for centuries and its quarry included white people. Historian Robert Davis estimates more than a million Christian Europeans were enslaved in North African trade from the 16th century to the 18th century. It was notorious for the high percentage of girls and women trafficked into sexual slavery.
From the early 19th century onward, the white West has entirely rejected slavery. The Islamic world didn’t legally end slavery until late in the 20th century. Mauritania became the last country in the world to officially ban slavery – although it was not actually criminalised (under international pressure) until 2007.
Yet slavery more or less openly persists in Mauritania – and elsewhere in much of the Islamic world.
In more recent years, Islamic State sexually enslaved Christians and Yazidis. Girls as young as 10 were abused by the Islamist army. Slaves were sold at market. It was an institutionalised practice defended in ItS literature by appeal to sharia law.
Yet Muslim activists like Yassmin Abdel-Magied have the audacity to castigate white Western nations over slavery that ended 150 years ago. She says nothing, however, about the slavery which was still not criminalised in her native Sudan when she was born – and which persisted until at least the late 2000s.
This was no “benign” slavery, either:
What’s Sudanese slavery like? One 11-year-old Christian boy told me about his first days in captivity: “I was told to be a Muslim several times, and I refused, which is why they cut off my finger.” Twelve-year-old Alokor Ngor Deng was taken as a slave in 1993. She has not seen her mother since the slave raiders sold the two to different masters. Thirteen-year-old Akon was seized by Sudanese military while in her village five years ago. She was gang-raped by six government soldiers, and witnessed seven executions before being sold to a Sudanese Arab.
Many freed slaves bore signs of beatings, burnings and other tortures. More than three-quarters of formerly enslaved women and girls reported rapes.
This does not, of course, assign collective guilt to all Muslims. But it does mean that the activists denigrating the white West perhaps ought to take a long, uncomfortable look at the state of their own backyard.
If they really cared about the injustice of slavery, they might focus on the modern day trade. There are an estimated 40 million people suffering in slavery today. Common forms of the trade in human beings are forced marriage, sex slavery, child slavery and forced labour. The Global Slavery Index reveals that the countries with the highest number of slaves are India, China, Pakistan, North Korea, Nigeria, Iran, Indonesia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Russia, and the Philippines.
Why does BLM focus on slavery that ended centuries ago rather than the 40 million strong slave trade today? Is it because much of the trade is concentrated in non-Western countries and arises from traditional cultural practices in India, the Middle East and Africa?
It is much easier to rage against dead white men than brave the might of modern slavery.
It also serves the power and ideological aspirations of the likes of BLM.
The simple fact is that they really don’t care about slavery, except as a bludgeon against the white, Western, liberal democratic world. That’s their real agenda.
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.