Strange Bedfellows: American Blacks and Arab Slavers 

Strange Bedfellows: American Blacks and Arab Slavers

By Mike Konrad

Politics make strange bedfellows and none could be more oddly paired than the present coordination of Black and Arab sympathizers, as is evinced in this photo of a mural of George Floyd on the Palestinian side of Israel’s security wall.
For some time now, black American and Palestinian sympathizers have tried to make common cause with each other. The most famous example would be that of Marc Lamont Hill, a former CNN commentator, and the words he delivered to the United Nations:

"We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea," -- YouTube

The phrase, “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea,” are not-so-coded words which call for the destruction of Israel.
Unfortunately, many American blacks have fallen for this halcyon view of Arab-black solidarity.
What is rarely addressed is that the Arabic root for slave and black is the same: A-B-D.  The word, Abeed is considered equivalent to the American vulgarity used for blacks. 

The Arab community knows this word all too well; “Abeed” is a derogatory Arabic slang term that is used to refer to Black people. This word is almost synonymous with the N- word. -- Muslim Girl

The sad fact is that the traffic in blacks as slaves is almost certainly traceable to Islam.

[H]ow many recall that Arab slavers were the first, and last, in modern times to ship millions of Africans out of the continent as slaves? And that Arab slavers preferred more African women to men? -- New African

It can be argued that the transatlantic slave trade started with Islam. Prior to 1492, it had often been the practice of Europeans to enslave other whites.

The most important source of slaves in medieval Europe... was the coast of Bosnia on the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea. The word ‘slave’ and its cognates in most modern European languages is itself derived from ‘sclavus’ meaning ‘slav’, the ethnic name for the inhabitants of this region… -- New African

When the open fields of the Americas required cheap labor, the Arabs introduced Europeans to black slavery. This slave trade continued long after the Western World outlawed slavery.

After abolishing their own trade in African slaves, [Europeans would highlight] the wickedness of the Arab slavers who continued to enslave Africans well into the first decades of the 20th century. Even to this day, Arab slavers are still at work in Sudan and Mauritania, buying and selling black Africans. -- New African

So what can we say about this Arabic slave trade? Was it worse or better than the Western variety?

[A]t least, 80 percent of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave market, it is believed that the death toll from 1400 years of Arab and Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been as high as 112 Millions.  When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the trans-Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 Million people. -- John Allembillah Azumah, author of The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue

Notice that 1400 years is given for the length of Muslim slave raids into Africa. That is the whole of Islamic history. Almost certainly, Arabs were enslaving blacks before Islam, and the numbers are therefore much higher. The transatlantic slave trade did not start until after Columbus discovered the New World, and so we find that Islam’s enslavement of blacks is far greater -- and worse yet, ongoing -- than any guilt borne by the West.

The Arab slave trade often had a preference for women, for their harems. Men were often castrated, with high fatality rates.

The castration of male slaves soon became a habit among slave traders due to the fact that castrated boys were in higher demand. They were noted to work faster and more efficient and stronger and were not a threat to slave masters and owners who feared that their wives, concubines and female slaves would have affairs with them. Face 2 Face Africa

Be aware that this is still ongoing.

[S]lavery was not eliminated. Mauritania continues the practice, failing to enforce a 2007 law designed to end the practice. Anti-Slavery International reports that slavery is still to be found in Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Chad and Sudan. “People born into descent-based slavery face a lifetime of exploitation and are treated as property by their so-called ‘masters’. -- New Statesman

Mauritania, Niger, and Mali are overwhelmingly Muslim.  While Chad is about 44% Christian, the Arabs/Berbers [ie: Muslims] still purchase child slaves from among the darker Christians to the south.

Samson was sold by his black African parents in southern Chad to Arab herdsman for the price of a calf…
Away from his parents and his playmates, life was tough for Samson. He was forced to abandon his native Sara language and Christian religion in order to learn Arabic and practice Islam.   -- The New Humanitarian

While not excusing Christians who sell their children, one has to wonder if the poverty which forced the Christians to do so was created by Islamic predations. And, it was well known that the wars in Sudan were fueled by partly-Arab Islamic Sudanese in the north feeling they had a right to enslave the Christian/animist Sudanese in the south.
Libya has become famous for its slave markets.

The open sale of human slaves -- migrants, refugees and Libyans -- shocked the world when it came to light in 2017. But without a capable government in the country, the practice has continued unabated while media interest ebbed. -- Newsweek

What no one dares say is that such enslavement of blacks is central to Islam… and not only does Islam enslave blacks. Islam will enslave anyone.

A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before. -- Ohio State News

In 1931, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported:

The Fellah [an Arab peasant] sometimes has to sell his sons as slaves at the cheapest price in order to use the money to keep body and soul together, and to keep his wife alive, el Dajani writes. I have been with my own eyes a thing of which I will tell you. A man stopped us as we were motoring to Haifa and said to the driver, “I have a little girl with me; we want to travel to Bireh (near Ramallah). Have you any room?” The driver said he had room, and the man brought back a young peasant child, not more than eight years of age. Her clothes were ragged and she was weeping. I asked the man where he had got the child, and he told me he had “hired” her and was sending her to his brother in Bireh. “Her parents”, he explained, “have let me take her for 25 years for the sum of £25. There is nothing to be surprised about, for there are persons who make worse bargains and buy girls outright -- for ever”. -- Slavery in Palestine

Oddly, there are Afro-Palestinians in the Holy Land. Almost assuredly, they were brought there as slaves by the Arabs, eventually being freed under the British mandate, when Arabs could no longer enforce their mastery. They still face social prejudice.
For any African-American to cut a deal with any Islamic cause is sheer insanity. Those who make apologies for Islamic slavery, or try to diminish its brutality, are liars. Whatever the sins of Western Christianity, they do not even begin to approach that of Islam.