The African Slave Trade Is Still Flourishing

Charles Jacobs is the president of the American Anti-Slavery Group. A few years ago he wrote a very important and interesting piece for The Federalist in which he informed us that black Africans are still being bought and sold by slavers in Africa, but there's very little interest in doing anything about it in Western nations or the press.

Unfortunately, little has changed since he wrote that column. Perhaps that's because the perpetrators are mostly Arab Muslims, a favored class among Western media liberals due to their status as an historically "oppressed" group, and the victims of this odious trafficking are largely Christian, and thus not deemed worthy of media attention.

If Israelis were selling Palestinians into bondage, or white South Africans were once again imposing apartheid on blacks it'd be all we'd be hearing from our media megaphones, but Arab Muslims enslaving black Christians elicits little more than a yawn from our "compassionate" elites. They're too preoccupied with climate change and imprisoning Donald Trump to concern themselves with genuine human rights atrocities.

Here are a few excerpts from Jacobs' article:

Every day across the African continent, black men, women, and children are captured, bought, and sold into slavery with the Western world paying scant attention. Human rights groups have marched and battled against abuses noticeably less cruel and evil than human bondage, yet no major organization has attempted to free today’s black slaves, much less taken meaningful steps to raise awareness about their plight.

For instance, in Mauritania, although slavery has been legally banned five times since 1961, it nevertheless persists with tens of thousands of blacks continuing to be held in bondage. While it is forbidden in the Qur’an for Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, in Mauritania, racism trumps religious doctrine — as it did in the West — as Arab and Berber Muslims enslave African Muslims.

Americans first heard about Islamist slave raids in Nigeria when Michelle Obama made it a cause célèbre with her “#BringBackOurGirls” hashtag, but interest quickly faded, and Boko Haram continued to kidnap hundreds of Christian girls into jihad slavery. So cruel are the events of their captivity that some girls prefer death as suicide bombers to the life of a slave.

Today, Fulani Muslim herdsmen raid Christian villages, massacring their inhabitants. President Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim, has done relatively little to stop the assaults, even in the face of demands for action from the White House.

In Algeria, sub-Saharan Africans fleeing violence and poverty are enslaved by Algerian Arabs as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. According to the Global Slavery Index (GSI), 106,000 black Africans are estimated to be enslaved in Algeria. Migrant women and children of both sexes risk being forced into sexual slavery, while men perform unskilled labor.

The GSI estimates as many as 48,000 migrants are enslaved in Libya, with survivors reporting torture and sexual slavery.

Jacobs goes on to discuss two factors impeding any effective action that might eliminate this horrific practice, or at least diminish it. You can read about these and more of what Jacobs has to say about this modern plague at the link.