Contemporary Slavery

I'm currently finishing up a book by Grove City College historian Paul Kengor, the title of which is The Worst of Indignities. It's a history of the Catholic Church's opposition to slavery, an opposition which was the first ever to emerge anywhere in the world and which remained almost completely consistent for over 1600 years.

In the final section of the work, Kengor discusses slavery as it exists today. What follows focuses on chattel slavery although sex slavery and other forms of bondage are also rampant in the contemporary world.

The chattel slavery practiced today is extremely cruel and largely a Muslim enterprise endorsed in the Koran. The victims of this barbaric practice are often Christians, especially black African Christians.

An article by journalist David Aikman on slavery in Sudan that Kengor discusses revealed that in the mid-1990s Christian slaves could be bought for as little as $15 but young women brought much higher prices.

Aikman writes that,

Many slave-owners would subject their human chattel to forcible genital mutilation. Slaves who tried to escape or displeased their owners were either beaten savagely, tied down in the sun without water, or subjected to what some escapees called "the insect treatment." This involved stuffing tiny insects into the victims ears, then sealing them with wax or small stones, and a scarf tied tightly around the head. Some victims ... simply went insane.

The skin of some ex-slaves was completely worn off their legs after being led along for days by ropes tied to camels.

Christians in the Middle East suffered horribly under the ISIS caliphate, especially in 2014 when ISIS was at its most powerful. During that time Islamists killed or enslaved about 10,000 Yazidi Christians in Iraq, subjecting the women and girls to systematic rape.

It's believed that more than 2,700 Yazidi women and children remain in ISIS captivity even though ISIS has been largely obliterated since 2019.

Tel Aviv University Professor Ehud Toledano, an expert on Islamic slavery, states that Muslims who engage in this horrific practice are "in full compliance with Koranic understanding....and that which the Prophet (Muhammad) has permitted, Muslims cannot forbid."

Kengor quotes black economist Thomas Sowell who writes of the seeming

inexplicable contrast between the fiery rhetoric about past slavery in the United States used by those who pass over in utter silence the traumas of slavery that still exist in Mauritania, the Sudan, and parts of Nigeria and Benin....Why so much concern for dead people who are now beyond our help than for living human beings suffering the burdens and humiliations of slavery today? Why does a verbal picture of the abuses of slaves in centuries past arouse far more response than contemporary photographs of present-day slaves....?

It causes one to wonder how much our contemporary justice warriors really care about those who are enslaved and how much they just want to use the historical issue to bash white America.