If President Obama wants to draw a moral equivalence between religions, he should know some history.
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Ralph Peters 
Defending
Islam in front of our religious leaders last week, our president not
only invoked the Crusades but seized the opportunity to excoriate the
United States for formerly justifying chattel slavery in Christian
terms, his tone suggesting that chains are rattling still. Indeed, along
with the treatment of American Indians, slavery remains a horrid blot
on our past, one that not even the blood that 750,000 Americans shed in
the war ending the “peculiar institution” washed away (forget that we
are the only nation that fought a civil war to free its slaves).
We’re guilty. Forever. And nothing can lessen our shame.
But in support of the Left’s current vogue for “fairness,” I now expect our president to follow up by convening a special meeting of Muslim clerics to chastise them for the 14 centuries of slavery under Islam that, in its scope, scale, duration, and cruelty, exceeded the outrages of any other slave-based civilization.
In seizing non-Muslims as slaves, the human beasts of the Islamic State caliphate are only carrying on an honored tradition. That is Islam, Mr. President. And it always has been.
We’re guilty. Forever. And nothing can lessen our shame.
But in support of the Left’s current vogue for “fairness,” I now expect our president to follow up by convening a special meeting of Muslim clerics to chastise them for the 14 centuries of slavery under Islam that, in its scope, scale, duration, and cruelty, exceeded the outrages of any other slave-based civilization.
In seizing non-Muslims as slaves, the human beasts of the Islamic State caliphate are only carrying on an honored tradition. That is Islam, Mr. President. And it always has been.
But let us, unlike our president, be honest. The Prophet Mohammed is reputed to have freed dozens of his slaves and to have encouraged his followers to release theirs. But the caliphs who followed the Prophet found that admonition inconvenient. In no time, Islamic jurisprudence produced detailed codes for seizing, keeping, and punishing non-Muslim slaves.
And so began the greatest slave-taking venture in history. Politically correct campus commissars would have us believe that the only men ever enslaved were black and the only slavers were white. Not quite. The first slave-labor plantations on an industrial scale were in not the Mississippi Delta but the Mesopotamian Delta, around Basra during the Arab “Golden Age.” For centuries, millions of blacks from Africa and brown-skinned captives from the subcontinent were put to work in conditions that led, in the late ninth century, to the greatest slave revolt known to historians, the 15-year Revolt of the Zanj (East African blacks), the scale of which eclipsed the better-known Spartacus uprising against Rome or the Haitian struggle for freedom. At its peak, perhaps a half-million slaves, impoverished Arabs and Bedouins, repeatedly defeated the sultan’s armies. At the climax of the uprising, Basra was obliterated amid a regional apocalypse.
Slaves thereafter were more strictly disciplined and dispersed, but the institution boomed throughout Islam’s realms. Compared to the mega-mall slave markets of Damascus and Baghdad, of Cairo, Tunis, and Bakhchisaray, and, later, of Timbuktu and Istanbul, the slave pens of Charleston and New Orleans were country stores.
As the Ottoman claw choked one third of Europe, the enslavement of Africans continued unabated, but the real prizes now had white skins (blonde females and pretty boys were especially prized). Each of the literally hundreds of Ottoman and Tartar invasions and slave-taking raids into the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, southern Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even Russia herded thousands and tens of thousands of prisoners southward in vast drives of human cattle. The Eurasian steppes and the Balkan mountain passes shone white with the bones of millions of captives who did not survive the journey.
Muslim pirates plagued the Mediterranean, raiding the lands not occupied by Muslims, to fill their slave markets and man the oars of their galleys — the latter a fate worse than that of plantation hands. Adventurous corsairs even raided coastal England and Ireland, kidnapping the populations of entire towns.
Apologists for Islam — and they are legion — claim that Muslim rule over conquered peoples was enlightened, that conquered Christians and Jews had only to pay the dhimmi tax and everything was fine. Tell that tale over the graves of the Balkan and Greek families forced to send their fittest, finest sons to the Sublime Porte of the sultan to be brought up as Muslims. The strongest young boys trained as janissaries, Ottoman shock troops, to make war on the frontiers against Christians and take more slaves. Others were trained for administrative duties. Indeed, some slaves rose high under both Arabs and Ottomans. But as the soldier-scholar Peter G. Tsouras reminded me, millions of males were castrated to suit the warped values of societies dysfunctional beyond Freud’s darkest dreams.
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