Islamic Human Rights: The Right to Be Enslaved

Jay Tea follows up on the post I referenced in Islam and Human Rights. His latest is A Second Look — And It’s Worse Than I Thought.

Longtime detractor and contrarian “Herman” took issue with my position, and made a comparison between the Charter and the works of the Founding Fathers — pointing out that many of them were slave owners, attempting — I think — to strike a sort of moral equivalence between them and the men behind the Charter.

I don’t accept this, but I think that the point Herman raises has some rather fascinating implications — ones that escaped him.

If we grant Herman his point for the moment, that would put the Arab League at the same moral point that we ourselves were at over 200 years ago. Those were the days when women were chattel, blacks often property, and only white male landowners were allowed to vote. Capital and corporal punishment was a given, and Indians were subhuman savages.

While this would be an improvement over the traditional Arab beliefs, it’s hardly a sign of hope for them. Indeed, if you listen to them, they are morally superior to us already — they see no reason to improve things.

Jay Tea goes on to make the point that the source of authority for our Constitution and the source of authority for this Charter are quite different. But to hang out on his first point – raising the topic of slave ownership is apt in some ways, because tens of thousands of people are in actual slavery – not metaphorical shackles, but actual shackles – right now.

I don’t refer to the fact that slavery was legally abolished in Saudi Arabia less than 50 years ago, or to isolated cases of slavery like this one in Colorado. I mean this:

[I]n the North African country of Mauritania, for example, black Africans serve the lighter-skinned Arab-Berber communities. Though slavery was legally abolished there in 1980, today 90,000 slaves continue to serve the Muslim Berber ruling class. Similarly, in the African country of Sudan, Arab northerners are known to raid the villages in the South — killing all the men and taking the women and children to be auctioned off and sold into slavery.

Not to mention Sudan, Niger, Mali, Chad, Ethiopia and other countries where slavery and genocide by Muslims is happening right now, without much in the way of comment by anybody, particularly by Muslims who whine about how oppressed they are in the United States and Europe.

There is no massive internal debate in the ummah about the morality and correctness of the fact of Islamic slavery, a debate of the sort that was held here as the Declaration of Independence was being debated.  There is no PR campaign to educate people on how wrong this is and how it defames Muhammed’s name.  The Saudis, who have donated billions to American universities to educate us on how good, peaceful and misunderstood Islam is, can’t seem to find any resources to educate their African Arab brethren on the goodness and peacefulness that is Islam.  Anybody care to speculate why that is?