CAIR’s Hypocrisy on Slavery

Published originally under the title "Muslims Denounce Confederate Names, Pot Calls Kettle Black."

Ahnaf Kalam

The Council on American-Islamic Relations — which goes by the cloying acronym, CAIR — is again exposing itself for what it is: an Islamist group dedicated to “sabotaging” and “destroying the Western civilization from within.”

Following news that Fort Hood in Texas was changing its name to Fort Cavazos, CAIR exulted in a press release. Originally named after John Bell Wood, a Confederate general, and now named after the first Latino to become a general in the U.S. Army, CAIR welcomed the change, since, “American military bases should not be named,” said CAIR rep, Ibrahim Hooper, after those who sought “to preserve slavery. We welcome this name change and call on all remnants of the Confederacy to be removed nationwide.”

Hooper went on to boast about how CAIR had “repeatedly called for the removal of Confederate names, holidays, flags, statues, and symbols nationwide.”

The rank hypocrisy is so palpable one scarcely knows where to begin.

The Site of a Jihad Slaughter

So let’s begin with Fort Hood itself — the one military base that you’d think CAIR would steer away from lest the public remember its significance. After all, it was there that a Muslim-American man — a U.S. Army major and “psychiatrist,” no less — went on a shooting rampage in 2009, murdering 13 Americans (including a pregnant woman) and seriously injuring 30.

While the media and talking heads had offered the same tired reasons to rationalize Nidal Hasan’s terrorism — that he was “picked on,” that he was “mentally unbalanced” — the fact is, the priorities of this “observant Muslim who prayed daily,” which included murdering fellow Americans in cold blood rather than be deployed against Muslims, comport perfectly with several Islamic doctrines (as detailed and documented in this 2009 article).

As to Ibrahim Hooper’s laughable assertion that “American military bases should not be named” after those who sought “to preserve slavery” — where does one begin?

A Religion Founded by a Slave Trader

From its inception to the present, for nearly 1,400 years, Islam — beginning with Muhammad — has promoted, practiced, and done everything to preserve slavery. Both the words and deeds of the “prophet” (who had many slaves and sex-slaves), and the Koran — which together establish what is and is not permissible for Muslims — unequivocally permit slavery and sex-slavery (see here and here for copious documentation).

It seems futile here to give examples (I have already documented in two books how Muslims enslaved many millions of just European Christians throughout the centuries). Suffice to say, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, a French historian specializing in slavery “estimates that the Islamic enslavement of whites far surpasses the transatlantic trade in black slaves.”

Most Slaveowners Worldwide Today Are Muslim

As for the specific spectre of sex-slavery in Islam, a report recently appeared documenting how Christian women are sexually abused, raped, and enslaved with great frequency in portions of the Muslim world. Examples follow:

  • Saudi Arabia: "[R]ape and sexual assault are commonplace across Saudi Arabia for the thousands of non-Saudi (especially Asian and African) housemaids across the country who are Christian (or non-Islamic), a position in which they are commonly abused and virtually treated as slaves.”
  • United Arab Emirates: “House-maids working in the UAE often face sexual harassment or slave-like treatment.”
  • Yemen: “Christian women and girls risk being sexually abused at the hands of militias due to the concept of ‘anfal’ [Arabic for “spoils”], which permits non-Muslims in some circumstances to be treated as slaves as part of the spoils of war (Quran, Surah Al-Anfal).”
  • Nigeria: "[Christian] Women and girls have been raped, forced into sexual slavery, kidnapped for ransom and killed.”
  • Democratic Republic of Congo: “Christian women are vulnerable to abduction, rape, trafficking, and sexual slavery, especially by ADF [Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamic terror group].

America’s First War: Against Muslim Slave Traders

It is further ironic to note that the United States’ first exposure to Islam came by way of Muslims abducting and enslaving American sailors, leading to U.S.'s very first war as a nation, the Barbary War. Earlier, in an effort to negotiate a release of the American slaves, ambassadors Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with a Muslim ambassador, Abdul Rahman Adja. The Founders later summarized this meeting in a letter to Congress:

We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Muslims’] pretentions to make war upon [and enslave] nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners... [dated March 28, 1786].

It goes beyond saying, incidentally, that Islam never took any initiative to ban slavery. Rather, the West, during the much maligned colonial era, compelled Muslim nations to give up the dehumanizing practice, even though it continued then, and increasingly now, to flourish underground — unsurprisingly so, since Islam permits it.

Black Slaves Today... in Muslim Countries

For example, eight of the top ten nations where slavery is most prevalent today are Islamic. Moreover, according to a 2019 report titled, “Black Slavery exists today in Muslim-dominated African nations,”

Today, an estimated 529,000 to 869,000 black men, women and children are still slaves. They are bought, owned, sold, and traded by Arab and Muslim masters in five African countries. This statistic estimates those enslaved in Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, and Sudan. It excludes Nigeria, for which there are no tangible estimates.

Other reports do give a number for Nigeria — where Muslims are waging a genocidal jihad against Christians — and that number is higher than for all the other nations combined: 1,384,000 slaves as of 2018.

But the hypocrisy of CAIR — whose delicate sensibilities caused it to be outraged that an American fort was named after a Confederate — does not end here. All throughout the Islamic world, Muslims regularly celebrate “heroes” whose claim to fame was to have massacred and enslaved countless non-Muslims (“infidels”).

Celebrating Muslim Mass Enslavement of Christians

Only recently, on May 29, Turkey celebrated the 1453 conquest of Constantinople (now Istanbul), when Muslims slaughtered tens of thousands and enslaved as many as 45,000 Christians for the sole crime of being Christian. Statues and monuments dedicated to the architect of that well-documented atrocity, Ottoman Sultan Muhammad (or Mehmet) II, an open pedophile, litter the streets of Turkey as well as other Muslim nations.

In this regard, what Muslims do is significantly worse than what Americans are accused of doing: naming a military base — which by nature is militant — after a Confederate general is one thing; Muslims, on the other hand, are in the habit of naming mosques — which Westerners naively deem as peaceful places of worship — after jihadist heroes (terrorists in Western parlance).

Earlier this week, for example, much hype and fanfare accompanied the reopening of Baibars Mosque in Egypt. A former slave-soldier who assassinated his way to the sultanate of Egypt, al-Zaher Baibars (1223-1277) was a notorious persecutor of religious minorities under his sway. He had many Christians and Jews beheaded or burned alive for refusing to convert to Islam, destroyed or converted numerous churches and synagogues into mosques, and enslaved many Europeans. Following his conquest of Antioch in 1268, he boasted in a letter to Christians that if they were there,

You would have seen ... your women sold [as slaves] four at a time and bought for a dinar of your [own] money! You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed .... your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests, and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes.

Yet, here is Egypt, spending over 7 million USD (a significant amount for the North African nation), to renovate a mosque in honor of this same Baibars. Meanwhile, other Muslims, such as CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper, are scolding Americans for having a military base named after a Confederate general who, whatever his “sins,” must be accounted a saint compared to the sorts of men Muslims name, not just their military bases after, but mosques.

Destroying the West from Within

Of course, none of this is surprising: CAIR — which vehemently hates and seeks to censor accurate history — is an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the largest terrorist funding case in U.S. history; a designated “terrorist organization” for nations allied to America; and a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood in America, which, as mentioned, is committed to “sabotaging” and “destroying the Western civilization from within.”

And what better way to do that then get Americans and Europeans to disavow their heritage and its masculine defenders, and instead prop up men-in-drag for “inspiration” — even as the rest of the world continues to be fueled by its militant past and heroes?

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Raymond Ibrahim, a specialist in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS and has been published by the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Weekly Standard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim guest lectures at universities, briefs governmental agencies, and testifies before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
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