I think the world has turned upside down—yesterday the New York Times ran an opinion piece (posted here) praising Sarah Palin (who dares to tell the truth) and then on the same day the Huffington Post reported on Arab racism and by doing so effectively points a finger of blame at the shameful international Leftists who are complicit in helping to hide Muslim Arab racism.
Blackpanther, I hope you are still lurking around here! You need to hear this!
From Rebecca Tinsley (who dares to tell the truth):
With the liberation of Libya come less happy reports from Amnesty and Physicians for Human Rights of rebels slaughtering scores of black Africans, believing they were all pro-Gaddafi mercenaries. While the dictator did hire some fighters from sub-Saharan Africa, the vast majority of black Africans in Libya are entirely innocent immigrants, one million of whom are guest workers.
According to a Cairo-based think tank, many of the Sudanese being targeted by Libyans are refugees escaping the ethnic cleansing of black Africans in Darfur and the South Kordofan region of Sudan. They have escaped one form of Arab racism, only to find another.
The racism is rooted in oh ONLY about 14 centuries of Arabs capturing and enslaving Africans.
None of this has happened in a vacuum: in 2000 there were deadly anti-immigrant riots in Libya. Nor is there anything unusual about Libyan attitudes: Arab racism toward black Africans is commonplace, even if it remains a taboo subject. For the Nobel Prize winning novelist Wole Soyinka, the unwillingness to confront Arab racism is rooted in the role of Arabs in the slave trade. “Arabs and Islam are guilty of the cultural and spiritual savaging of the Continent,” he writes.
The Ethiopian academic Mekuria Bulcha estimates that Arab traders sold 17 million Africans to the Middle East and Asia between the sixth and twentieth centuries. Yet, there is an almost total reluctance on the part of Arab intellectuals to examine their central role in slavery, past or present.
According to Naiwu Osahon, of the Pan Africa Movement, “Africans are treated like the scum of the earth” throughout the Arab world. He claims that the Arab policy has been “elimination, displacement, separation, marginalization and suppression” of black Africans since the 7th century.
By the way, history also tells us that many black Africans became Muslims only to save themselves from complete annihilation by Arab Muslims.
In Egypt, we are racists!
Arguably it continues to this day. Black African guest workers in Egypt, Algeria and Libya tell of being publicly ridiculed and physically assaulted by Arabs. Egyptian writer Mona Eltahawy tells of watching a Sudanese girl being assaulted and tormented on the Cairo Metro, concluding, “We are racist people in Egypt and we are in deep denial.” She makes a wider point, that the Arab world has ignored the suffering of Darfur because the victims are black. “We only pay attention when America and Israel behave badly.“
Hey, maybe later this month Wade and the union/community organizers can set those Egyptian ‘freedom fighting friends of Obama’ straight on how they treat their black brothers.
Arabs using blacks for target practice:
In the early 1900s Winston Churchill was appalled to see the Arab Sudanese armed forces using the black African Nuba people for target practice. [maybe Barack was too quick to send that bust of Churchill back to England—ed]. Nothing has changed, except that now they shoot them from helicopter gunships hovering over the Nuba Mountains where the black Africans citizens have fled. In modern Sudan it is standard practice for those Sudanese who define themselves as Arab to call black African Sudanese ‘abid’ or slave to their faces; the fact that there has been intermarriage for years is ignored.
The Canadian academic Salim Mansur claims: “Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long, turbulent record.”
However, any attempt to confront persistent Arab racism is shouted down by appeals to Arab/African solidarity against the neo-colonialist West.
Amazing, simply amazing! What is next, some Leftist Feminist (I know its redundant) will admit that women are abused in Muslim countries. Now, that will be the day!