New Zealand Greens’ list MP Golriz Ghahraman sure does like to talk up the evils of slavery and colonialism. She wants statues of New Zealand’s “colonial past” removed. She also makes a big noise about supporting the “Black Lives Matter” movement, whose central platform is “reparations” for slavery.
But there’s one kind of colonialism and slavery Ms Ghaharaman is notably silent about. Islamic empires brutally conquered countries from Europe to Africa and the Near East for centuries. Then there’s the slavery.
The Arab Muslim slave trade also known as the trans-Saharan trade or Eastern slave trade is billed as the longest, having happened for more than 1300 years while taking millions of Africans away from their continent to work in foreign land in the most inhumane conditions.
Ms Ghahraman is also voluble about “genocide” (despite posing for smiley selfies with the convicted genocidaire she represented in court). Except, again, there’s one genocide she dares not name.
Scholars have christened it a veiled genocide, attributing the tag line to the most humiliating and near-death experience slaves were subjected to, from capture in slave markets to labour fields abroad and the harrowing journey in between.
While official figures on the exact number of slaves captured from Africa in the Trans Sahara trade are contested, most scholars put the estimate at about nine million.
Which makes the 338,000 slaves shipped to the United States look a bit paltry. Yet Golriz’s BLM mates just can’t shut up about that.
The TransAtlantic slave trade lasted for a little over three centuries.
“The Arabs raided sub-Saharan Africa for thirteen centuries without interruption. Most of the millions of men they deported have disappeared as a result of inhuman treatment. This painful page in the history of black people has apparently not been completely turned,” read a loosely translated excerpt from The Veiled Genocide a book by Tidiane N’Diaye, a Franco-Senegalese author and anthropologist.
If the Antebellum slave trade was unquestionably brutal and despicable, the Muslim slave trade was, unbelievably, even worse.
The Trans Saharan Caravan concentrated on the West African region straddling the Niger Valley to the Gulf of Guinea along the TransSaharan roads to slave markets in Maghreb and the Nile Basin. The voyage that world take up to three months involved inhumane conditions that saw slaves die along the way due to diseases, hunger and thirst. An estimated 50 percent of all slaves in this trade would die in transit.
While European merchants were interested in strongly built young men as labourers in their farms, the Arab merchants were more focused on concubinage capturing women and girls who were turned into sex slaves while living in harems. So high was the demand that the merchants would double the price of female slaves with the ratio of captured women to men being three to one.
Male slaves would work as field workers or guards at the harems. To ensure that they never reproduced in case they got intimate with their fellow female slaves, the men and boys were castrated and made eunuchs in a brutal operation where majority would lose their lives in the process.
“The practice of castration on black male slaves in the most inhumane manner, altered an entire generation as these men could not reproduce. The Arab masters sired children with the black female slaves. This devastation by the men saw those who survived committing suicide”
Liberty Mukomo, University of Nairobi Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies
But this is all ancient history, surely, Golriz?
And even as Europe, one of the key players in the African slave trade abolished the practice hundreds of years ago and the United States officially ended it in 1865, Arab countries continued the trade with majority ending it late in the 20th century. In Malawi, slavery was officially criminalized in 2007 with mentions of some Arab countries currently being involved albeit clandestinely.
Fair Planet
Not even clandestinely: a notable feature of ISIS and other Islamist regimes which took over countries such as Libya was the proliferation of open black slave markets and a grotesque trade in sex slaves.
In fact, modern Islamic sex slavery goes a lot closer to home for Ms Ghahraman.
Thousands of Iranian women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery abroad. The Sex Slave Trade is one of the most Profitable activities in Iran today. Iranian governments officials are involved in buying, selling and sexually abusing women and girls[…]
Al Arabiya’s “Inside Iran” report revealed that a child in Iran can be sold for $150.
GVNet
Of course, Golriz Ghahraman is no more responsible for the abhorrent slave trade in Iran today than any American today is responsible for the Antebellum slave trade in that country.
But she is responsible for what she says – or doesn’t say.
Golriz Ghahraman would hardly seem to be an apologist for the Iranian regime, given that she and her family fled the regime, after all.
So why is she so resolutely silent about the hideous reality of modern slavery in Iran?
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD
