HISTORY CAN NOT BE FOOLED AROUND WITH, BECAUSE IT MIGHT COME BACK TO HAUNT US
VHeadline.com, IL
Sept 27 2005
“History can be always be distorted or manipulated to suit the ends
of those who want to put forward their erroneous viewpoints”
Oscar Heck’s story of the conversation with an Haitian Taxi-driver
and his call for reparations by the White or European colonial powers
needs a rebuttal, which will at at the very least brings to the fore
all of the issues concerned.
That story of President Hugo Rafael Chavez of Venezuela being in real
danger and the overthrow of President Bertrand Aristide of Haiti,
got me thinking enough to do my research and point out the many facets
of the issue.
If we go back in biblical times and even before that, slavery has
been the normal attitude of conquerors. If we go back to beginning
of the Islamic period, we will note that slavery began in earnest
after 632 A.D. When an Arabian Caliph sent an agent named Mohammed
Ali to Africa to capture and bring back slaves to Arabia soon after
the 7th century. The Arabs did not consider Africans as humans,
but only as chattel
The beginnings of slavery date back to the period of the Muslim
conquest and forced conversion of Assyrian Christian Mesopotamia,
Zoroastrian Persia, the Christian Kingdoms in Aram (Lebanon and Syria),
Asia Minor, Jewish Palestine, Coptic Christian Egypt, Christian Nubia
(Sudan), Algeria, Morocco, Christian Carthage (Tunisia) and Libya,
and reached into the heart of darkest Africa, through the lands of
the Tauregs and into Timbuktu, Nigeria, Musabenbeque (Mozambique),
Zanzibar (which came under the Al-Busaid dynasty of Oman till January
1964), Somaliland, Cote d’Ivoire and into Uganda.
If we go even further, the countless Muslim invasions of Hindustan
(India), the first by Mahmud of Ghazni from Afghanistan into the
territory of Raja Dahir, followed by the Moghal (Mongol) invader
Taimur-the-Lame into Hindustan where they forced the conversion to
Islam of thousands upon thousands of Hindus there, does not speak
well of Islam.
It was in Africa that all the big Arab slave markets began, and they
traded with Portugal, Spain, Holland, France and Britain. On the
South-East African coast the biggest slave trader was a Principe
Henri of Pondoland, an African Christian who traded in slaves with
the Portuguese. The U.S. came into the slave trade much later after
its independence in 1783. Even in the case of New France, the Governor
Louis de Buade, sieur de Frontenac, comte de Palluau et Forest was the
first to bring African slaves to far North America in November 1689,
which was considered a great triumph of France. In most of Africa
Tribal Chiefs did big business by capturing neighboring tribes and
selling them as slaves to Arabs or Europeans.
This has been the bugbear of the unknown Africa, and has been denied by
many of today’s Africans themselves, but there is historical data that
can prove all of this to be true. Arab Dhows can still be found hugging
the East African coast in search of slaves in this very day and age.
There never has been any doubt that Spain created the Amerindian
slaves in the Americas, and later brought in African slaves to work
in the gold mines of the Spanish colonies in America.
Nor is there any doubt that the British and other colonial powers
brought African slaves to the Americas and the Caribbean, having
bought them from Muslim (Arab) slave-traders on the West African coast,
but the British also brought in indentured slaves from India.
These were people who were kidnapped and brought to Demarara (later
British Guiana) and Trinidad & Tobago. Go to Java, and other parts of
Indonesia and see the many Buddhist Temples, which are now derelict
because of the Islamic conquests and forced conversion to Islam. It
should be noted that no history book on Asia and Africa blames the
Arabs outright for their enslavement of the African people. The
reasons are evident. Many of the African and Asian countries are
Muslim, or have alliances with Islamic states and it would not serve
their interests to expose it.
Thus the blame for slavery is conveniently laid at the feet of the
European colonial powers.
It was Islamic conquests after the 7th century that brought about a
great influx of slavery. Of course it was Salau-ud-Din (Saladin) the
Kurd who captured 20,000 Christian men, women and children pilgrims
on their way to the Holy Land and sold them into slavery.
Salau-ud-Din also invaded Nubia and forced Christian monks to convert
to Islam or die. While most converted, one named Maurice would not,
and he was skinned alive on orders of Salau-ud-Din that is the Black
St. Maurice whose statue graces the Cologne Cathedral. Is this not
the great Salau-ud-Din who Muslims think of as an Islamic warrior?
Remember along the coasts of the Maghreb (North Africa) the Corsairs
did a thriving slave trade by attacking European and American shipping,
capturing the crews, which they then sold as slaves. But it was
Stephen Decatur of the U.S. Navy that foiled the Corsair raiders
and soundly defeated them. Then there is the Othman Turks whose
fleets attacking the Mediterranean coast of Europe captured and sold
thousands of Europeans into slavery. There was a big slave markets
in Tripoli, Libya, in Meknes, Morocco, in Tunis, Tunisia (Carthage),
Algiers, Algeria, all countries conquered and colonized by Arab from
the Islamic invasion of the 7th century. Also the capture by Muslim
pirates of the niece of the Empress Josephine (Beauharnois) of France,
who was returning from a convent in Martinique who later sold her to
the Sultan of Othman Turkey. Slavery was part and parcel of Islamic
society and we cannot get away from it. A perfect example of this,
is the Holy City of Meknes in Morocco, within whose walls were buried
alive some 20,000 white Christian slaves.
Neither Islamic society nor those who support them want these truths
to be known.
There are still slave markets in Arab countries, where one can bid
and buy a slave of any nationality. The present forced conversion
Christians to Islam in the Sudan by the Arab regime in Khartoum is
an on-going affair. In Marseilles, France alone every year almost
4,000 girls disappear. This is where there are gangs operating the
slave markets from Arab and African countries. To talk of European
colonialism of the past and forget the slavery of the present is to
be duplicitous.
We can only deal with the present, because there is not much of the
past that we can really remember.
We see no cry for justice and reparations asking Muslim countries
to make reparations for their enslavement of Europeans and others,
from those that now expect the former European colonial powers to
pay for their past sins. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia,
Morocco, Algeria and other Islamic states are just as guilty of the
enslavement of millions of people, if not more so than all the European
colonial powers put together. Are we to overlook Arab slavery, while
we only make it a point to remember the sins of Europe? No country
conquered by an Islamic force can ever remember its history beyond
the Islamic period. This is the religious brainwashing that has gone
on for centuries in the Middle East, Maghreb (North Africa), darkest
Africa and the Balkans.
Perhaps it is worth remembering that even the Othman Turks were past
masters at religious brainwashing, more so than all the communists
in Europe.
It is time to take serious overview of past history to get an honest
judgment of its reality vis-a-vis the Moors in Spain, the Arabs in
all of the present day Middle East and Africa, the Othman Turks in the
Balkans. Of course the Turks were in occupation of Bulgaria, Rumania,
Albania, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary for centuries and forced people to
convert to Islam or die. Why do think there is a Muslim Albania, Bosnia
and Herzegovina today, but by Turkish Islamic conquest centuries ago.
Do not forget the Turks still occupy Constantinople, which is part
of the Greek nation. Let’s not forget the Armenian genocide of 1915
-21 by Othman Turkey in which 1,500,000 people died. There is also
the Abyssinian genocide carried out by Italy in the mid1930s, both
of which have been conveniently forgotten by historians.
We cannot therefore judge the European colonial powers, if we do not
include Islamic invasions and slavery.
If we do not, then we cannot arrive at an honest judgment of all the
issues involved. We can deliberately pretend forgetfulness or omit
the facts that expose the reality of our time by selective amnesia,
but sooner or later it will catch up with us.
History can not be fooled around with, because it might come back to
haunt us.