Islam is not mentioned in this story, but it has everything to do with it. The West has been indulging for decades now in an orgy of self-flagellation, such that every man on the street and schoolchild knows that George Washington was just a slaveowner, and that colonialism is responsible for all the ills of the world. This all-enshrouding fog of self-incrimination that now envelopes the West is one of the chief reasons why it is proving so difficult to summon the will to resist the global jihad.
For Western analysts are unable to see nonwhite, non-Christian non-Westerners as anything but victims, and this feeds into the Never Apologize, Never Explain mode of the Islamic world, whose spokesmen have cannily adopted the victim status conferred upon them by Western Leftist intellectuals and are using it for their own purposes. No Muslims are consumed with guilt for the Muslim slave trade within and outside Africa, which was much more extensive than the trade conducted by Europeans, and which endures in some areas to this day. And no descendants of such slaves are asking any Muslim states or entities to examine that slave trade and make any atonement for it.
This is also symptomatic of the displacement of responsibility that stokes the global jihad: listening to Muslim spokesmen, you will get the impression that Muslims and Islamic states have lived up to now in a state of pristine innocence, interrupted only by utterly unprovoked attacks from fanatical Christian Westerners. The idea that the Islamic world might bear any responsibility for its past history or present actions does not enter the minds of either Western or Muslim analysts.
From Reuters, with thanks to Looney Tunes:
HARARE (Reuters) – Hands aloft and tears streaming down her cheeks, Alicia Chipoyi prayed in a high-pitched voice for spiritual healing for the wounds caused by years of slavery and colonization of Africa by Europeans.
Chipoyi was one of hundreds of people attending a European-African-American church prayer meeting on atonement and reconciliation for the West’s past role in the exploitation of what has become the world’s poorest continent.
In prayer sessions punctuated by wailing and weeping, song and dance, delegates said the West had to repent before God as the first step to reconciliation with Africa, which blames many of its problems on the legacies of enslavement and imperialism…
African leaders including Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe have in the past called for reparations from the West for its part in the slave trade.
Chris Seaton, who leads the Europe-Africa Reconciliation Process, a London-based Christian pressure group that seeks to persuade Europe to admit its past role in colonialism, said more Europeans were now aware of the “dark side of colonialism.”