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Defying international pressure, Islamic Republic of Mauritania refuses to free slaves

Aug 28, 2017 8:30 am By Robert Spencer

The Mauritanian agency that is supposed to be dealing with slavery is “run by the white Moor community there, and it focuses a lot on a poverty alleviation mandate and doesn’t really address the slavery issues.”

Where is the international outcry? In the U.S., the Left is enraged over 100-year-old statues of slaveowners, but what about the real live slaves suffering today in Mauritania? Would caring about them be “Islamophobic”? We constantly hear in the West that Islam forbids slavery, but reality is otherwise.

The Qur’an has Allah telling Muhammad that he has given him girls as sex slaves: “Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave girls whom God has given you as booty.” (Qur’an 33:50)

Muhammad bought slaves: “Jabir (Allah be pleased with him) reported: There came a slave and pledged allegiance to Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) on migration; he (the Holy Prophet) did not know that he was a slave. Then there came his master and demanded him back, whereupon Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: Sell him to me. And he bought him for two black slaves, and he did not afterwards take allegiance from anyone until he had asked him whether he was a slave (or a free man).” (Muslim 3901)

Muhammad took female Infidel captives as slaves: “Narrated Anas: The Prophet offered the Fajr Prayer near Khaibar when it was still dark and then said, ‘Allahu-Akbar! Khaibar is destroyed, for whenever we approach a (hostile) nation (to fight), then evil will be the morning for those who have been warned.’ Then the inhabitants of Khaibar came out running on the roads. The Prophet had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives. Safiya was amongst the captives. She first came in the share of Dahya Alkali but later on she belonged to the Prophet. The Prophet made her manumission as her ‘Mahr.’” (Bukhari 5.59.512) Mahr is bride price: Muhammad freed her and married her. But he didn’t do this to all his slaves:

Muhammad owned slaves: “Narrated Anas bin Malik: Allah’s Apostle was on a journey and he had a black slave called Anjasha, and he was driving the camels (very fast, and there were women riding on those camels). Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Waihaka (May Allah be merciful to you), O Anjasha! Drive slowly (the camels) with the glass vessels (women)!’” (Bukhari 8.73.182) There is no mention of Muhammad’s freeing Anjasha.

“US warned Mauritania’s ‘total failure’ on slavery should rule out trade benefits,” by Rebecca Ratcliffe, Guardian, August 25, 2017 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

The routine abuse of thousands of enslaved Mauritanians, including rape, beatings and unpaid labour, should prevent the African republic from receiving US trade benefits, American labour unions have said.

Mauritania, which has one of the highest rates of modern-day slavery in the world and has been roundly criticised for its poor human rights record, is currently on a list of countries that benefit from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa). The act, designed to promote the economic development of countries that can show they uphold human rights and meet labour standards, enables African countries to export goods duty-free to US markets.

The US trade union AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, this week called on the US trade representative to remove Mauritania from the roster of approved countries.

“The government of Mauritania routinely fails to conduct investigations into cases of slavery, rarely pursues prosecutions for those responsible for the practice and fails to ensure access to remedy or otherwise support victims,” the union wrote in a petition, adding that the state harasses and imprisons anti-slavery activists and will not publicly acknowledge the continued existence of slavery.

“This represents a total failure to take any meaningful steps to establish freedom from forced labour,” said the petition.

Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981, the last country in the world to do so, but only made it a crime in 2007. Since then, campaigners say the government has passed a handful of inefficient reforms and failed to properly address the issue.

Although the union says it is unlikely the US will immediately remove Mauritania from the Agoa list, Celeste Drake, trade and globalisation policy specialist at the AFL-CIO, said the petition should “put Mauritania on watch”….

“It took decades to actually have a conviction let alone compensation for any victims,” he said. “One issue we have with the agency [Tadamoun] is that it doesn’t involve any of the former slaves. It’s run by the white Moor community there, and it focuses a lot on a poverty alleviation mandate and doesn’t really address the slavery issues.”…

Yes, doubtless they’ll be terrified.

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Filed Under: Featured, Mauritania, slavery Tagged With: African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa)


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Comments

  1. Bev says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 8:52 am

    And we continue to support slavery in another country. Put your money where your mouth is. Stop sending hard earned taxpayer dollars to people who still keep slaves. This is not a hard concept. Obviously this needed to happen some time ago.

  2. John A. Marre says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 9:00 am

    It’s an Islamic Republic. That explains why they have slaves, and refuse to act like civilized people.

    • World@70 says

      Aug 28, 2017 at 10:17 am

      It has always been a puzzle to me how many blacks in the US and elsewhere can embrace Islam with its record on slavery. Why is the Islamic connection to slavery so ignored?

      • karl anglin says

        Aug 28, 2017 at 3:56 pm

        Muhammad viewed blacks as fit for only one thing—–slavery.

    • Michael Copeland says

      Aug 29, 2017 at 2:36 pm

      AND HE HAD A BLACK SLAVE

      Mohammed was on a journey….

      “….and he had a black slave called Anjasha”.

      Mohammed rebuked him for driving the camels too fast.
      (Bukhari 8.73.182).

  3. Papa Whiskey says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 9:34 am

    Be it noted that “white moors” are Arabs and Berbers, not Europeans.

    • carpediadem says

      Aug 28, 2017 at 7:04 pm

      I thought Berbers were black?

      • Kepha says

        Aug 28, 2017 at 8:56 pm

        Depends on how you define “black”. There was a superstition, put forth in children’s books published and used in the USA in the early 20th century (then picked up by Elijah Poole and people like him), that as soon as you hit the southern shore of the Mediterranean, people were “black”. Why? It’s Africa, isn’t it? Yet how many Egyptians, Lubyans, Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans are fair-skinned, narrow-nosed, light-haired, and light-eyed?

      • Kepha says

        Aug 28, 2017 at 8:58 pm

        Mauretania–a fine, upstanding, dignified African land carrying on the heritage of the great Mansa Musa! An exemplar of how Islam causes the oppressed of the world to rise to new heights of dignity and self-respect! A lodestar of the glories of egalitarian Islam! Would Malcolm X ever lie to you ? [SARC}

    • Michael Copeland says

      Aug 29, 2017 at 8:38 am

      Yes,

      wikipedia explains the difference: “slaves (Black Moors) or slave owners (White Moors)”.

      This is diversity.

    • Michael Copeland says

      Aug 29, 2017 at 8:41 am

      See images of them on the internet.

  4. mortimer says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 10:46 am

    • Darryl Kerney says

      Aug 28, 2017 at 6:21 pm

      Hi mortimer, i will have to watch the videos you posted,
      but i’m wondering if you can answer a question that i can’t seem to find an answer to so far,
      why does the quran so often say “WE” when allah is supposedly talking to Mo as in the example Robert used above ?
      “Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave girls whom God has given you as booty.” (Qur’an 33:50)
      if allah is supposed to be the only god, who are the “WE” ?

  5. mortimer says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 10:51 am

  6. Guy Forester says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 11:22 am

    This isn’t the only country over there where this happens. Then again, there are our trading partners, the PRC, that has prison camps for dissidents that work the same way. That is probably why the PRC gets along so well with some of these countries.

    • Lukas says

      Aug 28, 2017 at 12:16 pm

      even while the chinese smoked local jihadis hard..

      • Kepha says

        Aug 28, 2017 at 8:59 pm

        Tells you a lot about Islamic “brotherhood”.

      • Guy Forester says

        Aug 28, 2017 at 11:56 pm

        The truth is, that is a third world tyranny SOP. Saddam and Gaddafi acted the same way. Shut up, sit down, do as told, you live as long as we like. If you make noise, waves, or otherwise we no likee, you die. And it won’t be pretty. The only difference is who is calling the shots or running chop chop square.

        The only reason the current regimes fight ISIS or Al Qaeda is to stop the competition from looting their peasants and stealing their slaves.

  7. jewdog says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 11:59 am

    Looks like black people are holding the “slaves” here, so the Left will consider this merely a labor dispute to be handled by the local authorities.

  8. mohamonator says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 3:54 pm

    Something tells me the Congressional Black Caucus is not going to get too exercised about this…

  9. Richie says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 6:37 pm

    No doubt Black Lives Matter is at the forefront of denouncing this?

  10. Eric says

    Aug 28, 2017 at 9:10 pm

    Where is the Congressional Black Caucus on this? Again they are less than useless.

    Eric

    • Bob says

      Aug 29, 2017 at 10:56 am

      Ditto Eric, for the useless, toothless, muslim-loving UN!

  11. Matthieu Baudin says

    Aug 29, 2017 at 1:07 am

    “… Where is the international outcry? In the U.S., the Left is enraged over 100-year-old statues of slaveowners, but what about the real live slaves suffering today in Mauritania? …”

    For the contemporary left Racism is an obsession and Slavery is only a footnote, to be picked up and used when convenient. It is all about the singers and not the song; as long as they can take the stage, take on a high moral tone and berate those who don’t immediately step into line – they are contented. There is no need to probe into too much detail, to look at the present day lives of those doing it the toughest, no need to get involved in the eradication of entrenched slavery through the Middle East, North and Sub Saharan Africa.

  12. Bsrat says

    Aug 29, 2017 at 11:13 am

    As we are talking about Arab slavery, they have always viewed a black person to be beneath them treated blacks as their servants through out history and it still continuous to this day wherever you go to any Arab country blacks are treated cheap worthless and are subjected to rape, violence and slavery. Nothing new here I despise Arabs and their religion.

  13. staffsgt7 says

    Aug 29, 2017 at 12:11 pm

    I speak up about slavery still alive and well in islam all the time. But I seem to be not heard since I am not a left winger loud mouth screaming snowflake in need of a diaper change! Now, think of all the energy spent on their yelling about slavery that was stopped about 1 1/2 centuries ago – all that energy could be used in demanding that slavery be stopped today in islam. Of course, we will get the whiney bully pulpit of moslems coming out and decrying slavery not being a part of islam… yeah right – I got so much proof that it is very much a part of it even to a point we got some of theirs in prisons or Obama sent them back (so they could continue their slavery in their pig sty moslem country).

    Just as the moslems wailed and whined that FGM wasn’t a part of islam until…. until we found them practicing it THEN they demand we accept it as a part of islam. sort of ‘funny’ how they change when they get caught.

  14. Sarah says

    Aug 29, 2017 at 4:14 pm

    I appreciate that its stupidly glib of me to sit here and just say ‘well, why don’t you fight back and overwhelm your oppressors’ but I still struggle to grasp,all the same, how these people can submit to this. A lefty would loftily inform me right now that this is my white privilege coming to the fore, I suppose.

    But, given this is yet another poverty stricken, hopelessly uneducated African micro-nation that follows god-rotting Islam, one can hardly be truly surprised as to their unwavering dedication to something like slavery. After all, if slavery was good enough for ole Mo’, he-who-must-be-emulated-as-perfect, then its good enough for this bunch, clearly.

    I did an online search on Mauritania and slavery and kept coming across factoids here there and everywhere about how they’re so poor and uninformed in Mauritania that they don’t even know there is a different way, elsewhere in the world. I call total bushwah on that.

    Even if every single last Mauritanian was denied access to a computer and mobile phone and newspapers and any other form of international information – they’d still be hearing about the whole ‘streets paved with gold’ nonsense that all those other African migrants are babbling about, as they pass through Mauritania on their way to Europe. Mauritania has a huge, very lucrative people smuggling trade. Its utter bushwah to assume the Mauritanians are clueless to what their lives COULD be like.

    Perhaps we should be cutting off their massive foreign aid receipts along with banning their exports and denying them the privilege to import our goods. They’ll either force themselves to make significant change if that occurs, or they’ll culturally implode. Either way, its their choice and the rest of us can live with the knowledge that we were not propping up a reprehensible culture and its continuing actions and choices by way of our fiscal support.

  15. Rich says

    Aug 29, 2017 at 10:58 pm

    Still 46 million in slavery in Middle East, India and Africa but racist morons in the USA still attack their own country, they dont give a shit about the 46 million!!

  16. Doug4500 says

    Aug 30, 2017 at 8:55 pm

    Clarification for benefit of readers on use of term “white Moors”
    ——

    Modern-day slavery is still a common practice in Mauritania.

    According to some estimates, up to 600,000 Mauritanians, or 20% of the population, are still enslaved.

    A 2012 CNN report, “Slavery’s Last Stronghold,” by John D. Sutter, describes and documents the ongoing slave-owning cultures.

    This social discrimination is applied chiefly against the “black Moors” (Haratin) in the northern part of the country, where tribal elites among “white Moors” (Beydan, Hassaniya-speaking Arabs and Arabized Berbers) hold sway.

    Low-caste groups within the sub-Saharan African ethnic groups of the south are also sometimes enslaved.

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