Tag: slavery

Want Slavery Reparations? Go Ask Muslim Countries, Says Scholar

It’s arguable that the people who complain about slavery most actually may love it, in a perverse way. After all, it provides so many with excuses for failure, anti-Western talking points, and opportunities to extract hand-outs. Just consider “reparations,” which are now continually demanded (by people enslaved only by their own indoctrination). Why, California Governor Gavin Newsom, panderer-in-chief, just signed a bill Friday to create a reparations-administration agency. Never mind that California was never a slave state.

But to African-descent people who want reparations, a British-Bangladeshi scholar has a message: You’re barking up the wrong tree.

You need to seek your booty elsewhere — from Muslim countries.

Dr. Rakib Ehsan, a commentator and author of the book Beyond Grievance, mentions the Ottoman Empire in particular. Now the nation of Turkey, chattel slavery was a major part of its economy and society for more than six centuries, Ehsan points out. He elaborates at The Telegraph:

Millions were enslaved — including Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Africans, and people in the western Mediterranean.

The Ottoman Empire captured and utilised “white slaves” — primarily European Christians — through various methods such as raids into European territories and the Black Sea slave trade originating from the Balkans and Caucasus.

Under the “Devshirme” system, Christian boys were conscripted and forced to convert to Islam, trained to serve as slave soldiers (the Janissaries). The gradual rolling back of Ottoman imperial slavery was ultimately the result of Western pressure.

Note here that white slavery, in a de facto sense, wasn’t unknown in the early United States, either. According to the 2007 book White Cargo, in fact, more than 300,000 white de facto slaves were sent from Europe to the United States over two centuries. And among some groups within this number, the mortality rate was 25-50 percent.

Keep reading

Gavin Newsom approves slavery reparations agency

Gavin Newsom on Friday approved a new state agency to administer restitution for descendants of slaves — a victory for Black lawmakers and advocates despite stopping short of providing cash reparations.

The Democratic governor signed the legislation, SB 518, five years after forming a task force in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to study the legacy of slavery in California and how the state could implement reparations policies — and more than two years after the panel released its extensive recommendations.

Newsom mentioned the bill during a conversation about racism on the podcast “Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay.”

“I signed a bill two days ago with the Black Caucus as it relates to creating a new office to address these systemic issues,” he said during an episode released Friday morning.

Pushing reparations proposals across the finish line has proved challenging — especially as the post-pandemic political climate shifted rightward and the state confronted multibillion-dollar budget deficits. Newsom himself threw cold water on the notion of writing checks to descendants of slaves when he said in 2023, “Dealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments.”

Last year, late amendments sought by Newsom, combined with caucus in-fighting, sank the effort to stand up a new reparations agency. The governor later vetoed a bill that would have provided redress for victims of racially-motivated eminent domain, noting the state lacked an agency to administer the program.

Keep reading

Ukrainians told to stop sharing violent conscription videos

Ukraine’s conscription authorities have called on citizens to refrain from documenting cases of violent forced military enlistment, instead urging the population to “cherish” recruitment officers. 

The message, shared on Wednesday by the Kiev Regional Territorial Center for Recruitment and Social Support (TCK), condemned a Telegram channel called Stop TCK Ukraine, which has been circulating videos of men being violently detained and forced into enlistment vehicles – incidents popularly dubbed “busifications” that often go viral.

The center alleged the channel was part of Russian information warfare and told Ukrainians to “never (!) watch videos of ‘busification.’”

“For God’s sake, don’t film or share such videos,” the post read. “If the Russians turn you into sheep, they’ll slaughter you like pigs tomorrow. So cherish the TCKs, help the TCKs, assist and protect them. They are the only ones filling the ranks of frontline units.”

Keep reading

Dozens of victims discovered inside Tampa mansion linked to church forced labor scheme

According to newly released court documents, 57 people, including minors, were forced to live and work under harsh conditions, reportedly enduring food and sleep deprivation, threats, and physical abuse.

Despite their lavish setting, victims were discovered to have been made to sleep on floors, kept in a garage, or crammed into rooms with limited access to bathrooms.

The indictment alleges that Michelle Brannon and fellow Kingdom of God Global Church leader David Taylor manipulated followers into working 24-hour shifts in church call centers. The workers were not paid and pressured into relentlessly soliciting donations that generated about $50 million over the last decade.

What they’re saying

One former church employee described the environment as mentally and physically abusive, citing public humiliation and isolation from family and friends.

“I did see David Taylor get aggressive with the staff,” said Leslie Portillo, who lived at the church’s Detroit ministry for several months.

Keep reading

Snowflakes are ‘triggered’ and ‘feeling unsafe,’ poor babies

Few things are more irritating than when the snowflakes among us are “triggered” and claim that they are “feeling unsafe” because of something someone said, or, as happened most recently, by the décor in a hotel.

On Thursday, Serena Williams was caught on her own video saying that she was triggered in a 5-star New York hotel because the lobby exhibited a decoration with cotton blossoms in it. She took a video of the blossoms and posted something to her social media where she said, “All right, everyone, how do we feel about cotton as decoration? Personally, for me, it doesn’t feel great.”

She doesn’t feel great because of decorative flower arrangements. How snowflaked up do you have to be, how pathetically weak, to be triggered by a cotton blossom? None of her family were slaves. She’s not a slave. She’s a wealthy, privileged woman whose name is recognized everywhere in the country.

I am of Jewish descent all the way down the line. I don’t cringe when I see a Mercedes-Benz or products by Bosch, Siemens, Miele, Stihl, Zwilling, or Wüsthof. I use some of these products.

For God’s sake, women, grow up and grow a spine. They should stop trying to garner sympathy by claiming they are “triggered” by this and that because they’re black and people should be more sensitive to their triggers. All that really does is to make others view them as tiresome and annoying. No one wants to be around someone who is always finding fault with something in America that causes them to be “triggered.”

A parallel phenomenon to being triggered is something I have noticed recently, which is that many (mostly) women, many white, claim that some things or words “made them feel unsafe.” This is yet another manipulation. They learned this garbage from their schools. Teachers instilled in these people the notion that they are entitled to irritate everyone around them by censoring their language. Don’t use this word. Better not use that phrase. It makes them feel “unsafe,” they say. They also feel “unsafe” every time a conservative speaks because “words are violence.” Right.

Keep reading

California Passes Reparations in College Admissions, Despite Prop 209

The California legislature passed a bill last week that would provide reparations to descendants of slaves in the form of college admissions — despite Proposition 209, which forbids the use of race in college admissions.

The bill, AB 7, provides that California State University, the University of California, independent institutions of higher education … and private postsecondary educational institutions … may consider providing a preference in admissions to an applicant who is a descendant of slavery.” It applies to anyone “who can establish direct lineage to a person who, before 1900, was subjected to American chattel slavery.”

Proposition 209, passed in 1996 and reaffirmed by California voters in 2020, bans the use of race in college admissions and for other public purposes. Supporters of AB 7 say that “descendant of slavery” is race-neutral.

The Los Angeles Times reports that AB 7 is only one of several reparations bills passed by the legislature:

Earlier this week, the Democratic-led Legislature also passed Senate Bill 518, which would create a new office called the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery. That bureau would create a process to determine whether someone is the descendant of a slave and to certify someone’s claim to help them access benefits.

The legislature also approved Assembly Bill 57, by Assemblymember Tina McKinnor (D-Hawthorne), which would help descendants of slavery build generational wealth by becoming homeowners.

…

The Legislature also passed McKinnor’s AB 67, which sets up a process for people who said they or their families lost property to the government through “racially motivated eminent domain” to seek to have the property returned or to be paid.

Newsom will now consider the bills. He signed a formal apology for slavery last year, after declining to back bills that would have provided cash reparations.

California entered the Union as a Free State in 1850.

Keep reading

Africa joins campaign to claim reparations from Britain for ‘historic crimes’

Africa has officially joined the push to demand reparations from Britain and other former colonial powers for ‘historic crimes’, including slavery and imperialism.

The African Union, which represents all 55 nations on the continent, has called for ‘meaningful reparations’ from European powers for exploiting Africa’s people, land and resources and blamed colonialism for ongoing ‘systemic injustice’ across the region.

At a joint summit in Addis Ababa with Caribbean leaders, the bloc said it would team up with countries across the Atlantic to seek compensation and what it called ‘reparatory justice’.

Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, the Djiboutian politician heading up the African Union Commission, said the two regions would now work together to ‘honour our ancestors, to uplift our descendants and reclaim our shared destiny in freedom, justice and unity’.

It comes as Caribbean nations – under the Caricom alliance of 15 states – have already demanded trillions in compensation for slavery. Now African leaders are expected to draw up their own list of demands.

Britain, which at the height of its empire controlled a quarter of Africa, could find itself facing fresh claims – not just for its involvement in the slave trade, but for the broader impact of colonialism and what has been described as ongoing ‘structural and systemic injustice’.

Reparations are now being framed more broadly, not only in terms of slavery, but also the return of cultural artefacts, reforms to global economic systems, and compensation for climate change impacts. 

Leaders argue that the industrialised nations of the ‘Global North’ bear historical responsibility for environmental degradation.

Keep reading

State Department Accuses China of Genocide and Slavery — and Rape, Torture, Starvation of Dissidents

The U.S. State Department published its annual global human rights reports on Tuesday, featuring a profile on the Chinese Communist Party that accused that government of a host of atrocities including genocide, slavery, worker abuse, forced abortions, and various forms of torture against dissidents.

The State Department human rights reports are published annually and broken down by country. The 2025 report published this week covers the year 2024. The profile on China focused significantly on updates regarding the ongoing genocide of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other non-Han ethnic groups in occupied East Turkistan. While widespread evidence indicates that the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to violently subjugate the Turkic peoples of East Turkistan for decades, human rights experts largely agree that dictator Xi Jinping dramatically expanded this effort in 2017, turning the region into a high-tech surveillance state and imprisoning as many as 3 million people in concentration camps.

Following a wave of negative publicity and action by human rights groups to raise awareness of the mass imprisonment of Uyghurs in concentration camps, the Chinese government began to describe the concentration camps as “vocational education” centers and claim that most of its victims had “graduated” from the prisons. Survivors of the abuse nonetheless persisted in reported experiences of beatings, psychological abuse, rape, and slavery at the hands of regime thugs at the camps.

Keep reading

How one million white Europeans – many seized on the south coast of England – were sold to the Muslim world and brutally exploited in the slavery scandal the Left DON’T want to speak about

When Englishman Thomas Pellow was 27, he led a slave-hunting expedition to the West African coast. His orders were to plunder the villages, kill the adults and capture the children.

But Pellow was not a mercenary employed in the transatlantic slave trade, which sent millions of its victims across the ocean. He was a slave himself – taken prisoner as a child by the Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail. And 300 years ago, he was far from alone. 

The sultan owned an estimated 25,000 European slaves, many seized in raiding expeditions on the south coast of England as well as countries as far afield as Iceland.

Though it is almost forgotten today – suppressed, perhaps, by some squeamish historians – the Muslim trade in both black African and white European slaves was deeply feared for three centuries.

Yet, at the time, dozens of memoirs, many of them bestsellers, were published by former slaves who had escaped from captivity, with horrendous stories of torture, rape and cold-blooded murder.

Now, a book by historian Justin Marozzi unflinchingly reveals the extent of slavery in Arab countries, which was conducted with unequalled brutality.

More shocking still, he shows that it continued in much of the Islamic world well into the 20th century – and, for hundreds of thousands of West Africans born into life as slaves, carries on to this day.

For Marozzi to investigate these stories, let alone publish, is courageous. His book invites an inevitable backlash from Left-wing academics and broadcasters who focus solely on the slave trade triangle between Europe, West Africa and the Americas that operated from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

Keep reading

House Committee Revives Proposal for ‘Automatic’ Draft Registration

For the second successive year, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) has included an ill-considered and unworkable proposal by the Selective Service System (SSS) to try to automatically construct a database of potential draftees from other government records collected for other purposes in the House version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The proposal to try to register young men “automatically” on the basis of aggregation and (mis)matching of other poorly-suited databases collected and intended for other purposes may fit perfectly with the standard operating procedures of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has already obtained access to the Selective Service registration database for unknown purposes. But if DOGE were really concerned with ending wasteful and inefficient government programs and agencies, it would have recommended abolishing the SSS, not making an attempt to salvage it.

Ongoing passive but pervasive noncompliance makes registration or a draft unenforceable. Compliance has fallen dramatically since the start of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and there’s been even more concern among potential draftees about activation of either a general draft or a draft of health care workers since the U.S. bombing of Iran. Deployment of soldiers for immigration enforcement, transportation of deportees to overseas death camps, and policing of domestic political protests in L.A. and elsewhere has prompted another surge of concern about a possible draft and what sorts of illegal orders might be given to both draftees and enlistees.

Automatic draft registration won’t magically make the registration database accurate or complete. But it has been proposed by SSS staff — otherwise threatened with losing their jobs if the agency is shut down as a useless failure — because it would enable the agency to pretend to be ready to implement a draft on demand. And it’s supported by both Republican and Democratic hawks because it would enable them to continue to pretend that the draft is available as a fallback option, so they can plan, prepare, and commit the U.S. to endless, unlimited war(s) without having to think about whether the people are willing to fight those wars, even if they escalate.

Whether warmongers like it or not, “automatic” draft registration can’t solve the compliance problem because no other government databases have all the information needed to identify all potential draftees or determine who is and who isn’t subject to the draft or required to register.

Keep reading