Bloodthirsty Liberal

The history of the US’s involvement in the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries is well-documented and common knowledge.

Other countries, not so much [via Jungle Trader]:

The slave trade once made the people of Nantes rich, but the French city covered up its dark history for decades. It recently erected a memorial to the victims in a project believed to be the first of its kind in Europe. But the effort to shed light on the Continent’s role in the 18th century slave trade with Africa and the New World has not been popular with some residents.

In the 18th century, cruelty had poetic names, like Le Prudent (“The Prudent”), La Légère (“The Light”) or Les Trois Maries (“The Three Marys”). The ships, named in the hope of a good voyage or baptized with Christian first names, were part of a brutal business between Europe, Africa and America: the slave trade. During a period of approximately 400 years, at least 13 million people were transported under horrendous conditions from Africa to the colonies of the New World.

The northwestern French city of Nantes played a central role in what has been described as the largest forced migration in global history. Although the city’s merchants came late to the lucrative slave trade, long after the Portuguese, Spanish and British, over the course of the 18th century the city on the Loire River became a central hub of the Atlantic triangular slave trade — and with it the most important port city in France.

Over 40 percent of the French slave trade was carried out via the city, with around 450,000 men, women and children abducted from Africa to America. According to curator Marie-Hélène Jouzeau, who is responsible for the city’s historical heritage, it wasn’t just the major merchant families who specialized in the business. “The entire mercantile community was involved, and the whole region profited from it,” she told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Late last month, and with little fanfare in the international press, Nantes officials opened the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery, which the organizers claim is unique in Europe.

…

“A kind of memory work,” is how Nantes Mayor Jean-Marc Ayrault describes the monument, with which Nantes is openly confronting its past. “It’s an invitation to reflect on a dark chapter in the history of our city,” he says.

Nantes had long suppressed the brutal origins of its wealth. A collective silence covered up the fact that the prosperity of the city’s great families, like the Michels, Montaudouins and Sarrebourse d’Audevilles, not to mention the splendor of the city’s architecture, were built on the slave trade.

Awfully grande of you for acknowledging your role, France. Your self-congratulation is merited. Funny, though, that when I toured the Loire with my family last summer, they never mentioned the role of bondage in the obvious wealth of the region. Isn’t that just like the Europeans? Oops!

And next time Reverend Wright and his ilk want to run down the US of KKKA for its original sin of slavery, I hope he brushes up on his French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and a Babel of West African languages so that he can dish out the insults in all the tongues of all the nations that participated in African slavery.

Les poulets de France reviens de nicher. (Or some such.)

In a story about slavery in Mauritania and Sudan, I commented that slavery was forbidden in Islam. Reader Carol piped up to cite theory and practice indicating otherwise.

But not only is she not a Moslem, she’s not male, so why should I believe her?

Now, I’m a believer:

Following are excerpts from a statement by Dr. Saud Al-Fanisan, former dean of Islamic law at Imam Muhammad Bin Saud Islamic University, Saudi Arabia, which aired on Al-Risala TV on March 16, 2012:

Dr. Saud Al-Fanisan: Allah permitted the purchase and sale of slaves. Slaves are the property of their owners. This is slavery in the shari’a, yet a slave enjoys a great deal of freedom. The only thing he is deprived of is the right to own [himself]. That’s it. He enjoys freedom of thought, freedom of belief, the freedom to work, the right to deny [Islam], and the right to command good and forbid evil. A slave enjoys all these liberties, so how can it be claimed that there is no freedom [in Islam]?

I regret the error.

PS: While we’re on the subject of sharia:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaaqub, which aired on Al-Nas TV on March 16, 2012 :

To the lives of people and to the life of the Islamic nation… The shari’a must be exalted.

…

Anybody who attacks a home, a shop, a bank, a factory, or anything… When an armed gang enters a place in order to take things by force, they are fighting Allah and His Messenger.

The [hiraba] punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and who strive to spread corruption in the land, is for them to be executed, or to be crucified, or to have their hand and foot chopped off on opposite sides, or to be banished from the land. The implementation of this punishment will guarantee security.

I’ve argued against the notion of sharia law in Western societies. But if it’s what they want…

I said “serf”, not “surf”!

Hey, I give credit to CNN. Others have been talking for years about slavery still being practiced in Africa, but if the Most Busted Name in News finally gets the scent, why should we quibble?

An estimated 10% to 20% of Mauritania’s 3.4 million people are enslaved — in “real slavery,” according to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Gulnara Shahinian. If that’s not unbelievable enough, consider that Mauritania was the last country in the world to abolish slavery. That happened in 1981, nearly 120 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. It wasn’t until five years ago, in 2007, that Mauritania passed a law that criminalized the act of owning another person. So far, only one case has been successfully prosecuted.

The country is slavery’s last stronghold.

As I say, good for CNN. As many as 680,000 people are held in slavery in Mauritania. (The cite I link to above, iabolish.org, notes that Sudanese—now South Sudanese—suffer from the same affliction, or did until very recently.)

But I knew I had something to add. Maybe that Mauritania is a Muslim country—when Islam is supposed to forbid the abomination of slavery. No, as messed up as that is, I knew there was something else I had to add.

Oh yes, now I remember:

Mauritania is a member of the UN Human Rights Council.

Just trying to do my part.

I’ve had so much to tell you while we were down! (Some technical glitch I don’t understand, and which I put down to the machinations of David Axelrod anyway.)

Let me start with this:

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan addressed an estimated 600 students at UC Berkeley last Saturday and told black students not to befriend any Jew without first reading “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” a book that promotes the thesis that Jews were behind the black slave trade. Heck of a way to start up a friendship!

Scholars both black and white have exposed the NOI book as a pack of lies, a modern day calumny which, much like their medieval analogues — “the Jews poisoned the wells,” “the Jews make matzo with the blood of Christian children” — is meant to incite hatred toward Jewish people. Dangerous hatred. The Daily Californian reports that Jewish students were hurt and shocked.

But that’s not even the point of the author. After all, this is Farrakhan and this is Berkeley. What else would one expect?

Perhaps not this:

In 1994, an African Muslim from Mauritania — Mohammed Athie — and I broke the story of a modern-day slave trade in Mauritania and Sudan in The New York Times. We reported that perhaps 300,000 African Muslims were still serving Arab/Berber masters; “Black Africans in Mauritania were converted to Islam more than 100 years ago,” we wrote, “but while the Koran forbids the enslavement of fellow Muslims, in this country race outranks religious doctrine. These people are chattel: used for labor, sex and breeding. They may be exchanged for camels, trucks, guns or money. Their children are the property of the master.”

In Sudan, Africa’s largest country, we reported that slavery was “making a comeback, the result of a 12-year-old war waged by the Muslim north against the black Christian and animist south. Arab militias, armed by the Government, raid villages, mostly those of the Dinka tribe, shoot the men and enslave the women and children. These are kept as personal property or marched north and sold.” We based our reports on government documents, human rights publications and a stunning interview with a UN official.

…

PBS’s Tony Brown Show, the most popular black news program at the time, invited Mohammed and me to speak about slavery. Immediately after our appearance, we were verbally attacked by Farrakhan’s spokesman, who denied that blacks served Arab masters in Sudan or — worse from the NOI’s point of view — that black Muslims served Arab Muslim masters in Mauritania. Farrakhan’s “calling,” funded in part by Arab dictator Muammar Gaddafi, was to break the black-Jewish civil rights alliance while teaching American blacks that Islam was their path to freedom. Not in Sudan and Mauritania, it wasn’t!

The NOI was serious about shutting us up. Samuel Cotton, a black reporter for the City Sun, New York’s second-largest black paper, conducted a thorough investigation that resulted in a five-part series. “Arab Masters, Black Slaves” screamed across the front page in New York’s news kiosks. The NOI warned Sam. They followed and menaced him when he spoke in Chicago, not far from their headquarters. Sam’s book “Silent Terror” — which chronicled his experience reporting on the Mauritanian slave trade — has since become an underground classic.

At a press conference in Washington, D.C. in 1996, Farrakhan was asked about reports of slavery in Sudan. According to the New York Times, he challenged them: “If slavery exists, go … to Sudan, and come back and tell the American people what you found.” The Baltimore Sun sent two reporters to Sudan. They found and liberated slaves and published a special four-page insert in the paper’s weekend edition. Farrakhan refused their request for an interview and pretty much went radio silent on slavery issues until fairly recently.

…

Why has Farrakhan decided in recent days that he can safely replay his “Jews were the slavers” card? I believe that the anti-Israel/anti-Semitic climate on California’s campuses emboldened him to regurgitate the attack. UC President Mark Yudof condemned Farrakhan’s message but defended his rights to free speech. I wonder what Mr. Yudof would do if a Ku Klux Klan speaker asked for the same rights and a platform on his free-speech campus.

Meanwhile, I encourage the student body to visit our website at www.iabolish.org to learn about the plight of modern day slaves, especially those in Sudan and Mauritania, where political correctness and fear have blocked human rights activists — who should be the slaves’ most vociferous champions — from taking moral action to set them free.

I’m glad the African American students in the video clip above took the message of self-reliance and empowerment from Reverend Farrakhan, and ignored (judging from their comments) his nastier insinuations. After all, Hitler delivered pretty much the same message to the Germans, and they were nowhere near as discerning.

BTW, forget the Klan speaking at Berkeley. Would Mark Steyn be invited? Alan Dershowitz? Caroline Glick? Clarence Thomas? Don’t bother packing your parka, Rev. Farrakhan; Hell would freeze over first.

PS: I knew California was bankrupt, but I didn’t realize that extended to morality as well.

Now that I have your attention:

Police in Peru say they have rescued nearly 300 women from sexual exploitation in a raid in the country’s Amazon region.

At least four people were arrested in Puerto Maldonado on suspicion of human trafficking.

Among those rescued from about 50 brothels were at least 10 minors – the youngest was a 13-year-old girl.

Saul Levy could not be reached for comment.

Slavery, man. You can outlaw it, you even fight wars over it—but it keeps coming back.

I’m tempted to mock, but this is fine with me.

Was your smartphone made in a sweatshop? Were those diapers made by slaves? Were children in another country forced to put that stitching in your designer jeans?

Consumers will be able to find out after the debut Thursday of a new app and website that measure the forced labor in everyday products.

Created by the U.S. State Department and a watchdog group, the free app and website will make consumers aware of their “slavery footprint.”

“This is a new way to create awareness about the issue of modern slavery and empower consumers,” said Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. “If we can do carbon footprints, why not slavery footprints?”

…

Some results: 9 people or “slaves” were used to mine rubies in jewelry; 3.1 individuals were used to make bikes; 1.9 to make diapers; .9 to make cotton T-shirts, and 3.2 to make a smartphone.

Nine is very high, while .9 is low, said Dillon. The ideal number, though, is zero, he added.

Yeah, well I don’t have any rubies, diapers, or a smart phone, but I am wearing a cotton t-shirt and I do own a bike. I guess that makes me a 4. Sorry, slaves.

I couldn’t care less about my carbon footprint, but I do try to live my life with some sense of my impact on the world. Leave only footprints, take only pictures, as the hiking saying goes. If I have information that lets me choose between more or less slavery, I suppose that’s a good thing.

So, who’s up for an abject apology for the heinous institution of slavery?

Let’s hear it, Africa. We’re waiting.

A U.S. Government anti-slavery report published Monday throws the spotlight on countries it says are not meeting minimum anti-trafficking standards.

The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking In Persons (TIP ) Report identifies countries that it says meet minimum standards, countries working towards them and countries that appear to be doing little to stop trafficking.

Each country is put into one of four grades – Tier 1, Tier 2, Two Watch and Tier Three. The United States can impose sanctions on countries in the bottom tier.

…

In Africa, Nigeria and Mauritius kept their Tier 1 status – the only African nations in the top rank – while Algeria, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Madagascar and Yemen all dropped into Tier 3.

I see only one country in Africa not engaged to some extent in slavery.

And guess which South American country is up to its pelvic abscess in human trafficking? (Two, if you count Cuba.)

Next time I hear about the stain of slavery, I’m going to look at this map. I knew Africans were complicit in the slave trade back in the day, I just didn’t know they still were two and a half centuries later.

Rabbi Joseph Pollack of Boston University Hillel leads former slaves in the traditional Passover song, Dayenu.

The background is the Charles Jacobs, founder of The American Anti-Slavery Group and now with Americans For Peace and Tolerance has worked for over 25 years to free mostly Christian African slaves. He and Rabbi Pollack traveled to South Sudan to celebrate the liberation of the Christian slaves of Sudan.

For those of you that want to learn about this, here is a report from Sudan. The speaker is Dr. Charles Jacobs:

- Aggie

Who is more likely to save an Israeli woman if she is literally locked up in an abusive home in Gaza? Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jews) or the standard issue western feminists?

You guessed it.

Every few months, we are presented with media reports about Jewish women rescued from their Muslim husbands in the Palestinian Authority or within Israel.

The stories are always similar. The women were tortured by their husbands, often locked in their homes or under constant guard by members of their husbands’ families. Either with or without the help of their Jewish families, they reached out to Yad L’Achim which rescues Jewish women and their children from Muslim husbands. Yad L’Achim volunteers plan and carry out often dangerous rescue operations and bring these women and their children to safety.

In January, Channel 10 presented live footage of one such rescue. Viewers saw relatives of a mother of four named Dana waiting anxiously at the Erez checkpoint as she and her children fled her husband and his family in Gaza and took their first steps of freedom.

During their courtship, Dana’s husband showed her every courtesy. After their marriage, he began regularly beating her and kept her under around the clock surveillance. A visit to Yad L’Achim’s website makes clear that her story is anything but unique.

Yad L’Achim’s work in saving Jewish women from violent Muslim husbands is especially notable given the nature of the organization. It is an anti-missionary haredi organization led by Rabbi Dov Lipshitz. It is not feminism that motivates its members to save these women. It is Jewish law. And specifically, the halachic command of the ransoming of Jewish hostages. According to the organization, it carries out scores of rescue missions like the one that rescued Dana every year.

The question naturally arises, why do haredim dominate what by rights ought to be a field occupied by secular feminists? Why aren’t Israeli and American Jewish feminists at the forefront of efforts to save these women from their violent husbands? Where, for instance, is the New Israel Fund? Its website brags, “The New Israel Fund founded or funded most of Israel’s women’s rights organizations and networks.”

Obviously Yad L’Achim, which defends these women’s right to live without fear is a women’s rights group. So why doesn’t NIF fund it? Yad L’Achim and other religious groups have been pilloried with allegations of racism in recent months for their public calls for Jewish girls and women not to date Arabs. In principle, these attacks seem fair. Blanket denunciations of Jewish- Muslim dating and intermarriage are problematic, even if they are justified from a religious perspective.

But whether one agrees or disagrees with the religious precepts that guide Yad L’Achim’s actions, the fact is they are not saving a principle. They are saving women and children. Shouldn’t that be enough to earn them the respect of the Left that is supposed to be motivated by concern for the weak and downtrodden? IN HER interview with Channel 10, Dana said that in Gaza, “what they do is curse the Jews 24 hours a day.”

The fact is that both misogyny and Jew-hatred are facts of life throughout the Muslim world. This state of affairs renders marriage to Muslim men a particularly dangerous prospect for Jewish women.

But the feminists throughout the Jewish world are silent on this issue. And this isn’t surprising. The egregious mistreatment of Jewish women by their Arab husbands involves two issues that the Left – which encompasses most feminist groups – is intent on ignoring: Islamic misogyny and Islamic Jew hatred. Just as the Left ignores, underplays, trivializes or justifies the fact that hatred of Jews is the most universal sentiment in the Muslim world today, so it systematically ignores, underplays or trivializes the endemic brutalization of women and girls throughout the Islamic world.

Take a purportedly feminist discussion of the impact of the Arab revolt on the position of women in the Arab world from ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour on Sunday. In a segment that lasted roughly 15 minutes, Amanpour said essentially nothing about the appalling lives of women and girls under Islamic law.

When Newsweek editor Tina Brown mentioned “the barbaric custom of child brides,” in Yemen, Amanpour didn’t ask her to elaborate. In accordance with that Yemeni custom, little girls are routinely married off to grown men.

When Iraqi women’s rights activist Zainab Salbi noted that the key issue for women in the Muslim world is changing the family law that governs their societies, Amanpour didn’t ask her what she meant.

What she meant was that under Islamic family law, women and girls are considered the property of their male relatives. And their “owners” can legally beat them and rape them and genitally mutilate them and force them into marriages they object to. If the women and girls are “disobedient,” their male relatives can expect little or no punishment for murdering them.

Rather than discuss the real, truly life-threatening dangers faced by women and girls throughout the Islamic world, Amanpour presented her viewers with a superficial and false depiction of recent events in which a few well-dressed, perfectly coiffed, pretty young women in Egypt and two Western dressed women in Libya are supposedly transforming the position of women in their societies one tweet at a time.

It was a complete lie. But it wasn’t shocking. It would have been shocking if Amanpour had provided her viewers with any relevant facts about the subject she was purportedly discussing.

The contrast between Yad L’Achim and traditional feminist groups and icons worldwide is statement on the state of the free world today. Whereas the feminists obscure the plight of women living in the Muslim world, a haredi group is saving women living in the Muslim world.

For years the New Israel Fund and countless other Jewish and non-Jewish leftist organizations have waged a culture war against the haredim for what they allege is their mistreatment of women.

Many women – both Orthodox and non-Orthodox – disagree with the position of women in the haredi world. But it cannot be denied that today haredim are the only ones rescuing battered Jewish women from their abusive Muslim husbands.

I apologize for posting the entire piece. I tried cutting out the chaff, but there wasn’t any. What she is saying is the truth; we all know it, but we go through life pretending that it isn’t. Try bringing up the fate of women in the Muslim world to a liberal friend and see how fast the top can spin. But the haredi are living life as if there is a higher authority, higher than the readership of the NY Times, say, and they don’t want to be judged ill by that authority.

- Aggie

At the brilliant suggestion of reader Carol, I will no longer publish pictures of such Medusas as Moammar Qaddafi or Helen Thomas—there’s too much ugliness in the world already, don’t you think—but instead a more pleasing stand-in for their horrible visages.

Following are excerpts from Libyan Leader Mu’ammar Al-Qadhafi, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on October 10, 2010:

On behalf of the Arabs, I’d like to condemn, apologize, and express deep sorrow for the conduct of some Arabs – especially the wealthy among them – towards their African brothers. The wealthy Arabs treated their African brothers in a disgraceful way in the past. They bought children and took them to North Africa, to the Arabian Peninsula, and to the other Arab regions. They subjugated them and traded in them. They engaged in slavery and human trafficking in a most abominable fashion, to tell you the truth. We are ashamed, along with our African brothers, when we recall this.

We are ashamed of those who behaved in this manner, and especially the wealthy Arabs, who viewed their African brothers as inferior slaves. This is no different from the way the West – America and Europe – behaved towards the Africans. They would hunt them like animals, treat them like slaves, and act like colonialists. They engaged in colonialism and exploited them, and this continues to this day. We extend our apology and express our sorrow for these acts.

About the only one who does not appear to have been guilty of subjugating African brothers and sisters is Israel. Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mo!

I guess that would be another reason why Africans risk their lives for economic opportunity in Israel, bypassing Libya, Egypt, etc. on their way. They know they won’t be sold into slavery.

The next time you’re told what a racist country we are (in other words, tomorrow) because slavery was once legal here (though not for 147 years and counting!), ask them to explain this:

Nigerian girls are being forced to work as prostitutes in Mali “slave camps”, say officials in Nigeria.

The girls, many of them under age, have often been promised jobs in Europe but ended up in brothels, said the government’s anti-trafficking agency.

The brothels are run by older Nigerian women who prevent them from leaving and take all their earnings.

Let’s count the betrayals, shall we? Country on country, black on black, women on women. Human on human.

People have enslaved other people across the millennia. It has always been a sin and always been evil, but some people get the message sooner than others.

PS: I’ll resist the urge to wonder if they’re better off where they are than in Europe.

We had a bizarre commenter to our recent Louis Farrakhan post, who challenged us to prove that Jews were held in bondage in Egypt back in the day. As we had just thrown out our last Certificate of Bondage in a fit of spring cleaning (issued by Rameses himself, with his thumbprint), we demurred, and suggested she look to other sources, of which there is no shortage—but she demurred.

A Nation of Islam disciple herself, she claimed that black people—AND ONLY BLACK PEOPLE—met criteria for being Chosen. (No Jews need apply.) As there was no honest exchange of viewpoints, and as she grew more hostile and bigoted as we tried to draw her out, we had to show her the door (the front door, I assure you).

But I hope she’s still around to read Jeff Jacoby’s interesting piece on the meaning of slavery and liberty:

‘HOW IS it,’’ the great English man of letters Samuel Johnson taunted Americans 235 years ago, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’’ His fellow Englishman Thomas Day remarked in 1776 with equal scorn: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature it is an American patriot signing resolutions of independency with the one hand and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.’’

That America’s founders were hypocrites, above all on the subject of race, is an enduring charge.

As it should be: each generation needs to come to terms with this.

But let the record show that the British Empire did not abolish slavery itself until 1807, long after Johnson’s snarky comment. Most of Europe (and its colonies abroad) followed suit around the same time. So the slave trade was not unique to America, but almost universal.

Are the Founders guilty as charged? There is no denying that the patriots who proclaimed it “self-evident’’ that “all men are created equal’’ tolerated black slavery. It is true that the Declaration of Independence, which so stirringly affirms that God endows every human being with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’’ was the work of a Virginia planter who owned 200 slaves.

So, yes, it is easy to damn Jefferson and the other Founders for not living up to their highest ideals. But if that is all it takes to be convicted of hypocrisy, how many of us would escape conviction? Surely what is more remarkable about Jefferson is not that he owned slaves, but that he acknowledged forthrightly and repeatedly that slavery was wrong. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,’’ for instance, he characterized slave ownership as “the most unremitting despotism’’ — an outrage bound to provoke divine wrath. “Indeed,’’ Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.’’

The Founders weren’t stupid. Of course they knew that the universal ideals embraced in the Declaration were not matched in reality across the colonies. The controversy over slavery was intense; but even more intense was the need for a united front against England. The urgent choice in 1776 was not between slavery or abolition. It was between hanging together, as Benjamin Franklin supposedly quipped in Philadelphia, or most assuredly hanging separately. They chose to hang together, and the confrontation over slavery was left for later.

But in that confrontation, the lofty ideal of equality enshrined in the Declaration — precisely because it was enshrined in the Declaration — imparted enormous moral authority to the abolitionists’ cause. Those who indict the Founders because their treatment of African slaves didn’t come up to the standard of “all men are created equal’’ should be asked: Would the Declaration of Independence have been improved if those words had been omitted? Would slavery have ended sooner had abolitionists not been able to invoke that “self-evident truth’’?

People similarly point out the depraved inhumanity in the Constitution of describing slaves as 3/5 of a human being. But they don’t recall or realize that discounting of human value was a compromise that favored the North. Representation in Congress would be based on population, and if slaves counted as one person, their numbers would have weighted the country toward the Southern way of thinking. Without gaining any rights or liberties, they would guaranteed a slave-holding nation in perpetuity.

Still, this was a very unsatisfactory position for a nation to be in—something Abraham Lincoln remarked on in 1863.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

…

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

…

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Less than a century after the Declaration, the nation was being tested on its rhetoric of equality. The very life of the nation depended on its passing that test (and on the lives of the men who died at Gettysburg and elsewhere that it might pass). To Lincoln, the Civil War was the unfinished business of the Revolution and the Founding.

And to Martin Luther King, business was still unfinished:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

Long-time readers will know this already, but I think our nation’s critics miss the mark when they cite slavery. By about a hundred years. No other nation went to war to abolish slavery, slaughtering 620,000 men in the process. Evil as slavery was (and still is), I’d rather live in Thomas Jefferson’s America than in Robert Byrd’s. The century of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the KKK—that is America’s unique shame.

I may be wrong, but I think we finally got it right in the last 45 years (almost 200 years too late).

Before she scuttled off back to the arms of Minister Farrakhan, I would have liked to hear what our Krazy Kommenter thought of that. I would also liked to have know what the Nation of Islam’s position is on centuries of the Arab (Muslim) slave trade—which is thought to have exceeded the American slave trade, and which is still going on.

Yes, I would have liked that very much.

Happy 4th of July, and God Bless America.