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Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (Reappraisals in Jewish Social and Intellectual History)

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There is an effort by some to pit Black people against Jews, and vice versa.

On the one side, the argument is made that the Jews controlled the slave trade, which rests on the widely disseminated lie that Jews control and for centuries have controlled the economies of the West. The claim that Jews controlled the slave trade is destroyed by this book. Excellent.

On the other side, there is the equally dishonest attempt to deny the genocidal character of slavery.

Slavery is not the same as the Holocaust, because the mass murder involved in the moving of slaves from Africa to the Americas was not the *goal*, as it was the goal of the Holocaust (where the enslavement of Jews was secondary to their elimination -- and, by the way, also the Nazi attempt to eliminate Roma and to partly eliminate Slavs.)

But genocide is not limited to the Nazis' Holocaust. Genocide is a broader category, involving the attempted destruction of a people *as such*, and this was certainly the case with the slave trade, which desimated large parts of West Africa.

In slavery, the attempt was made to reduce black people to less than human, as manifested in the murderous conditions on slave boats, and the practice, which eventually became a key industry in certain states, such as Virginia, of breeding slaves for sale, thus breaking up families, which break-ups the slaves resisted with all their passion. (See the great book, "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom," which refutes the lie that slaves didn't care about families. That book, a fierce attack on the racist scholarship of Genovese and others, which attempts to prettify the genocide against African-Americans, was written by the late Herb Gutman, who, by the way, happened to be a Jew.)

During most of the twentieth century, Jews and African-Americans were the closest allies. It is the *dream* of racists to see these two groups at each others' throats.

[....] There was no "black holocaust." That is a myth perpetrated by black race-baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. [...] obviously does not know the meaning of the word "holocaust." Simply put, there was no organized effort by the United States government to exterminate Negro slaves, as was the case with the holocaust in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. There wasn't even any effort by individuals in the United States to totally eradicate Negroes, whether slave or free. As the reviewer so eloquently stated, he has branded himself anti-Semitic by his rantings.

It's pretty nervy for the Nation of Islam to go on about Jewish involvement in the slave trade. Most Jews that participated in the African trade were slaves themselves, either to the Portuguese or the Muslims (the Portuguese called these people the "lançados"), and were usually used to keep the books. The biggest slavers - the people who went into the African interior for centuries to capture slaves for sale, were Muslims. In fact, it's mainly in the Islamic countries that slavery, especially the enslavement of animist Negroes, still takes place.

It's nothing to do with not being able to say something negative about Jews. It's about the claims of the "Nation of Islam" simply not being true. It's just so much anti-Semitism, made especially worse by the fact that the very crimes these pseudo-Muslims accuse the Jews of were perpetrated by the Muslims themselves, over hundreds of years, and are still being perpetrated to this day.

Western slaves traded traveling to Africa in the 1600's found a flourishing slave trade run in large part by Islamic traders from the Ummayad through Ottoman Islamic empire. The Koran expressly embraces slavery. Remember that the Koran is supposed to be the DIRECT word of GOD. Mohammed left many rules for slaveholders. Slavery was not abolished in Saudi Arabia until 1964. See the Segal book for documentation of this information.
In what is called the New World the Aztecs, Incans and many native American tribes practiced a brutally cruel form of slavery
The great pyramids of Egypt were built by slave labor. The Ancient Egyptian society pre-dates the period of the Blblical Hebrews by millenia. The Egyptians left literature and art detailing a comprehensive system of slavery.

If you want to read the continuing cover up of Jewish involvement in the African slave trade, read this book. If you want to read a thoroughly researched documentation of Jewish involvement, read The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews.

What is needed is simply the recognition and admission by Jews of their significant role in the African slave trade, if only because it is clear they dominated the financial world in that period. They were the bankers who loaned the money to fund this trade. Jews must also acknowledge their role in creating and propogating the 'myth of Ham' that became the basis for black enslavement in the western world.

This is no more than Jews have asked of Germans, to acknowledge their role in the Jewish Holocuast. Jews must acknowledge their role in the black holocaust.

Now I know I will be blasted as an anti-semite because if you say anything negative about Jews in this country, you are so labeled. However, we need an honest dialogue to resolve this issue.