This is from Robert Malaby, commenting on the post, “Is the Nackey Loeb School Ruing the Day It Gave Robert Azzi its First Amendment Award?” “What a repulsive piece from Mr. Azzi. Too many items to take issue with in a random internet comment, but two I feel compelled to address.”
Azzi contrasts the 1619 Project with the “dominate White 1776 narrative.” Other than being the founding date universally recognized since, oh, 1776, calling this a “White narrative” would come as a surprise to Bob Woodson, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, John Sibley Butler, Ian Rowe, Wilfred Reilly, Carol Swain, Shelby Steele, and all the other black scholars at 1776 Unites.
I’m fairly certain Azzi runs a seminar called “Ask a Muslim Anything,” or something similar to that. Well, has Mr. Azzi ever considered that slavery was far more brutal in Muslim countries than in the United States? The word “slave” itself is actually derived from “slav,” central Europeans enslaved by the Moorish people of the Iberian peninsula and northern Africa – that is, Muslims. The “from the shores of Tripoli” line in our Marine Corps hymn is a reference to our ending the slave trade off the Barbary Coast of Africa, where more white people were taken as slaves than the total number of black slaves ever sent to the United States. It has been estimated that somewhere between 20-25 million slaves were taken out of Africa, (not counting the 8-10 million Africans enslaved by other Africans), and of that 20-25M, slaves were split 50/50 between the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and a trek through the Sahara and into the Arab world. Interestingly enough, of the 12M or so slaves who sailed the dreaded Middle Passage, the total number who arrived in the US was under 400,000 – most ended up in Brazil or the West Indies. The mortality rate for the trans-Saharan slave trade was much higher due to foot traffic, and for the slaves who did make it to the Middle East, they were routinely raped, tortured, then killed. Where the US had parity between the sexes, slaves in the Middle East were around 2:1 female to male and often placed into a harem. British explorer David Livingstone wrote that he had sleepless nights for weeks after seeing how slaves were treated in the Arab world. When the US halted the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1809 per the Constitution, the regions of the world most upset were its biggest beneficiaries – Africa and the Middle East.
Slavery is disgusting. What makes America unique is not that we had it – slavery predates Christianity and Islam, and was practiced by Africans, Greeks, Indians, Ottomans, Romans, Russians, and every civilization on every inhabited continent throughout human history – but that we ended it.
What I find bizarre is that an allegedly smart guy like Mr. Azzi either does not know or is willing to discount all of human history, all the overwhelming evidence attesting to the fallen nature of the human condition, and believe that America is the lone bad apple. But then again, there are no awards to be won by denouncing the history of other countries and cultures.
