Just in time for Robert E. Lee’s 215th birthday, AL.com brings us this unintentionally hilarious article, where the Muslim “advocacy” (i.e., leftist activist front) organization CAIR has decided to rip on Mike Holmes, an Alabama State House member, for being a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Let’s leave aside the competing historical accounts of the Civil War that separate leftists like the AL.com journalists and the kinds of people who join the SCV. Both of them are probably not very accurate — or at least, not very complete, although I suspect Rep. Holmes has a more complex view than what the article attributes to him: “Rep. Mike Holmes believes the Civil War was about taxes, not slavery.” But that’s not what makes the article funny. What’s funny is that it’s not some run-of-the-mill commie “anti-racist” group taking issue with Rep. Holmes honoring his ancestor, it’s a MUSLIM group. In their own words:
“It is unacceptable for a lawmaker, whose duty it is to represent all constituents in his district, to be a member of an organization that honors traitors and white supremacists,” said Ibrahim Hooper, director of national communications for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.”
With all due respect to Mr. Hooper, a Muslim taking sides about the US Civil War is roughly equivalent to me getting my dander up about what a tosser that Abu Bakr was for not honoring Mohammed’s wishes as to who should succeed him. But more to the point, Muslims trying to take the moral high ground on historical slavery and racism is really rich. As nasty as the trans-Atlantic slave trade was, the Muslim version was dramatically worse, vaster in scope, and longer lasting:
It takes no more research than a trip to almost any…library to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere as compared to the meager writings on the even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic World… at least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some European slaves were still being sold on the auction block in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States…
– Thomas Sowell, The Real History of Slavery
Sowell also documents the cruelty of Muslim slavers, who left grisly reminders scattered across Africa, highlighting their lack of respect for the basic humanity of their human chattel:
The death toll on these marches [across the Sahara] exceeded even the horrific toll on packed slave ships crossing the Atlantic. Slaves who could not keep up with the caravans were abandoned in the desert and left to die… Thousands of human skeletons were strewn along one Saharan slave route alone – mostly the skeletons of young women and girls, who were more in demand than men in much of the Islamic world… It has been estimated that, for every slave to reach Cairo alive, several died on the way.
And it bears repeating that, as soon as the Democrats destroyed the Libyan government, African slavery showed back up in Tripoli, two hundred years after the US Marine Corps crushed the Barbary Pirate slavers there in one of their first major victories.
It’s also rich that CAIR calls the Confederates “traitors”. The national identity of Southerners has always been complicated, and our differences with the Yankees date back to the old world, at least to the English Civil War but probably as far back as Anglo-Saxon times. Reducing conflicts between north and south to a single political cause, and ignoring all of that history, is foolish. Calling a Southerner a traitor for resisting the invasion of his country by Washington is as ridiculous as calling a Ukrainian a traitor for opposing a Russian attempt to restore Russia’s historical claim on the country. The term “rebel” was used during the time of the war, and still seems appropriate today.
In contrast, CAIR has notoriously tried to minimize the involvement of Islamic organizations in the terrorist horrors of the past few generations. Just last year they sent out guidance to schoolteachers about how to talk about the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with their classes, where they cautioned teachers not to suggest that the attackers were motivated by religion. “Avoid using language that validates the claims of the 9/11 attackers by associating their acts of mass murder with Islam and Muslims. For example, avoid using inaccurate and inflammatory terms such as ‘Islamic terrorists’, ‘jihadists’, or ‘radical Islamic terrorists.’” The tips also suggest that teachers focus on anti-Islamic discrimination that supposedly followed the 9/11 attacks – but presumably not the widespread anti-Western attacks and murders that persisted almost continuously from 2001 to 2016 as bin Laden respectors sought to continue the fight.
First, this looks a lot like the “Lost Cause” mythology of the Civil War, which presumably is what CAIR is taking issue with regarding the Sons of the Confederate Veterans – it attempts to act like Al-Qaeda and ISIS and their ilk were anomalies, instead of the zeitgeist of early 21st century Islamic youth, just as Lost Causers sometimes seem to argue that slavery wasn’t really all that much of a big deal in the antebellum South despite what it looks like from, say, Lincoln’s speeches and the rhetoric of both Yankee and Confederate pundits. While CAIR and the Lost Causers have a point that both the Civil War and the GWoT were more complicated than the standard narrative often admits, they are also both guilty of minimizing some really nasty shit in an attempt to make their side look better. It is undeniable that hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world supported resistance, including violent resistance, against the West in general and the US in particular, and definitely against Israel. Considering that the United States spent twenty years fighting that zeitgeist and thousands of American soldiers lost their lives as a consequence – for better or worse – CAIR’s whitewashing certainly skirts traitorousness. Certainly it’s traitorous enough to make their position on the Confederacy a case of “people in glass houses throwing stones”. I mean come on, even the organization’s name — the Council on American-Islamic Relations — implies that they aren’t on the same side as Americans.
It looks like Representative Holmes basically told CAIR, and AL.com, to go pound sand. Good for him. People that don’t respect the memory of fallen soldiers – even those on the other side – don’t deserve respect from anybody. It bears repeating here that ASD‘s perspective is that all warriors who fight honorably are worthy of being remembered and respected, and that includes huge percentages of Confederates, Nazis, Soviets and other soldiers from Communist countries, mujahideen jihadis, and whoever else you want to dig up from your dumb “bad guy” list. People who lose sight of this obvious and eternal truth have no business leading anyone.
The Antisocial Darwinist 