Where are the liberals? On this very day in 1997, Dr. Charles Jacobs, then the president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, an organization at the forefront of the war against modern-day black slavery in Africa, published a biting op-ed in The Boston Globe: “Where are the liberals?” Back then, the world was slowly coming to grips with a stinging fact: that Arabs and Muslims own black men, women, and children as chattel property in Mauritania and Sudan — today. The problem, however, was that all of the activist and media elements which one would think would jump to free modern-day black slaves — including the anti-apartheid coalition of the 1980s — simply weren’t there. Even worse, organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — the people who had produced the original reports of slavery which alerted Dr. Jacobs and others to its horrors — simply refused to help. Furthermore, so-called black “leaders” like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, world-famous figures with massive community and media clout, either directly rebuffed efforts to help tell the world, or backed off at the behest of actively hostile parties such as Louis Farrakhan (who preferred to blame the Jews). Though a few brave and decent people in the mainstream media, such as at Dateline NBC and even The New York Times, did do their part in broadcasting the images and accounts of slavery, such instances of righteousness were few and far between — and today, are just about extinct. What, then, astounded Dr. Jacobs and his allies was that it was conservatives and evangelical Christians who actually took up the fight. While liberals waffled and worried about offending Arabs or “dividing” the black community (against Farrakhan), conservatives stood up. Pat Robertson’s 700 Club became a forceful mouthpiece for the abolitionist movement. They were likely the first national television show to broadcast footage of heroes like John Eibner and Baroness Caroline Cox buying back the freedom of black Sudanese slaves — they even trashed Farrakhan as “an absolute charlatan”! Liberals, however, save for a precious few decent Democrats like Barney Frank and the late Donald Payne, were silent. That is what led Dr. Jacobs to ask, “Where are the liberals?” The answer is staring us in the face today. Around that time, we now know, the cultural Marxist idea that “white people” can’t criticize evil committed by non-Westerners was becoming vogue. The idea is that since white people have committed grievous violations of non-white people’s human rights in the past, all they have the right to do now is crusade to correct Western sins, and leave those non-Westerners commit today, no matter how much worse they are, alone. For whites who’ve snookered themselves into feeling guilty about the “unearned” wealth on which they live, this serves as their flagellatory expiation. Back then, Jacobs called this the “human rights complex”; today, it’s called “intersectionality,” where Jews are at or near the top of the rich, white “oppressor” cabal, and neither have the right to their own state, nor to tell Black Lives Matter or Farrakhan that they’re racist, anti-Semitic hypocrites. This was why, five years after this op-ed, Jacobs published another in the Globe: “Why Israel, and not Sudan, is singled out.” Israel accidentally kills a few civilians while targeting terrorists — a human rights catastrophe! Sudanese Arabs murder, kidnap, enslave, and rape tens of the thousands of black African Christians — nothing. This is even more egregious now when we see most of the media’s inaction today that we know there is also Islamic slavery in Algeria, Libya, and Nigeria. They’d rather applaud statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln being torn down by mobs of spoiled, ignorant children. It is always a sad day when a warning from the past comes true, and heeded far too late.
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