Stossel and Reilly on American Slavery

With the aid of Wilfred Reilly, author of Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me, John Stossel exposes fashionable claims -- such as Senator Kaine's assertion that the United States created slavery -- to be farcical.

This is Stossel's interview of Reilly on slavery.

While that will surprise few of my regular readers, Stossel and Reilly bring up a few facts that might, in addition to a rare dose of sanity about the way many people think about the issue:

"There's nothing wrong with acknowledging your historical mistakes," Reilly responds. "I'm black, Irish, a bit Native American ... .Those are three peoples who have experienced a great deal historically. Nothing wrong with acknowledging that. But it's extremely odd to focus only on the negatives of your society. And to exaggerate those!"

...

It's better to teach the truth, says Reilly -- almost every society had slavery.

"The Arabs were history's premier slave traders. Muslims took so many blonde slaves out of the [Slavic] region, they gave the world the name 'Slav,' [for] 'slave,' to the global slave population."

Arabs captured and enslaved more than a million Europeans.

Years later, the first people who seriously tried to abolish slavery were white Westerners: The British and then Americans. They called slavery immoral.

"Yeah, the British Navy," Reilly explains, "in a story almost no one now knows, sank 1,600 slave ships. They freed 150,000 people that were enslaved at the time."

By contrast, Saudi Arabia only abolished slavery in 1962. And even now, the Global Slavery Index estimates that there are still 700,000 slaves in Saudi Arabia.

I can't help but wonder how many times Reilly has been unjustly insulted as an "Islamophobe" for pointing out the facts in that last sentence, or a "racist" for standing up for the West.

While I have not read the book myself, I am intrigued, and if you are also, the link you need occurs early in Stossel's column, which is worth reading in full.

-- CAV