Irony? What irony?

While working off bad karma for the federal government in the late 80s, the Colonel once met a pleasant young black man who was either a Muslim or enamored of Islam. The former, we tend to recall. He admired "the Moors" who were not slave owners like European and Americans.

This kind of belief is right up there with the Nation of Islam belief that there's a spaceship orbiting the earth to do something or other. Obliterate white people, we think, but don't quote us.

Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was, of course, in the West as well up until relatively recent times. Yet while the European and American slave trade get stern treatment attention from historians (as well as from reparations advocates and guilt-ridden politicians), the Islamic slave trade, which actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people, is virtually ignored. (This fact magnifies the irony of Islam being presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity.) While historians estimate that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved around 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean areas began in the seventh century and lasted into the nineteenth, and involved 17 million people.

"The Persistence of Islamic Slavery." By Robert Spencer, FrontPageMagazine.com, 7/20/07 (emphasis added).