https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/black-slaves-matter/
“There is no money nor kudos in trying to end the Muslim slave trade, but the likes of Black Lives Matter most definitely recognise the rewards to be tapped in the bottomless reservoir of Western guilt. Meanwhile, black slaves are chained, abused and castrated as the same activists avert their gaze”
The criteria that broadcasters and newspapers used to sort what was newsworthy from what was not always eluded me. It seemed that they regularly ignored or failed properly to foreground what was self-evidently startling or essential. They also appeared to highlight reports that were less shocking but also less important examples of the items they hid or downplayed. Long after I left the British Council, I would amuse myself by checking the internet or the inside of the papers I bought for the sort of “suppressed” stories that might more aptly have graced the front page.
On January 17, 2015, I stumbled on an article hidden deep in the Weekend edition of Le Monde so extraordinary that I cut it out. It was entitled, “En Mauritanie, prison ferme pour trois militants anti-esclavagisme” [“In Mauritania, imprisonment for three anti-slavery activists”].
Revealing that ‘Mauritanian justice’ had just sentenced the activists to two years in jail for making ‘racist propaganda’, Charlotte Bozonnet, the author of the piece, said that the punishment was:
A conviction that highlights the taboo subject of slavery, a practice officially outlawed since 1981, but still extremely widespread in Mauritanian society. The three accused are Biram Ould Abeid, Director of the Initiative for the Resurrection of the Abolitionist Movement, an anti-slavery NGO, Brahim Ould Bilal Ramdane, one of his deputies, and Djilby Sow, president of an association for civic and cultural rights.
Arraigned before a tribunal in Rosso in the south of the country, they had been arrested in November 2014 … while they were leading a ground campaign to denounce the practice of slavery … “Biram” is a big name in the struggle against slavery in Mauritania, himself from a family of Haratines — the caste of slaves and the descendants of slaves’.