Ideological obsession with the transatlantic slave trade prevents insight into the Arab-Muslim slave trade.
"Yet this emphasis on “white guilt” conveniently occludes a far vaster and longer-standing phenomenon: the Arab-Muslim slave trade, which historians estimate ensnared between 10 and 18 million Africans over thirteen centuries, from the seventh century until well into the twentieth. Unlike the transatlantic trade, which concentrated on adult males for plantation labor, the Arab trade disproportionately targeted women and children for domestic servitude and sexual exploitation, with mortality rates during transit often approaching 50 percent—far exceeding those of the Middle Passage. Castration of male captives to produce eunuchs further inflated death tolls, rendering entire lineages extinct. As a counterbalance to the preferred Marxist (anti-Western) narrative, this erasure extends to the enslavement of Europeans themselves. Between 1530 and 1780, an estimated 1 to 1.25 million white Christians—primarily from Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts—were captured by Barbary corsairs from the North African regencies of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Salé, then sold in the slave markets of the Maghreb.
The coordinated slave raids struck deep into Europe: coastal villages in Italy, Spain, France, and beyond were depopulated; corsair vessels reached as far as Ireland (notably the 1631 sack of Baltimore, where over 100 villagers were abducted) and even Iceland (the 1627 Turkish Abductions, which seized around 400 people from remote settlements). Children were torn from families, women consigned to harems, men to galleys or quarries. European states, despite possessing formidable navies, repeatedly failed to suppress this predation, preferring tribute payments to decisive military action—a pattern of appeasement that prefigures modern reluctance to confront Islamic extremism, be it militant or civilian."
