Anti-American lawmaker forced to delete post about slavery in America
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was forced to delete a social media post about slavery in America after it triggered discussions about her home country, Somalia.
Omar, who recently called the United States “one of the worst countries” in the world, shared more controversial thoughts in an X post marking June 19th as “Juneteenth,” a holiday observed by the Left.
“160 years ago on June 19, 1865, slavery ended in this country. Today, we celebrate Black freedom, resilience, and achievement, and continue the work to root out systematic racism from our policies and institutions,” read Omar’s post.
Users responded by pointing out that Omar’s native Somalia, which she has repeatedly affirmed her allegiance to while serving in US Congress, is a hotbed of modern slavery. According to Walk Free, roughly 98,000 Somalians live under modern slavery, with the Somalian government scoring 18/100 in its efforts to crack down on slavery.
“Somalia still has slaves. Ilhan should go fight to free her own people,” commented conservative influencer Gunther Eagleman on Omar’s post. Other users chimed in, some noting that Somalia has made weak efforts to eliminate child labor.
“Go back [to] Somalia if you feel so strongly about freeing slaves,” another netizen wrote. “Plenty of slaves still there.”
Omar subsequently deleted the post and replaced it with one that did not mention slavery.
“On Juneteenth, we remember that freedom is not always swift but it is always worth the fight. It’s a powerful reminder of how long justice can take to reach those who deserve it most,” her new post reads. “Today, we celebrate Black freedom, resilience, and achievement, and continue the work to root out systematic racism from our policies and institutions.”
Leftists often use Juneteenth as a prompt to demand reparations from White Americans for the fact that slavery once existed in America.
“#Juneteenth is a day for: BLACK PEOPLE to CELEBRATE our freedom. NON-BLACK PEOPLE OF COLOR to DEMONSTRATE solidarity. WHITE PEOPLE to PAY #Reparations,” a Black Lives Matter-affiliated organization called BLM Grassroots posted on X last week.
“Commit yourselves to real reparations policies that hold accountable the government, white-supremacist capitalism, and white people — who continue to benefit from our generations of stolen labor,” the organization also said in a press release on Thursday. “Slide your Black friend some benjamins. Make a check out to Black liberation organizations, like BLM Grassroots.”
The slave trade: An African enterprise
Like Omar’s initial post, demands by the Left that Americans pay “slavery reparations” ignore the fact that slavery was and continues to be most prevalent in Africa. Europeans involved in the transatlantic slave trade purchased their slaves from African warlords, primarily in Nigeria.
Even PBS published an Africans in America series companion book acknowledging that it was primarily Africans who enslaved Africans:
The white man did not introduce slavery to Africa . . . . And by the fifteenth century, men with dark skin had become quite comfortable with the concept of man as property . . . . Long before the arrival of Europeans on West Africa’s coast, the two continents shared a common acceptance of slavery as an unavoidable and necessary—perhaps even desirable—fact of existence. The commerce between the two continents, as tragic as it would become, developed upon familiar territory. Slavery was not a twisted European manipulation, although Europe capitalized on a mutual understanding and greedily expanded the slave trade into what would become a horrific enterprise . . . . It was a thunder that had no sound. Tribe stalked tribe, and eventually more than 20 million Africans would be kidnapped in their own homeland.
Africans enslave Africans to this day. According to the Global Slavery Index, roughly 7.6 out of every 1,000 Africans were living in modern slavery as of 2018.
