The activist group “NYC Educators for Palestine” is staging a “teach-in” for New York public school children of all ages, using Martin Luther King Day to equate the non-violent movement for black American civil rights with anti-Jewish jihad.
What these propagandists will never tell children as young as 6 is that their actions are covering up for history’s greatest anti-black catastrophes while blaming innocent Jews.
For a start, many of Dr. King’s own African ancestors were trafficked to the Americas in the first place partially as the result of the enslavement of black people by Palestinians’ fellow Muslims. Arabs and Islamized Africans bear substantial responsibility for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with the Europeans buying many slaves from Muslim rulers who eagerly profited from selling off their non-Muslim war captives.
By contrast, Jews were among the most passionate opponents of racial discrimination in America, making up nearly a quarter of all white freedom riders, with some murdered alongside blacks for their anti-racist activism.
Professed Arab “concern” for black civil rights during the 1960s was actually no more than a cynical disinformation campaign concocted by Communist China and the KGB to pull politically active black Americans closer towards Third Worldist Marxism and away from patriotic integrationism.
But these “educators” are hiding something much worse: Arabs and Muslims, kin to the Palestinians, still own black slaves today. The following could serve as the basis for any serious curriculum on black-Arab relations:
In Algeria and Libya, tens of thousands of Africans attempting to make their way to Europe are enslaved by local Arabs, some terrorist militiamen. The Global Slavery Index says that they number 84,000 and 47,000 respectively. Those who escape have detailed torture, blackmail, and use as grunt labor, with CNN disseminating chilling video in 2017 of a nighttime auction in which two Nigerien men were sold for the equivalent of $400 apiece. The U.S. State Department’s 2024 human rights report on Libya documents that “criminal and nonstate armed groups controlling extralegal facilities routinely tortured and abused detainees [including refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants], subjecting them to arbitrary killings, rape and sexual violence, beatings, electric shocks, burns, forced labor, and deprivation of food and water, according to dozens of testimonies shared with international aid agencies and human rights groups. In many instances, the purpose of this abuse was reportedly to extort payments from detainees’ families.” Those black migrants within Algeria who are not enslaved also face deeply-seated (systemic) racism.
In Mauritania—a 100% Muslim country—the Arab and Berber minority rule over a true apartheid state in which the black majority is treated as sub-human and racist violence is commonplace. For centuries, Africans have been owned as complete chattel—bequeathed in wills, rented out between friends, and given as gifts to pay gambling debts or as part of dowries. Well within living memory, many were tortured unimaginably. French colonial administrators banned slavery in 1901 and 1905, but to no avail. Then, the year after independence, Mauritania banned it again in 1961; then again in 1980 and 1981; then criminalized it in 2007, and then further criminalized it in 2015. Today, despite some finally being freed, the Global Slavery Index estimates 149,000 Africans are still enslaved, with an unspecified number caught in more modern forms of bondage, such as wage theft. Abolitionists are also subject to violence and repression, one imprisoned in 2018 for planning to run for president.
In Sudan, thousands are still enslaved 21 years after the end of a racist jihad perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood junta which dominated the country from 1989 to 2019 (and now does again). In scenes repellently similar to October 7, Arab Muslim militias armed by the state would penetrate into the mostly Christian south, storm villages, shoot and behead the adult men, burn the huts to the ground, and drag away black women and children as chattel slaves. The women became concubines, the girls domestics (before becoming concubines), and the boys herders (often murdered once they reached adulthood). All were forcibly converted to Islam; all suffered physical and racial abuse; many were physically mutilated. Perhaps 200,000 were kidnapped between 1983 and 2002 and 2 million killed before a peace deal was finally signed in 2005. One vague estimate for those still in bondage is 35,000. Today, Arab Sudan is once again waging a genocide against the black Muslims in the western Darfur province in which human bondage, particularly sexual slavery, has re-emerged, with untold numbers of black women raped—some even marched away in chains. As of 2025, the separatist Rapid Support Forces may have killed 200,000 Africans since the conflict re-ignited in 2023, but any estimate is faulty.
Additionally, the Arab world itself is also a major center of black slavery. Impoverished African women, often from Nigeria and Uganda, are tricked into answering advertisements for decent-paying jobs as domestic servants in countries like Egypt, Lebanon, and the Gulf states—Saudi Arabia and the UAE in particular. Once there, passports confiscated, they are plunged into long hours of unpaid labor: some sold from trafficker to master, many raped, some forced into prostitution, some beaten for taking a day off, some sent to prison for escaping—some murdered and mutilated for trying to return home. In 2020, Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, claimed that as many as 80,000 women had been trafficked across Lebanon, Mali, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE into sexual slavery from Nigeria alone. Some Nigerian women have even been trafficked as far east as Iraq, enduring rape, forced abortion, and gruesome torture. Africans are also trafficked to the migrant slave labor hub of Qatar, forced into debt to pay their recruitment fees and often taking up jobs as cleaners and security guards, but always running the risk of being abandoned without food or pay.
These “educators” are hiding something much worse: Arabs and Muslims, kin to the Palestinians, still own black slaves today.
Africans are sometimes even enslaved by non-Arab Muslims like Boko Haram in Nigeria. In Hamas-style attacks, Boko Haram terrorists have raided boarding schools and Christian villages, dragging off boys to train as child soldiers and girls to distribute amongst themselves for “marriage” as concubines. In 2014, 276 Christian girls were abducted from the town of Chibok, causing some short-lived concern among mainstream media and political figures like Michelle Obama; as of 2025, however, 91 are still in captivity. In 2018, Boko Haram stormed a school in Dapchi, kidnapping 110 students, killing five, and demanding a ransom for their release. That October, when a ransom was organized, Boko Haram refused to release one 15-year-old girl, Leah Sharibu, because she refused to convert to Islam, proclaiming her a “slave for life.” Now approaching 23, Leah is still a slave, reportedly “married” to a Boko Haram terrorist and mother to his two children.
It’s clear that any “Palestine teach-in” will conceal all of these grisly facts. Because the liars who hijack Martin Luther King Day for the purposes of Hamas and Iran’s Islamic rulers are exclusively interested in training American children to hate Jews. If they were truly to honor Dr. King, as opposed to hijacking his good name, they’d do what he would have wanted: demand that Arabs and Muslims free their black slaves. But we won’t be holding our breath.
The New York “anti-racist” Palestinianist teachers would never tell public school students that there is a neighborhood in Gaza principally home to residents of African origin called “al-Abid.” Abid is an Arabic slang term meaning both “black” and “slave”—a rough equivalent of the N-word. Those Palestinians “face entrenched racism,” says JFeed, “frequently denied leadership positions, excluded from certain professions, and pressured to marry within their own community.” Black Americans who have learned of this long obscured fact are neither endeared to the Palestinian cause nor blame the Jews.
Even less likely is that an anti-Israel “teach-in” would include as “balance” the 2010 accusation that Hamas rounded up, tortured, and harvested internal organs from 250 black Eritreans trekking through the Sinai to seek asylum—in Israel.
On Martin Luther King Day in 2004, the prestigious Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, welcomed Francis Buk, an African immigrant who had been brutally kidnapped at 7 and owned as a chattel slave in Sudan for a decade, to speak to its students. “The question is what good [is] your freedom if you don’t use it, to help others who live [for] and dream of freedom?” Buk told local news after his emotional speech. Would these “teachers” deign to let Buk or any other survivor of modern-day Arab slavery address children—let alone ones who could see the tears in his eyes?
Dr. King was a resolute Zionist. He wanted nothing to do with Jew-haters of any color or persuasion. Teaching the truths outlined above would be what he would want done on his day. Not using that day, in which we honor his dreams, to promote a hatred he fought to eliminate.
A version of this article first appeared in JNS. Used with permission.
