We have taken these extracts from an essay on slavery in Arab Africa, in particular Mauritania and the Sudan, by Samuel Cotton, titled Arab Masters-Black Slaves:

These black African slaves in Mauritania are subjected to mental and emotional torments that have always been concomitant with slavery. “Routine” punishments for the slightest fault include beatings, denial of food and prolonged exposure to the sun, with hands and feet tied together. “Serious” infringement of the master’s rule can mean prolonged tortures, documented in a report by Africa Watch.

Some of the tortures are highly imaginative. Even a natural sadist would need to ponder for a while to come up with them:

These include 1. The “camel treatment,” where a human being is wrapped around the belly of a dehydrated camel and tied there. The camel is then given water and drinks until its belly expands enough to tear apart the slave. 2. The “insect treatment,” where insects are put in his ears. The ears are waxed shut. The arms and legs are bound. The person goes insane from the bugs running around in his head. 3. The “burning coals” where the victim is seated flat, with his legs spread out. He is then buried in sand up to his waist, until he cannot move. Coals are placed between his legs and are burnt slowly. After a while, the legs, thighs and sex of the victim are burnt. There are other gruesome tortures … Another report states that some slaves caught fleeing are often castrated or branded like cattle. …

The civil war … led to the resurgence of the slave trade….Arab militias, armed by the Government, raid villages, mostly those of the Dinka tribe, shoot the men and enslave the women and children. …

The price varies with supply. According to the London Economist (January 6, 90) in 1989, a woman or child could be bought for $90. In 1990, as the raids increased, the price fell to $15. …

The head of state, Omar Hassan el Beshir, is reputed to have six or eight slaves in his home in Khartoum.

The author asks “why has the media given such little attention to this story?” and suggests an answer:

Perhaps fear of incurring the wrath of the Islamic governments of Mauritania and the Sudan lies at the heart of the issue. It is dangerous business to expose corrupt regimes in Islamic countries.

We have heard so.

Certainly Gaspar Biro found it was:

Biro produced a 42-page report to the U.N.’s Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. He pointed to slave trafficking, and that the Sudanese criminal law provides routinely for flogging, amputation, death by stoning, and in special cases, for the execution and crucifixion of children as young as 7. The Sudanese called his report a “flagrant blasphemy and a deliberate insult to the Islamic Religion” on which it says Sudanese law is based.

Biro received “veiled threats” against his life, and a blunt warning not to offend Islam from the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C.

Will any power come to the aid of the slaves held by Arab owners?

The United Nations will not. Islamic states dominate that disgusting organization.

Will the US State Department do anything? Not while Barack Obama is president and Hillary Clinton is secretary of state.

Last questions:

Should the United States – once rid of Obama and his black-winged minions – act to put an end to this time-honored custom of slave-owning in Islamic countries? If so, why? As a moral imperative? As resistance to the jihad? Both?

While politicians in Western democracies, or at least in Britain and the US, interrogate their consciences over how much physical and mental pressure they may allow their agents to use on captured terrorists to elicit vital security information, they choose to overlook the practice of torture in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank …

The West Bank? There Britain has suddenly to take heed of  what the following report calls ‘a wave of torture’  because Britain is the paymaster of the torturers.  The Mail on Sunday is to be commended for exposing the facts, but calling it a ‘wave’ that has been going on for ‘the past two years’ implies that the practice is unusual, when in truth, as the British Foreign Office knows perfectly well, it is prevalent and customary.

From the MailOnline:

The Government is sending British police and intelligence officers to the West Bank to try to stop a wave of brutal torture by Palestinian security forces funded by UK taxpayers.

Their mission is to set up and train a new ‘internal affairs’ department with sweeping powers to investigate abuse and bring torturers to justice.

The department is being paid for by Britain, with an initial planning budget of £100,000 – a sum set to soar as it becomes established.

Yesterday a senior official from the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA), which runs the West Bank and its security agencies, admitted for the first time that torture, beatings and extra-judicial killings have been rife for the past two years, with hundreds of torture allegations and at least four murders in custody, the most recent in August. …

Support for the new department follows the disclosure by The Mail on Sunday in January that Britain spends £20million a year funding the forces responsible for the abuse.

Most of their victims are accused of involvement with Hamas, the radical Islamist party that seized power through violence in the Gaza Strip in 2007. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is controlled by the rival Fatah party.

Fatah and Hamas are both terrorist organizations. Britain gives millions to Hamas too – though strictly, of course, for ‘humanitarian aid’.

As if money were not fungible!

Thomas Sowell writes today in Townhall on  ‘the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about “torturing” captured terrorists’:

People’s actions often make far more sense than their words. Most of the people who are talking lofty talk about how we mustn’t descend to the level of our enemies would themselves behave very differently if presented with a comparable situation, instead of being presented with an opportunity to be morally one up with rhetoric.

What if it was your mother or your child who was tied up somewhere beside a ticking time bomb and you had captured a terrorist who knew where that was? Face it: What you would do to that terrorist to make him talk would make water-boarding look like a picnic.

You wouldn’t care what the New York Times would say or what “world opinion” in the U.N. would say. You would save your loved one’s life and tell those other people what they could do.

But if the United States behaves that way it is called “arrogance”– even by American citizens. Indeed, even by the American president…

For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought…

When historians of the future look back on our era, what will they think of our time? Our media too squeamish to call murderous and sadistic terrorists anything worse than “militants” or “insurgents”? Our president going abroad to denigrate the country that elected him, pandering to feckless allies and outright enemies, and literally bowing to a foreign tyrant ruling a country from which most of the 9/11 terrorists came?…

The left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.

If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.