Free Republic

It was another devastating blow for black Africa’s most powerless from the world’s most powerful black American. Like in his 2009 African visit when he visited a former European slave depot in Ghana, during his recently concluded 2013 African tour U.S. President Barack Obama again deemed that the defunct trans-Atlantic slave trade was the only past black African slavery worthy of his attention. While paying homage to the victims of the trans-Atlantic trade is obviously necessary for myriad reasons, the U.S. president failed once more not only to mention Africa’s other historical slave trade, Arab slavery, that also involved millions...

One weekday morning in April 2004, a Libyan girl named Soraya was accorded one of her nation’s highest honors: Col. Moammar Khadafy was visiting her school, and Soraya alone had been chosen to present him with a bouquet. “You can’t imagine the excitement,” she recalled. “To see Khadafy in person . . . His face had been known to me since I was born.” Soraya was ushered into a makeshift dressing room, where she changed into traditional garb for the Libyan woman: red pants and tunic, small hat. “My heart was beating a hundred miles a minute,” Soraya said. She...

A Conversation with Thomas Fleming, historian and author of A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.Thomas Fleming is known for his provocative, politically incorrect, and very accessible histories that challenge many of the clichés of current American history books. Fleming is a revisionist in the best conservative sense of the word. His challenges to accepted wisdom are not with an agenda, but with a relentless hunger for the truth and a passion to present the past as it really was, along with capturing the attitudes and culture of the times. In...

The History Place - Great Speeches Collection Frederick Douglass - The Hypocrisy of American Slavery Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was the best known and most influential African American leader of the 1800s. He was born a slave in Maryland but managed to escape to the North in 1838. He traveled to Massachusetts and settled in New Bedford, working as a laborer to support himself. In 1841, he attended a convention of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society and quickly came to the attention of its members, eventually becoming a leading figure in the New England antislavery movement. In 1845, Douglass published his autobiography,...

Representative Gwen Moore (D-Wisc) says she is “tired of people complaining about the cost of welfare benefits. The notion that benefits ought to be temporary or should encourage recipients to find gainful employment is inhumane.” “Some of us just aren’t suited for employment,” Moore argued. “We may lack marketable skills or the motivation to drag ourselves to a job on a daily basis. Why should we be pressured into something we don’t want to do? That’s slavery.” Moore made the case for more remunerative welfare as “just compensation to those bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of reproduction. Why...

It seems every day in the 224 years since our Constitution was written, we, as a nation, have moved further away from the "more perfect union" it brought into being. Right from the beginning, governments, both state and federal, were fighting to break free from the clearly laid out box this beautifully crafted document imposed on them. At various times those governments did break free – moments such as the Alien and Sedition Act and the actions of President Jackson come to mind – but overall, it remained contained and kept our individual liberty secure. Sadly, this is no longer...

full title....Historians claim Obama's 'Door of No Return' which he visited to highlight the evils of slavery is a 'scam' and was actually used as a garbage dumpWhen President Barack Obama visited the 'Door of No Return' on a Senegalese island on Thursday, he believed he was looking at where Africans were shipped across the Atlantic into slavery. But not all may be as it first seemed. Historians claim that the entrance of Slave House on Goree Island where Obama posed for a photo opportunity was most likely only used for disposing of garbage. As reported by the Telegraph, Professor...

For a black American president on a tour of Africa, it seemed an obvious opportunity for a speech about the evils of slavery. When Barack Obama visited Senegal on Thursday, he headed for Gorée Island, where a crumbling fort is said to have been the key departure point for millions of slaves shipped across the Atlantic. Yet as the president toured the 18th century building and later spoke of how the visit had allowed him to "fully appreciate the magnitude of the slave trade", historians pointed out that it was probably never used for that purpose at all.

BANGKOK, Thailand — Their condition recalls dark tales from the 18th century: underfed men lorded over by seafaring captains who pay them nothing and maim the disobedient. Yet these forced labor abuses play out on Thai-owned fishing trawlers each day. And the victims — typically destitute men from Myanmar or Cambodia lured by coyotes full of false promises — continue to wash ashore with accounts of torture and casual homicide. For years, US officials have urged Thailand, one of America’s closest Asian allies, to rid its $7.3 billion fisheries export industry of these abuses. Though carried out on lawless seas,...

China was downgraded Wednesday to the lowest ranking in an annual U.S. survey of human trafficking across the globe, raising the prospect of rare sanctions from Washington. The U.S. State Department said China together with Russia and Uzbekistan have been dumped to the Tier-3 blacklist of the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report after languishing on Tier-2 Watch List, the second lowest rank, for nearly a decade. They join the other countries that have been on the blacklist for years—North Korea, Syria, Zimbabwe, and Iran. In downgrading China, the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons cited an...

Thomas Walker, a direct ancestor of George W. and George H.W. Bush, was a notorious slave trader active in the late 18th century along the coast of West Africa.

(Newser) – Ohio has another creepy captivity case on its hands. Three people have been charged with forced labor after allegedly holding a woman with cognitive disabilities and her child prisoner for two years, reports the Plain Dealer. According to an FBI affidavit reviewed by the Mansfield News Journal, Jordie Callahan, 26, and Jessica Hunt, 31, convinced the woman (referred to in the affidavit as SE) to come live with them, then allegedly forced her to do house and yard work. She and her child (no age is given) were watched via baby monitor and kept in a padlocked room...

War is hell and should be else there would be more of it, but there are things that are far worse. Living in a godless tyrannical Marxist/fascist hell with no liberty, no religious, political or economic freedom for one. No thank you. I'll stand by the constitution and defend my God-given unalienable rights, including the rights to free speech, free religion, to be armed, to be free from government spying, freedom from over-reaching tyrannical government, etc., etc., etc. The corrupt democrat politicizing of our government agencies must stop NOW!! The government snooping programs MUST be shut down NOW! Our borders...

When President Obama goes to Africa at month’s end, the first African American president will have a rare opportunity to spread U.S. values to that continent. It would be a shame if his trip instead validated slavery. By selecting Tanzania as one of the three countries that will receive a presidential visit on that trip, the Obama administration is honoring a government that has been in a multiyear diplomatic dispute with the United States over human trafficking. Specifically, a U.S. court in 2008 issued a $1 million judgment against a Tanzanian diplomat stationed in Washington because he and his wife held...

The Afghanistan Parliament recently blocked a bill that would ban the selling of women. The politicians said it was against Islamic Law. ... Afghanistan's parliament has blocked a law banning violence against women in what is being seen as a serious blow to the progress of women's rights. President Hamid Karzai approved the legislation by decree in 2009 but the country's politicians were required to endorse it. ... Among the law's provisions are criminalising child marriage and banning "baad," the traditional practice of selling and buying women to settle disputes.

While much documentation is known of the American slave trade, the Muslim enslavement of Africans (and Europeans) encompassing the last 1400 years has been hushed up. This remarkable documentary films shows the story historians have neglected.

Just days after announcing an order to block the execution of convicted killer Nathan Dunlap, Governor John Hickenlooper’s administration is once again courting controversy, this time in the form of convicted sex offender Homaidan al-Turki... Hickenlooper’s parole board will decide this week on whether or not to release al-Turki, a Saudi national who was originally sentenced to 28 years to life in 2006 for imprisoning and sexually abusing his housekeeper over a period of years in the basement of his Aurora home. ... federal and state officials are still investigating any ties between al-Turki, Evan Ebel and the white supremacist...

In his second term, as scandals were exploding all around him, President William Jefferson Clinton boarded Air Force One along with a few close personal friends, like BET CEO and richest black man in America Robert Johnson, and a bunch of other businessmen and politicians, along with the ubiquitous Jesse Jackson, for a jaunt to Africa. The trip cost a mere $42.8 million, which would have been enough to feed a sizable chunk of Africa, and featured an entourage that would have shamed Alexander the Great or Jay-Z. It took 1,300 people to make Clinton’s Great African Getaway possible including...

"I hope there will be no decision to allow women to drive at this stage because we have first to respect the wish of the people and the society." — Rawdah Al-Yousif, female "guardianship" activist in Saudi Arabia. Some slaves prefer slavery: “A prominent Saudi female activist,” Emirates 24/7 reported recently, has come out against the decision by Saudi Arabia to lift its ban on women driving cars. Rawdah Al-Yousif complained that campaigns to give women the right to drive , continue despite the clear response by the rulers of this country that any decision to allow women to drive...

As you prepare to grill out your steaks and fly your flags, take time from the swilling of beer to consider the following. Our government is completely out of control. Benghazi, Fast-n-Furious, IRS Abuse, 100,000 perjured affidavits, phony securities marketed under false pretense, Congressional force used to commit accounting fraud, money lanudering and more. There is no longer a rule of law; the Golden Rule has been turned into "Do unto others, run like hell and, if caught, bribe Congress or threaten economic collapse." While that contains a slight amount of hyperbole, the operative word there is "slight." There is...