How did he know what whites were? I don’t think they thought of race in modern terms.
True that. And I was being silly to make another point about Muslims. But I believe they saw tribal differences and kingdom differences. Hence, making sex slaves out of "yellow haired" women (blondes) was probably about as much about planting the flag on the Byzantine Empire as it was about the attractiveness of the blondes themselves. To them it was like not just winning the game, but also tearing down the opponents goalposts.
Plus, they really played up some differences (real or imagined) between the Muslims and the Europeans. As the centuries went by the Muslim pirates expanded on Muhammad's blonde slave talk by saying, "Ya know, Omar. Them European women are more into sex than Muslim women." And, "I hear they like being raped." Like fish tales, the more they talked about it the more enticing European sex slaves became in their culture. From 1 to 1.2 million Europeans were captured into slavery for the Berber (north Africa) slave trade. The primary purpose of the women was sex slavery. And they had to keep capturing more and more not just because the women were wore out and discarded, but because any child born to them by rape was considered a child of the rapist and, therefore, not a future slave. The only way the rape victims kept their children is if they renounced Christianity and turned Muslim (at least in word). And even then, it means the child was not a future slave (thus there wasn't much chattel slavery breeding new slaves).
This is, IMHO, why much of north Africa is white today, why people like Gadhafi could've passed for a white man.
If special programs are needed to provide special help to some that others apparently do no need, does that not imply that some are inherently supremier than others?