A fascinating video on X shows a young woman who identifies as a “Palestinian” spending almost nine minutes trying to explain why her black, pro-Palestine friends were wrong to be offended when West Bank denizens referred to them as “monkeys” and “slaves.” Watching her intellectual contortions is impressive as she tries to hide a fundamental fact: Arabs despise blacks.

A little history is appropriate. The African slave trade to the West probably wouldn’t have existed were it not for the Muslim Arab slave traders. It did not matter to them that many of the Africans whom they sold into slavery were fellow Muslims. What mattered was that they were black. To that end, during the era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Arab traders happily brokered an estimated 12.5 million black Africans into demeaning and often deadly slavery.

X screen grab.

The Muslim Arab world also got its “cut” of black African slaves. Indeed, the internal Islamic slave trade in black Africans equaled or even exceeded the Transatlantic Slave Trade, with 10 to 15 million Africans kidnapped from Africa and sent into Muslim territories from North Africa to the Middle East to Turkey and the Balkans.

The slave trade only ended in the early 20th century. This contrasts with the Transatlantic passage, which was shut down 100 years before, and American slavery, which ended half a century before in a welter of blood, as hundreds of thousands of white Americans fought to end the immoral scourge on their land.

Despite the millions of blacks who were sucked into the Arab and Muslim world, few left behind descendants. ChatGPT even volunteered to explain to me how castration caused the difference between the internal Muslim slave trade and the Transatlantic Slave Trade:

...the contrast between the Atlantic slave trade and the Islamic/Ottoman slave trade on this point [castration] is striking, and it helps explain why African-descended populations remain large in the Americas but are relatively small in the Middle East today.

1. Castration in the Islamic World

• In the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim regions, many black male slaves were castrated, especially if they were destined for harems or high-trust roles.
• Mortality was extremely high: anywhere from 50–90% of boys died from the procedure.
• This meant:
  • Few African males left descendants.
  • Enslaved Africans were not “self-reproducing” populations; constant new imports from Africa were required.
  • Even though millions of Africans were trafficked into the Islamic world over centuries, their genetic and cultural impact was muted because few lineages survived.

2. The Atlantic Slave Trade (Europeans → Americas)

• In contrast, European traders and plantation owners in the Americas did not generally castrate enslaved men.
• Enslaved Africans were used primarily for agricultural labor, and plantation owners had a strong economic incentive to allow them to reproduce — because children of enslaved women were also enslaved, creating a self-reproducing slave population.
• Over time, this produced large, permanent African-descended populations in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America.
• Example: The U.S. slave population grew from roughly 400,000 imports to 4 million enslaved people by 1860, due largely to natural reproduction.

3. Demographic Consequences

• Americas: Today, there are hundreds of millions of people of African descent across North and South America and the Caribbean.
• Middle East / Ottoman legacy regions: Despite centuries of slave imports (comparable in scale), only small communities of Afro-descended peoples remain — e.g., the Afro-Turks, the Zanj in southern Iraq, Afro-Iranians, Afro-Saudis, and the Sidis of India/Pakistan.
• The relative scarcity is largely due to:
  • Castration of male slaves,
  • Social marginalization,
  • And cultural assimilation over generations.

This Muslim Arab disdain for blacks, including black Muslims, has not diminished over the centuries, with Sudan as Exhibit A. During the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005), the Muslim Arabs in the north didn’t stop at slaughtering black Christians. When they were done, they turned their attention to slaughtering black Muslims. This slaughter blurred into the Darfur Genocide (2003 to the present), which saw the Arab Janjaweed troops ruthlessly exterminate non-Arab (i.e., black) civilians.

It's against this backdrop that you get this young woman, with her relentless, hectoring voice, explaining how wrong her black “allies” are to be offended by the casual, demeaning racism they experienced in the West Bank:

What an unbearably exhausting voice and tone to justify the unjustifiable – namely, that Arab Muslims have always considered blacks to be beneath them, which is why they sold them into slavery for hundreds of years.

— Andrea Widburg (@Bookwormroom) August 30, 2025

The problem, she says, is that her black friends just don’t get the hierarchy of oppression:

In Palestine, a non-Palestinian black person is more privileged than a Palestinian of any color, and an American, black or white, is one of the most privileged people in Palestine.

Just as whites are told that blacks cannot be racist, because racism can only operate from the top of the social and economic hierarchy downward, so-called Palestinians, by being the most oppressed, cannot be racist, no matter what they do or say.

Those black people who objected didn’t ‘know their place’—which, ironically, is exactly what a white supremacist would say:

I know that when I am in black spaces, it is not my place to call out issues within the black community, especially when those people are being slaughtered. When I am in black spaces, I am there to observe, to learn, to be an ally, not to call out black people.

Those pro-Palestinian blacks are discovering something that whites could have told them all along. Principles and morals are fixed and apply in all situations to all people. If you believe that it’s wrong to define people by the color of their skin, rather than by their character and values, your principle will never waver, regardless of the situation.

By contrast, if you are a leftist whose “intersectional” values are strictly hierarchical—that is, different rules depending on where you are on the victimhood totem pole—you may find that you suddenly are expected to take the abuse you once so freely dished out.