English slaves of Islam


http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001423.html

Melanie Phillips's Diary

September 27, 2005
Britain's 200-year jihad
On my travels for the past few days, I have been reading a book which
tells the story of a quite astonishing part of British history of which
I was previously unaware. In 'White Gold', Giles Milton records the
appalling details -- gleaned,it appears, from a wealth of historical
documents including diaries and letters -- of a seaborne Islamic jihad
against Britain which lasted for no less than two centuries.

>>From the early seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, thousands of
British men women and children were kidnapped by Arab corsairs and sold
into slavery in Morocco where they were kept in conditions of
unspeakable barbarism. The astounding thing is that these British
victims were not merely seized at sea where they ran the gauntlet of
such pirates in places such as the Straits of Gibraltar. They were
actually abducted from Britain itself.

Corsairs from a place in Morocco called Sale -- who became known in
Britain as the 'Sally Rovers' -- sailed up the Cornish coast in
July 1625, for example, came ashore dressed in djellabas and wielding
damascene scimitars, burst into the parish church at Mount's Bay and
dragged out 60 men women and children whom they shipped off to Morocco.
Thousands more Britons were seized from their villages or their ships
and dispatched to the hell-holes of the Moroccan slave pens, from where
they were forced to work all hours in appalling conditions building the
vast palace of the monstrous and psychopathic Sultan, Moulay Ismail,
who tortured and butchered them at whim. Most of them perished, but the
book records the survival of a tenacious Cornish boy Thomas Pellow, who
survived 23 years of this ordeal and whose descendant, Lord Exmouth,
finally ended the white slave trade when he destroyed Algiers in 1816.

The book makes clear that this assault upon the British people (and
upon Europeans and Americans who were similarly seized) was a jihad.
The Sally Rovers, writes Milton, were called 'al-ghuzat'-- the term
once used for the soldiers who fought with the Prophet -- and were
hailed as religious warriors engaged in a holy war against the infidel
Christians who were pressurised to convert to Islam under threat of
hideous punishment. What is even more striking was the response of the
British crown. For almost two centuries, it made only the most
ineffectual attempts to rescue its enslaved subjects. Those who had
succumbed to the torture and inhumanity of the Sultan and converted to
Islam were deemed to be no longer British and therefore outside the
scope of any rescue. The pleas of Pellow's parents were simply
brushed aside. Popular outrage forced successive Kings to dispatch a
series of feeble emissaries to try to get the Sultan to end this vile
traffic and release the slaves, all to no avail.

But this went on for virtually two centuries. For almost 200 years the
British state either sat on its hands or wrung them impotently while
the Islamic jihad seized, enslaved and butchered its people. And then
it appears, this staggering onslaught was all but airbrushed out of our
history.

Food for disquieting thought.

Posted by melanie at September 27, 2005 11:20 PM

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