On February 18, “Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine” posted an anti-Semitic meme to their Instagram account which purportedly explains why black Americans should naturally ally with Palestinian Arabs. Under the heading “African people have a profound understanding of [Israeli] apartheid and occupation,” was a cartoon from 1967 depicting a Jew with a rope around the necks of both Egyptian-Arab dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser and Black boxing superstar Muhammad Ali. The hangman’s hand bore the Star of David and a dollar sign. Behind the roped Arab and black captives, a muscular black arm labeled the “Third World Liberation Movement” raises a scimitar ready to cut the evil Jews’ victims free.

The day after the image appeared, the Harvard administration condemned the post and all three Harvard groups responsible for it reissued the same message of Black-Palestinian solidarity, but removed and apologized for the anti-Semitic graphic. The cat, however, had been let slip out of the bag: elites at Harvard had become Farrakhaners.

For decades, anti-Semitic forces have sought to break the historic Black-Jewish alliance, with two sequential blows. First, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan sought to poison Black minds with a book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which purported to prove that “the Jews” ran the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

A second strike came a generation later. A leftist idea called “intersectionality,” promoted first on campuses and then in K–12 curriculum, divides American society into two groups: the “oppressed,” which includes all minorities -- ethnic, sexual, racial, and religious (except Jews) -- and the “oppressors.” Jews are classed with the “oppressors” as “White-adjacents” whose successes are seen as proofs of their villainy.

Intersectionality decrees that every oppressed group is a natural and moral ally of all the others in their collective fight against “White supremacy.” A prime corollary: Any criticism of the culture, history, or conduct of an “oppressed” group or any person in it is slammed as “racist.” In one fell swoop then, the Jews went from being on the “good guy” team, chief ally of American Blacks (and gays, and feminists, and so on) over to the “bad guy” team. At the same time, American Arabs and Muslims took the empty Jewish seat, their causes embraced by all the “oppressed,” with their conduct beyond criticism. It was an incredibly clever way to recruit America’s activists to the jihad against the Jews.

Both of these assaults on the Jews are built on lies and deceits. All cultures and societies -- the Romans, Greeks, Aztecs, Chinese, Africans, Christians, Muslims, and Jews -- have had slaves. And while some Jews, like people from practically all other groups at the time, played a role in the African slave trade, the Jewish role was microscopic, especially in the antebellum America South. What made Farrakhan’s book so persuasive was the publication of actual records of Jews buying and selling blacks. Zooming in on these relatively few individual cases, his claim that it was “the Jews” who were the master slavers seems compelling. Zooming in on Jewish conduct has indeed always been a powerful technique.

Only if you pull the camera back is the actual truth revealed -- the truth that Harvard professors and anti-Israel radicals seek to hide: that it was the Muslims who, for 14 centuries, conquered and enslaved Black Africans. And it is Muslims who still do: Today, Arabs and Muslims capture, buy, and sell blacks in at least five African countries and across the Arab world.

In Algeria and Libya, Sub-Saharan African migrants fleeing violence and poverty to the south are enslaved by local Arabs as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean for Europe. The Global Slavery Index estimates that 84,000 Blacks are enslaved in Algeria and 47,000 in Libya. A CNN video shows Arabs auctioning off two black men for $400 each.

In Mauritania, light-skinned Arabs preside over an apartheid system in which the Black majority is treated as subhuman, and, says the Global Slavery Index, 149,000 people are still enslaved. These are true chattel slaves, passed down like furniture from father to son, and, in previous decades, are known to have been horrifically tortured.

In Nigeria, ISIS affiliate Boko Haram’s jihad attacks on African Christians are eerily similar to the Hamas slaughter of October 7. Boko Haram, like Hamas, is motivated by Islamic supremacism, and, like Hamas, storms “infidel” (Christian) villages, murders and burns people alive, and kidnaps children, mostly young girls. The number of people in jihadist custody is unknown, but is at least 4,000.

In Sudan, there remain an estimated 35,000 Blacks enslaved during the Arab north’s self-declared jihad which killed 2.5 million.

And in Arab countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, unspecified thousands of poor black women are lured by promises of legitimate jobs to be trafficked as prostitutes and household maids. In 2020, one Nigerian government official claimed that as many as 80,000 women from Nigeria alone were being held as sex slaves across Lebanon, Mali, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E.

These truths are not told because they are politically incorrect, anti-intersectional, and “Islamophobic.”

Curiously, nobody seems to have tried to apply intersectionality to the Middle East and North Africa. There, it is Muslims who are in the majority, and are -- if you are a woman, gay, Christian, Jewish, or, in many cases, Black -- indeed the oppressor majority and, following intersectionality, should be given no quarter. Instead, for no logical reason, the left’s “no criticism” shield for American minorities extends to American Muslims’ Middle Eastern and African brethren. Which means that, at Harvard, and everywhere else where anti-Semitism reigns, today’s Black slaves must never be mentioned, much less liberated.

You love Hamas and the Palestinians and hate the Jews? You’re a foe of today’s Black slaves.

Hopefully, in time, there will no longer be a “secret relationship” between Harvard anti-Semites, Louis Farrakhan, and today’s slavers of Black Africans.

Charles Jacobs is president of the Jewish Leadership Project and a founding member of the African-Jewish Alliance. In 2000, he received Boston’s Freedom Award from Coretta Scott King for his work in helping to liberate thousands of black slaves in Sudan. He holds a doctorate in social policy from Harvard University.

Ben Poser is executive editor of White Rose Magazine and executive director of the American Anti-Slavery Group. He holds a degree in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History from Brandeis University.

Image: Picryl