Indeed, along with the treatment of American Indians, slavery remains a horrid blot on our past, one that not even the blood that 750,000 Americans shed in the war ending the “peculiar institution” washed away (forget that we are the only nation that fought a civil war to free its slaves).But in support of the Left’s current vogue for “fairness,” I now expect our president to follow up by convening a special meeting of Muslim clerics to chastise them for the 14 centuries of slavery under Islam that, in its scope, scale, duration, and cruelty, exceeded the outrages of any other slave-based civilization.

The first slave-labor plantations on an industrial scale were in not the Mississippi Delta but the Mesopotamian Delta, around Basra during the Arab “Golden Age.” For centuries, millions of blacks from Africa and brown-skinned captives from the subcontinent were put to work in conditions that led, in the late ninth century, to the greatest slave revolt known to historians, the 15-year Revolt of the Zanj (East African blacks), the scale of which eclipsed the better-known Spartacus uprising against Rome or the Haitian struggle for freedom.

At its peak, perhaps a half-million slaves, impoverished Arabs and Bedouins, repeatedly defeated the sultan’s armies. At the climax of the uprising, Basra was obliterated amid a regional apocalypse. Slaves thereafter were more strictly disciplined and dispersed, but the institution boomed throughout Islam’s realms. Compared to the mega-mall slave markets of Damascus and Baghdad, of Cairo, Tunis, and Bakhchisaray, and, later, of Timbuktu and Istanbul, the slave pens of Charleston and New Orleans were country stores.

As the Ottoman claw choked one third of Europe, the enslavement of Africans continued unabated, but the real prizes now had white skins (blonde females and pretty boys were especially prized). Each of the literally hundreds of Ottoman and Tartar invasions and slave-taking raids into the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, southern Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even Russia herded thousands and tens of thousands of prisoners southward in vast drives of human cattle.

The Eurasian steppes and the Balkan mountain passes shone white with the bones of millions of captives who did not survive the journey.Apologists for Islam — and they are legion — claim that Muslim rule over conquered peoples was enlightened, that conquered Christians and Jews had only to pay the dhimmi tax and everything was fine. Tell that tale over the graves of the Balkan and Greek families forced to send their fittest, finest sons to the Sublime Porte of the sultan to be brought up as Muslims. The strongest young boys trained as janissaries, Ottoman shock troops, to make war on the frontiers against Christians and take more slaves.