My latest in PJ Media:

In light of the ongoing efforts by Democrats and the establishment media to make the Make America Great Again hat equivalent to the Nazi swastika, presidential candidate Julián Castro’s recent embrace of the phrase was curious in the extreme. Yet thus far no Leftist political or media spokesperson has complained about the fact that at the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America annual convention last week, Castro declared: “Muslim Americans for generations have been part of the fabric of our American family. They have helped make America the great nation it is.” So far, no one has wagged a disapproving finger at Castro and reminded him that, in the immortal words of Andrew Cuomo that so many Leftists agree with today, “America was never great.”

Their silence is odd, but even odder is the fact that Castro apparently did not provide even a single example of how Muslims “have helped make America the great nation it is,” yet his audience seems to have taken for granted that it was true. But what is the basis for this confidence? Can Mr. Castro elucidate? Since, as he said, “Muslim Americans for generations have been part of the fabric of our American family,” it shouldn’t be hard for him to list a few examples of how Muslims have helped make America the great nation that it is, right?

Castro may not want to do this, of course, since it would only draw attention to his right-wing, bigoted, hate-filled claim that America is great, and that will only lose him voters among Democrats today. So we will have to do it for him.

Castro probably had in mind the increasingly popular Leftist dogma that the slaves in the pre-Civil War American South were Muslims. This claim has been gaining a great deal of currency recently, and despite the fact that slavery has been illegal in the United States for over 150 years, there are more Muslim slaves all the time. According to PBS, “10 to 15 percent were said to be Muslims,” but by April 2019, PBS had revised this, saying that “up to 20 percent of Africans enslaved in America were Muslim.” Even that isn’t enough for the VOA, which claims that “approximately one-third” of American slaves were Muslim.

The VOA does admit, however, that “while the exact number of enslaved Muslims is unknown, up to 40 percent of those who were captured and enslaved came from predominantly Muslim parts of West Africa.” However, that factoid works against the VOA’s own argument about the percentage of Muslims among the slaves, for as the historian Jeremy Black, author of A Brief History of Slavery, notes, Muslim slavers, including those who sold slaves to Atlantic slave traders, enslaved only non-Muslims. Nor are the alleged Muslim slaves likely to have come from non-Muslim areas of West Africa, as there simply weren’t many Muslims at all in those areas during the time that the transatlantic slave trade was thriving.

There is much more. Read the rest here.