Titled "Slave Market" and painted by a Frenchman in 1866, the painting "shows a black, apparently Muslim slave trader displaying a naked young woman with much lighter skin to a group of men for examination," probably in North Africa (AKA "Barbary").

An American museum is vociferously calling on a German political party to stop using one of the former's paintings in the latter's campaign poster for the European elections.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, founded in 2013 and first elected to Germany's national parliament in 2017, has been putting up posters of the painting with the slogan, "So that Europe won't become Eurabia."

"We are strongly opposed to the use of this work to advance any political agenda," objected Olivier Meslay, director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which houses the original painting. He said his museum had written to AfD, "insisting that they cease and desist in using this painting." Despite the rather legal tone, the painting is in the public domain; even Meslay acknowledges that "there are no copyrights or permissions that allow us to exert control over how it is used other than to appeal to civility on the part of the AfD Berlin."

For its part, the AfD said the U.S. museum's call is "a futile attempt to gag the AfD," adding that "[t]he German public has the right to find out about the truth about the possible consequences of illegal mass immigration." Even so, other elements in Germany are even more hostile to the AfD's poster: "party workers have had to repeatedly put up new copies, only to see them destroyed again the following night."

What to make of all this? Objectively, the "Slave Market" painting in question portrays a reality that has played out countless times over the centuries: African and Middle Eastern Muslims have long targeted fair "infidel" women — so much so as to have enslaved millions of them over the centuries (as copiously documented in my recent book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, from which the following quotes and statistics are derived).

Concerning the Muslim demand for, in the words of one historian, "white-complexioned blondes, with straight hair and blue eyes," this traces back to the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, who enticed his followers to wage jihad against neighboring Byzantium by citing its fair and blonde women who awaited them as potential concubines.

For over a millennium afterward, Islamic caliphates, emirates, and sultanates — of the Arab, Berber, Turkic, and Tatar variety — also coaxed their men to jihad on Europe by citing (and later sexually enslaving) its fair women. Accordingly, because the "Umayyads particularly valued blond or red-haired Franc or Galician women as sexual slaves," Dario Fernandez-Morera writes, "al-Andalus [Islamic Spain] became a center for the trade and distribution of slaves."

The insatiable demand for fair women was such that, according to M.A. Khan, an Indian author and former Muslim, it is "impossible to disconnect Islam from the Viking slave-trade, because the supply was absolutely meant for meeting [the] Islamic world's unceasing demand for the prized white slaves" and "white sex-slaves." Emmet Scott goes so far as to argue that "it was the caliphate's demand for European slaves that called forth the Viking phenomenon in the first place."

As for numbers, according to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, "between 1530 and 1780 [alone] there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast" (the appropriate setting of the "Slave Market" painting). By 1541, "Algiers teemed with Christian captives [from Europe], and it became a common saying that a Christian slave was scarce a fair barter for an onion."

With countless enslaved European women — some seized from as far as Denmark and even Iceland — selling for the price of vegetables, little wonder that European observers by the late 1700s noted how "the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion."

Further underscoring the rapacious and relentless drive of the Muslim slave industry, consider this: the United States of America's first war — which it fought before it could even elect its first president — was against these Islamic slavers. When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams asked Barbary's ambassador why his countrymen were enslaving American sailors, the "ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that ... it was their right and duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners."

The situation was arguably worse for Eastern Europeans; the slave markets of the Ottoman sultanate were for centuries so inundated with Slavic flesh that children sold for pennies, "a very beautiful slave woman was exchanged for a pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves were traded for a horse." In Crimea, some three million Slavs were enslaved by the Ottomans' Muslim allies, the Tatars. "The youngest women are kept for wanton pleasures," observed a seventeenth century Lithuanian.

Even the details of the "Slave Market" painting/poster, which depicts a fair and naked female slave being pawed at by potential buyers, echoes reality. Based on a twelfth-century document dealing with slave auctions in Cordoba, Muslim merchants "would put ointments on slave girls of a darker complexion to whiten their faces; brunettes were placed for four hours in a solution to make them blond ('golden'); ointments were placed on the face and body of black slaves to make them 'prettier.'" Then, the Muslim merchant "dresses them all in transparent clothes" and "tells the slave girls to act in a coquettish manner with the old men and with the timid men among the potential buyers to make them crazy with desire."

In short, the Clark Art Institute's objection to the Alternative for Germany party's use of the "Slave Market" painting as a poster is just another attempt to suppress the truth about Muslim/Western history, including its glaring continuity with the present. For the essence of that painting—Muslim men sexually pawing at and ultimately preying on fair skinned women—continues to this day all throughout Western Europe, especially Germany.

The historic events, statistics, and quotes narrated above are from and documented in Raymond Ibrahim's book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. American Thinker reviews appear here and here.