If someone continually highlights black slaves long dead in a land where slavery is long dead, but ignores current day black slaves, would you conclude that he actually cares about black slavery? Or might you suppose he was running some kind of scam?

In this boat is virtually every contemporary leftist. But the poster boy for such hypocrisy just may be, quite notably, “civil rights” activist Al Sharpton. So says Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, in a Saturday American Thinker piece.

Of course, this is just one of Sharpton’s many sins, which include “the Tawana Brawley rape hoax of 1987, the anti-Jewish Crown Heights riots of 1991, and the firebombing of a Jewish-owned Harlem fashion boutique in 1995,” Jacobs reminds us. Note here that property was destroyed, people were injured, and at least one was killed by events Sharpton helped instigate; in fact, he actually said during the 1991 riots that “Hitler did not do the job.” He has blood on his hands.

This hasn’t stopped prominent Democrats from now kissing the race hustler’s ring. As black economics professor Glenn Loury recently lamented, providing examples of such, “‘@TheRevAl has dedicated his life to the fight for justice for all…,’ wrote Elizabeth Warren. Kamala Harris praised Sharpton as a man who has ‘spent his life fighting for what’s right.’ Joe Biden agreed, lauding the reverend as ‘a champion in the fight for civil rights.’”

Yet the “problem for Democrats,” Loury continued, “is that Al Sharpton actually is…‘a con man.’”

This brings us to the slavery con. It’s not just that “Mr. Sharpton is an ambulance-chasing, anti-Semitic, anti-white race hustler,” as the word-mincing Loury puts it. It’s that contrary to his self-marketing, Sharpton is not, as Jacobs points out, “a tough guy who never buckles when it comes to defending his race.”

Consider: While mulling a 2004 presidential run, Sharpton took a trip to Sudan in 2001 to investigate reports of Muslim Arabs killing and enslaving black Christians. He met with slave women who’d been raped and bore scars from beatings and was “appalled”; he said it was “outrageous that no nationally known civil rights group has gone over to Africa to criticize what is happening there,” Jacobs relates, and he vowed to bring attention to their suffering.

He then promptly did nothing.

While Sharpton’s trip might have largely been driven by political opportunism (i.e., elevating his profile in the black community and facilitating his presidential ambitions), Jacobs points to another reason for the con man’s inaction.

He believes Sharpton abandoned the Africans, he wrote, “because they are enslaved by Arab Muslims.”

“When Sharpton returned from Sudan he met with senior members of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam,” Jacobs explains. “Farrakhan had been vigorously denying that Arabs were enslaving blacks. His mission is to convince American blacks that Islam is the path to authentic freedom; it would be damaged by living and breathing proof that blacks are enslaved and slaughtered in African countries like Sudan where Islam dominates. Equally damaging for Farrakhan is the case of Mauritania, where black Muslims, who had been converted to Islam centuries ago, are nevertheless enslaved by Muslim Arab-Berbers.”

While I suspect a big part of Farrakhan’s “mission” is empowering himself and converting his own hatred into action, he is devoted to that mission. As Jacobs also tells us, when the Muslim leader was cornered in a 1996 press conference and asked why he was ignoring African slavery, he “grew visibly angry and challenged the gathered reporters. “‘If slavery exists,’ he shouted, ‘why don’t you go, as a member of the press?! And you look inside of the Sudan, and if you find it, then you come back, and tell the American people what you have found!’”

Well, Baltimore Sun editors “took him up on his challenge and sent two reporters to Sudan, where the reporters personally purchased the freedom of two black Christian slave boys,” Jacobs continued. “Three months later, the Sun published a Pulitzer Prize-nominated account of their trip. Clarence Page, the Chicago Tribune’s black editorialist, who had written about a billion-dollar ‘loan’ to Farrakhan by Libyan dictator Qaddafi for purposes of fomenting a revolt among black soldiers in the U.S. armed forces, now taunted Farrakhan to respond to the Sun report. But the leader of the Nation of Islam fell silent.”

So much for caring about black slavery.

Yet far from being alone in hypocrisy, Sharpton and Farrakhan reflect a left-wing norm that treats black slavery as merely a political tool. And, no, the excuse that they’re Americans and, as such, their sole job is getting their own house in order doesn’t wash.

Not only is slavery, again, long dead in the United States (except for the Muslims we invite in who then illegally enslave blacks here), but the American Left couldn’t talk enough, protest enough, and boycott enough to combat Apartheid in then-white-ruled South Africa. Never mind that the nation wasn’t actually enslaving anyone and that millions of blacks fled into South Africa because life there was far superior to that in their black-ruled countries. Anyway, so much for white privilege.

What motivates this slavery hypocrisy? Aside from what Jacobs mentioned, remember that those bent on sowing division — and leveraging advantages, such as affirmative action and “reparations” — in the United States can’t do so by focusing on slavery outside of it.

Moreover, the reality of such bondage not only destroys the leftist narrative that Western civilization (or white people, America) is uniquely flawed and must practice perpetual penance, but reveals the contrary truth: Western civilization is uniquely civilized. After all, the West might not have been the first to practice slavery, but it was the first to end it.

As for ending today’s African slavery, the Left will get right on that as soon as it becomes politically advantageous — or, as is said, when Hell freezes over.

Photo: AP Images