The Slave Trade and Conspiracy Theories

More deliberate lies and deceit from the Candi Cult:

You can always tell it is a new day: there is yet another nutjob conspiracy theory being pushed by the Jew-hating psychopath Candace Owens. The latest one is that the Jews were the ones mainly behind the slave trade! And of course, tomorrow we will learn from her that all cases of teen acne are the result of an evil Jewish plot. It is such a good thing we have her around to tell us what is really happening in the world.

Her neurotic, demonic and irrational obsession with the Jews knows no bounds, and her addiction to ugly antisemitism must be called out – daily. As to her latest stupidity – blaming the slave trade on Jews – one can easily enough dismiss this nonsense.

But of course she and her legion of cult followers never let facts, evidence and reason get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, and some good old Jew-hatred. So let me draw upon two experts here. The first one wrote on this very matter in a column penned over 30 years ago.

In his 1999 collection of essays, Barbarians Inside the Gates, Black American economist and commentator Thomas Sowell has a piece called “Singling Out Jews”. The second half of his essay goes like this:

On a subject where such ideological distortion has been the rule rather than the exception, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would take it a step further and single out Jews as responsible for the enslavement and trading of Africans. But when it came to enslaving human beings and trading them like cattle, blacks did it, whites did it, Jews did it, Gentiles did it. There was slavery in China and Russia and in the island paradise of Bali.

 

If this presents an ugly picture of the human race, so be it. But to talk about Jews trading slaves is like saying that white people have toenails. It is true enough in itself, but grossly misleading if it suggests that non-whites do not have toenails.

 

During the long era of slavery, going back thousands of years and extending around the world, merchant peoples in general traded slaves along with other merchandise. Venetians, Greeks and Jews did so in Europe, the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, The Arabs in Africa and the Middle East, as well as various African tribes, among many other peoples in many other places.

 

None of those who are trying to whip up Americans of African ancestry against Jews points out that the Arabs were among the principal enslavers and traders of Africans, while Jews were much more likely to be trading Slavs in Medieval Europe and around the Mediterranean. No doubt diligent research can turn up cases of Jews holding or trading black slaves in the Western Hemisphere, but blacks themselves did the same thing in the Caribbean and in New Orleans and Charleston, among other places. Nobody’s hands are completely clean.

 

Even if the discussion of slavery is arbitrarily restricted to the enslavement of black people, Jews come far down the list of those involved. They cannot compare with the number of Africans who held fellow-Africans in bondage in Africa, not even counting those who sold their black brothers to the white man.

 

Most Jews were in no position to trade slaves, and had all that they could do to survive the persecutions to which they were themselves subjected. But leading scholars—both Jews and Gentiles—affirm that Jews were not exempt from taking part in this global trade.

 

The singling out of Jews and the implication that they had some special role in the enslavement of Africans is an outrage rightly being condemned, though not by enough people. Unfortunately, it is only a further extension of the pervasive selective history and selective moral indignation that has long marked the discussion of slavery and other issues, even in “respectable” circles.

And much more recently, the Messianic Jewish commentator Ron Cantor posted an online piece about the idiocy of what Candace is claiming. Titled, “Candace Owens’s latest lie: ‘Jewish people were in control of the slave trade’,” it is worth sharing portions of it here. He says in part:

Claims that Jewish people were responsible for, or disproportionately behind, the Atlantic slave trade are not only historically false but also recycle long-standing antisemitic conspiracy theories. When Candace Owens repeats or amplifies these ideas, she is not engaging in serious historical critique, as she is not a historian or even a student of history. She primarily repeats unproven claims on a myriad of subjects for likes and clicks.

 

Now, she is reviving a narrative that has been thoroughly debunked by mainstream historians across ideological and religious lines. Even a novice student of the 17th and 18th centuries would know how dumb her assertions are. The Atlantic slave trade was a vast, multinational enterprise spanning centuries and involving European empires, African kingdoms, shipping companies, plantation owners, insurers, and financiers. The dominant actors were the Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, and Dutch, operating through state-sanctioned trading companies and imperial systems.

 

To suggest that Jews “ran” or were “behind” this system ignores the basic structure of early modern power: Jews, as a small and frequently persecuted minority in Europe, were largely excluded from political authority, colonial governance, and chartered monopolies that controlled the trade.

And he goes on to say this:

Yes, a small number of Jewish individuals participated in slaveholding or slave trading, just as members of virtually every ethnic and religious group did in societies where slavery was legal. But participation is not the same as control, and participation of Jews was minimal.

 

Serious scholarship consistently shows that Jewish involvement was marginal relative to the scale of the trade. Jews owned only a tiny fraction of slave ships, plantations, and trading firms. In many colonies, laws explicitly restricted Jewish economic activity and barred Jews from the very institutions that organized large-scale slaving operations.

 

The idea that Jews were central to the slave trade gained traction not from academic research but from polemical sources (meaning, written to prove a point, not for accuracy)—most notably the highly racist propaganda “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” published by the Jew-hating Nation of Islam. Historians have debunked the book. It is not peer-reviewed (meaning scholars have not affirmed it).

And he concludes:

What makes Owens’s claims especially troubling is that they mirror classic antisemitic tropes: the notion of secret control, disproportionate influence, and hidden culpability for society’s greatest evils. These narratives have historically been used to exploit, expel, persecute, and MURDER JEWS. Repackaging them as “just asking questions” or “telling uncomfortable truths” does not make them any less dangerous or false.

 

Owens, who claims to be a follower of Jesus (wait until she finds out He’s Jewish!), is influencing hundreds of thousands of Christians. Paul warned the Christians of his day not to buy into such theories, saying that God has not rejected Israel (Rom. 11:1, 11). We sound the alarm because we care for you. Paul warned that misunderstanding God’s plan for Israel could lead to pride and deception (Rom. 11:25). While God wants his church to pray for Israel and contend for her salvation.

 

Debunking this claim does not minimize the horrors of slavery or deflect responsibility from those who truly profited from it. Slavery is grotesque. The moral weight of slavery rests squarely on the imperial powers, colonial elites, and economic systems that normalized and enforced it. In fact, the vast majority of slave owners in America identified as Christian. I did not listen to her entire podcast, but did she mention that? (That is not an indictment of Christianity, but of those hypocritical slave owners who claimed to love Jesus while abusing His creation.)

 

In the end, Owens’s narrative fails both historically and morally. It collapses under basic scrutiny of the evidence and relies on innuendo rather than scholarship. It is classic scapegoating. It fails the common-sense test for anyone who knows anything about Jewish history. We dishonor the history of slavery when we use it to attack people who had very little to do with it.

 

Pray for Candace Owen’s soul. I just did.

This is just the latest case of a lying, embittered and demonised nutjob who really needs to keep her mouth shut, repent and get right with God. Like Cantor, I pray for her – daily. She desperately needs deliverance and new life in Christ.

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