The problem, however, was that all of the activist and media elements which one would think would jump to free modern-day black slaves, including the formidable anti-apartheid coalition of the 1980s, simply weren’t there. Even worse, organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — the people who had produced the reports of slavery which originally alerted Dr. Jacobs and others to its horrors — simply refused to be of much help.
Furthermore, so-called black “leaders” like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, world-famous figures with massive community and media clout, either directly rebuffed efforts to help tell the world, or backed off at the behest of actively hostile parties such as Louis Farrakhan (who decided to act out of character and blame the Jews).
Though a few brave and decent people in the mainstream media, such as at Dateline NBC and even The New York Times, did do their part in broadcasting the images and accounts of slavery, such instances of righteousness were few and far between — and today, are just about extinct.
What, then, astounded Dr. Jacobs and his allies was that it was conservatives and evangelical Christians who actually took up the fight. While liberals waffled and worried about offending Arabs or “dividing” the black community (against Farrakhan, Jackson, and Sharpton), conservatives stood up. For instance, Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and CBN News became a forceful mouthpiece for the abolitionist movement. In the spring of 1997, they were likely the first national television show to broadcast footage of angels like Dr. John Eibner and Baroness Caroline Cox of Christian Solidarity International directly buying back Sudanese slaves’ freedom. In fact, their segment was specifically shaped to refute Farrakhan’s disgusting public denial of slavery from a year earlier — Robertson himself trashed Farrakhan as “an absolute charlatan.”
Jacobs also approached feminists, telling them that female slaves, forcibly converted to Islam and often vaginally mutilated in the case of Sudan, are mostly concubines whose bonded wombs their Arab captors use as a sadistic weapon of cultural, demographic, and racial jihād. Nobody agreed to help except Barbara Ledeen of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, who in 1996 helped organize a four-hour hearing on slavery before members of Congress at which Jacobs, Cotton, Cox, and other abolitionists testified.
Liberals, however, save for a precious few laudable Democrats like Barney Frank and the late Donald Payne, were silent.