“Who built America, Muslims or Christians?”

That was the premise of a debate between Mehdi Hassan and Matt Walsh on X last year.

It started after Walsh, who — in response to Hassan claiming the Muslim call to prayer was just as American as the sound of church bells — posted: “Christianity built this country. Islam did not at all in even the slightest way. That’s why we can have our church bells, you ungrateful little bitch.”

Hassan’s response?

It was a callback to the classic “America was built on slavery” argument. If slavery built America, and Muslims were the majority of slaves, then Muslims built America. The narrative goes: Muslims were peaceful victims enslaved by white Christians. Peace reigned in Africa before colonizers arrived.

Critics immediately poked holes in his argument. Some said Muslims were likely only a small minority of enslaved people in the United States, and assimilation lowered that number even further. Others accused him of hypocrisy: why harp on Muslim slaves in America and remain silent about the Arab slave trade, which had been going on for at least 1,000 years prior?

The debate begs the question: how long will the pundit class (in both Britain and America) continue to treat American chattel slavery as a unique moral evil and use it to justify rewriting history and encouraging Americans to hate their own country? Mehdi is wrong, first of all: Christian settlers, for the most part, built the wealthiest and most powerful country in history on what was until then a largely unsettled patch of land where small bands of tribal people lived with no infrastructure or concept of property.

More importantly, while the transatlantic slave trade is an activist fixation, slaves are a global phenomenon. And the Arab slave trade — an older, and much larger, system that is still in effect today — goes unmentioned.