The British Museum recently announced a “special exhibition,” opening in October 2019, and titled “Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art.” According to the museum, it is meant to counter “stereotypes” of Muslims and will “highlight just how extensive and enduring the cultural exchange between the west and Islamic world has been.”

There is of course a less admirable “cultural exchange between the west and the Islamic world” that “influenced” generations of European painters—one which recently made the news, “triggering” many on both sides of the Atlantic, and possibly prompting this new exhibition in response: the sexual enslavement of European women by Muslims.

Around May, 2019—and to highlight the apparent threat male Muslim migrants pose to German women—Alternative for Germany (AfD), a political party founded in 2013, began using a painting created in France in 1866 titled “Slave Market.”  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.  AfD placed images of this painting on posters with the slogan, “So that Europe won’t become Eurabia.”

The director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which houses the original painting, responded by strongly protesting and calling on the German political party to “cease and desist in using this painting” (even though it is in the public domain).   Other elements in Germany responded with action, so that “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 speaking, 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 European women—so much so as to have enslaved millions of them over the centuries.

The Muslim demand for, in the words of one historian, “white-complexioned blondes, with straight hair and blue eyes,” traces back to the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, who enticed his followers to wage jihad against neighboring Byzantium by citing its blonde (“yellow”) women awaiting them as potential concubines.