Yes, Haaland certainly looks the spitting image of a Viking, both in appearance and in his ‘warfare’ on the pitch, though perhaps not quite so much in his attitude. Haaland is too kind, too cheerful, and too down-to-earth.

I know nothing about football, so I shall not attempt to analyse his abilities on the pitch, but my interest encompasses all the videos and commentaries about the Vikings that have emerged in the wake of this giant of a football phenomenon.

Most of the videos are highly entertaining, but then, of course, the comments begin to appear, mostly from the political left, most recently from Sky News Australia, which is generally a relatively credible and serious news channel, about the Vikings’ brutal campaigns of killing across the map: from Russia, the Middle East and America. When the Vikings were not killing and stealing, they were taking slaves back to Scandinavia. All of this is true, with the necessary nuances, but it is equally true that in 1960 the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad and the explorer Helge Ingstad discovered that the Vikings had sailed westwards and reached America 500 years before Columbus.

That is why we row!

And this brings me to reflections drawn from my many years of studying the slave trade conducted by the Vikings and by the white man.

Everyone should be familiar with the atrocities that took place during the triangular trade of the Denmark–Norway union. The twin kingdom engaged extensively in the slave trade. The transatlantic slave trade lasted for approximately 300 years. Human beings purchased in West Africa were transported across the Atlantic, and those who survived the horrific conditions aboard ship, in foul-smelling cargo holds, were sold as commodities to wealthy plantation owners in the Caribbean and the southern states of North America. Some of the enslaved were also transported to Norway and Denmark and sold to affluent noble families throughout Norway. But that is another story—for the time being, it is not spoken of.

White Christian men bought and sold free human beings as commercial goods for the sake of profit.

The key phrase is white Christian men.

But what is the truth?

Why is no attention directed towards those who supplied white slave traders with black people?

Why is there so little discussion of the genocides and slave trade carried out by the Islamic caliphates over more than 1,300 years?

Why is all the focus on white people?

Naturally, the atrocities associated with the transatlantic slave trade were senseless and un-Christian.

But the uncomfortable truth is that many centuries before white Christian men came to Africa to enrich themselves through the trade in living black human beings, Muslim slave traders had by force kidnapped African men, women and children, placed them in chains, and brutally transported them—often across the African continent and through the Sahara—away from their villages and families, abusing and torturing them before selling them on in the Middle East, Asia and the Ottoman Empire.

The caliphates ruled with an iron fist for 1,300–1,400 years. Millions of people were captured and enslaved by Muslim states. Even Europeans were taken and sold as slaves. The exact number is uncertain and estimates vary, but between two and four million Europeans are thought to have been enslaved. In reality, the figure was probably much higher. The caliphates operated with a brutality that would make both ISIS and Hamas look like Scout outings.

According to some sources, Muslim slave traders castrated  80–90 per cent of all male captives in order to sell them as  eunuchs. Other historical sources estimate that the figure was ‘only’ 60–80 per cent. Sources dating back a thousand years may be imprecise. The castration was usually carried out before the slaves were transported across the desert and over great distances before eventually being sold in marketplaces in East Africa, Egypt and, later, West Africa, to European slave traders there. The chances of surviving castration were minimal because of shock, haemorrhage and infection. The trade routes of the caliphates were marked by blood and corpses.

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632, we are speaking of many tens of millions of enslaved Africans, Europeans and people from Asia. Slavery and the trafficking of human beings in the name of Islam continue to this day.

The pirates of North Africa did not confine themselves to kidnapping black slaves. After ravaging the Mediterranean region and taking civilians as slaves, they sailed north to Britain, attacked small villages, abducted young men, women and children, and sold them to the highest bidder. According to the historian Robert C. Davis, an estimated 1–1.25 million Europeans were enslaved between 1530 and 1780. Others operate with higher estimates.

My question regarding these atrocities, carried out in the name of Allah, is why they are being silently buried and erased despite having continued for 1,500 years. Instead, the white man is condemned, statues of white men are torn down, crimes committed by black people are protected, while grandmothers are sent to prison for saying something inappropriate about illegal immigrants.

Why do the mainstream media not wish to put this on the agenda?