Randa Abdel-Fattah

speaker

3,221 appearances 41 recordings 9 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 8 Sep

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 38 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 15.

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Throughline · The story of July 4th is messier than you remember · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

A lot of the language around slavery was taken out.

The Committee of Five's version had a whole section condemning the king for his role in the slave trade.

... ... ... ...

This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain.

Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.

referencing a promise of freedom that was made to enslaved individuals if they were willing to leave their enslavers and join up with the British, which did have a very significant impact on how the war played out in certain parts of the colonies.

That whole thing was struck.

They were not mincing words.

But many Americans in the colonies were profiting from the slave trade and the industry it propped up.

So before the declaration could be approved by enough members of Congress, that passage was cut.

Now, everybody can debate whether or not you should have made those compromises.

You can have historians say that was evil.

In some ways it was.

You could also have a story and say, if you didn't do it, you would never have the colonies creating a union.

Jefferson himself was a slave owner.

They knew that the gap between the words that they were writing and the reality that they were living and that the country was going to be living for the foreseeable future were going to be at odds.

Jefferson himself wrote that sentence while he's enslaving people.

Around this time, Jefferson was enslaving close to 200 people.

So yeah, you got a lot of contradictions in there.

It's an incredibly important moral issue.

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