On December 24, 2025, Algeria’s parliament unanimously passed a law declaring France’s 132-year colonization of the North African nation a crime. The Algerians are further demanding a formal apology and reparations from France. Interestingly, this new law also stipulates prison sentences for any Algerian who speaks well of French colonialism, or makes any “remarks with colonial connotations.”
This is a clear example of selective outrage. Yes, France colonized Algeria for over a century. But it also brought to that what it did not have before—functional governance, infrastructure, technology, medicine, and, in a word, progress.
Algeria thrived on enslaving Europeans: Hence why this new law criminalizes speaking well of the colonial era—as many, especially older, Algerians still do.
Moreover, France did give its former colony priority in migration, allowing millions of Algerians to relocate to France for a better life, as a form of compensation or reparations.
On the other hand, what has Algeria done to atone for the centuries of crimes it committed against the Europeans, including the French, writes Islamic scholar, bestselling author Raymond Ibrahim on his Substack. Ibrahim is a regular contributor to The Herland Report.
Algeria thrived on enslaving Europeans: For over three hundred years, from around the 16th to the early 19th century, the Muslims of North Africa—also known as “Barbary,” that is, land of the barbarians—thrived on enslaving Europeans.
According to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.”
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Algeria thrived on enslaving Europeans: Virtually no part of coastal Europe was safe from these Muslim pirates. From 1627 to 1633, Lundy, an island off the west coast of Britain, was actually occupied by them. From it, they pillaged England at will. In 1627 they raided Denmark and even far-off Iceland, hauling a total of some 800 slaves.
In 1631, the fishing village of Baltimore in Ireland was raided, and, according to an early source, “237 persons, men, women, and children, even those in the cradle” were seized and taken to the miserable slave markets of North Africa—the most notorious and largest of which was centered in, irony of all ironies, Algeria.
Then there were the sadistic torments Christian captives were subjected to: many were forced into hard labor in quarries, with barely any food or water. Others were rowers on Ottoman galleys, chained for hours, beaten by their overseers, and worked to death.
Women and girls were sold into concubinage, enduring sexual abuse—as did not a few boys and even men. With countless European women selling for the price of an onion, little wonder by the late 1700s, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”
Punishments for those who resisted or in any way spoke negatively of Islam, Muslims, and especially Muhammad, beggared description and included being “impaled alive” and “roasted alive.” Other European slaves were “thrown from the city walls, and caught upon large sharp hooks, on which they hang till they expire.”
After a Muslim man tried to engage in homosexual relations with his young male European slave, and the latter, outraged, killed him, the hapless Christian was, to quote an eyewitness source. Read the full article here.
