History’s Worst Slavers Now Demand Reparations
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. (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?
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.”
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,
dragged to the place of execution over the rough and pointed stones, subjected to the insults of an excited and brutal crowd. On his arrival there each of the spectators seemed to take a pleasure in assisting at the work. He was crucified against the wall with four large nails; a red-hot iron was thrust through his cheeks to prevent him from speaking, and, in this condition, he was slowly burnt to death with firebrands. Such acts of cruelty were by no means uncommon.
Nor was America spared. In 1785, Muslim pirates from Algiers captured two American vessels. Considering the horrific ways Christian slaves were treated in Barbary —tortured, pressured to convert, and sodomized, as described in the writings I’ve been quoting from missionaries and redeemers (such as John Foxe, Fr. Dan, Fr. Jerome Maurand, Robert Playfair; see pp. 279-283 of my book, Sword and Scimitar) — when Captain O’Brian later wrote to Thomas Jefferson that “our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” he was not exaggerating.
As ambassadors to France and England, Jefferson and John Adams met with one of Barbary’s envoys to Britain, one Abdul Rahman. In a March 28, 1786 letter to Congress, Jefferson explained the source of Barbary hostility:
We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
And yet, here is Algeria today, lecturing Western people about morality, branding France a “criminal” colonizer, and demanding “reparations”—because France colonized, that is, civilized Algeria, including by forcing it to stop subsisting on slavery.
The irony is staggering, indeed: it’s not just that Muslims in general had a long history of enslaving Europeans, but that Algeria was arguably the worst of all these Muslim slavers of Europeans.
At any given time for three centuries, Algiers held tens of thousands of European slaves. Entire coastal regions of France, Italy, and Spain were repeatedly raided, leaving devastation in their wake. European captives endured unspeakable horrors: torture, forced labor, sexual abuse, starvation, and death.
Incidentally, there’s another great irony here: France’s entire rationale for invading Algeria in the first place was precisely to put an end to its Muslim slave market, which had for centuries preyed on Europeans.
At any rate, and when it comes to reparations, whatever one thinks of France’s colonial history in Algeria, it has, at least, and as mentioned, privileged its former colony by allowing millions of Algerians to move to and pursue a better life in France.
Meanwhile, what has Algeria done to atone for the millions of Christians it enslaved, tortured, and killed? Nothing. Not a word of apology. Not a single dinar in reparations. Not even acknowledgment in its schoolbooks.
Before closing, and speaking of reparations, between 1795 and1800, the United States was forced to spend 16 percent of its entire annual federal budget on ransom payments to Algiers, in order to release some American sailors and buy a few years of peace, before Algiers became more demanding again, and the First Barbary War broke out.
So by Algeria’s own logic, shouldn’t it be making reparation payments to the U.S.?
In short, Algeria has just exposed itself, in front of the whole world, as a shameless hypocrite.
https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/16/2026/history-s-worst-slavers-now-demand-reparations
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