Algeria’s parliament has passed a new law criminalizing France’s colonization of the country from 1830 to 1962 and demanding an apology and reparations. The vote came a few weeks after the 55-member African Union passed a resolution for reparations for colonization and colonial-era crimes.
Naturally, the media coverage of this has been uniformly awful and out of context, painting the Muslims sympathetically as victims and France and the Europeans as brutal oppressors. Brutality certainly existed, but it was hardly a one-way street.
This sort of retconning of history cannot stand. There is no country less deserving of reparations for anything than Algeria, the long beating heart of the slave trade for more than 1,000 years, and its Muslim neighbors along the Barbary Coast.
Before the French conquered and colonized Algeria and other parts of North Africa, the Barbary Pirates raided throughout the Mediterranean. These Muslim pirates, under the protection of Tripoli, Tunisia, and Algeria, captured European and American merchant ships, stole the cargo and vessels, and enslaved the crews, often selling them in the bustling slave market in Algeria. Yes, that Algeria, long before the French arrived.
These slavers were part of a millennium-plus of brutal Muslim slave traders in North Africa, including Algeria, that created the Trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean, and Red Sea trade routes to transport tens of millions of African slaves to the Arab world.
It was centuries later that this trade expanded to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This lasted from the earlier times of Islam in the 7th century through the 20th century, and there remain pockets of slavery in these areas to this day.
But the Muslim slavers did not restrict themselves to Africa to capture slaves. In addition to taking American and European sailors as slaves and selling them in the markets, such as in Algiers, they raided European coastal towns in most nations that had a coastline.
In Italy, the Muslims raided southern coastal towns and the islands of Sicily, Ischia, and Gozo, sometimes enslaving entire populations. This practice was widespread in Spain, Portugal, France, England, Wales, Ireland, and even Iceland. More than just Italian island populations were entirely carted off to the Algerian slave markets.
A well-known example is the Sack of Baltimore. In 1631, Muslim slave traders raided and hauled off into slavery the entire population of the village of Baltimore, Ireland. Every man, woman, and child was sold in the slave market in Algiers, ending up rowing in ships for decades without setting foot on land, or becoming sex slaves in Muslim harems.
It is estimated that more than a million Europeans were captured and enslaved by the Muslim African slavers over several centuries. And of course, this doesn’t touch what they did to African coastal towns.
U.S. President John Quincy Adams famously pointed out, long before the multicultural suicide pact took hold in the West, what was understood by all as an indisputable truth: “The fundamental doctrine of the Koran is that of everlasting war against all infidels; and it was the first and governing principle of the religion.”
They do not perceive the individual dignity of the human because the Koran has no such concept as man being made in the image of God.
So it is with rich irony and slave galleons full of chutzpah that it is a nation with such a brutal, 1,300-year slave trade history that wants reparations from the people it enslaved. Every Muslim and non-Muslim nation that was part of this horrible, long history of slavery is also part of the African Union that voted for reparations.
No. Algeria and the rest of North Africa can request reparations after they apologize and pay reparations to European nations for their much longer and more extensive slave trade than any European colonization lasted.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children and seven grandchildren and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected].
