When, once again, innocent French people were attacked by yet another knife-wielding North African, the country’s shock and sorrow soon gave way to anger at the suspect’s native country, Algeria. France was still reeling from the killing spree of Brahim Abdessemed in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse on Feb. 22, when its minister of the interior, Bruno Retailleau, had the unenviable task of informing the nation that he and his predecessor had vainly tried to extradite the man to Algeria no fewer than fourteen times.

At every turn, the authorities of the former French colony refused to provide Abdessemed with the required legal documents to allow him back into the country he had left in 2014 to settle in France. There, he remained an illegal immigrant and kept his Algerian identity documents. Algeria’s refusal to take him back was therefore widely seen in the French media as an affront to the former “colonial power.”
Bruno Retailleau, known for his tough-talking on the need to curb non-western immigration, cut a pathetic figure when admitting that France was being led by the nose by the authoritarian regime in Algiers, which had refused to take back at least 30 other Algerian illegal immigrants suspected of Islamist or criminal activities.
Besides Abdessemed, France also wanted to be shot of an Algerian Islamist “influencer” whose violent rants had earned him a certain notoriety among young Muslims in France. The regime refused to let him disembark at Algiers airport, where France had deported him, and forced Air France to put him on the next flight back. France, vilified as a racist, Islamophobic hellhole by the influencer, who nonetheless does not want to leave it, was seething with anger and shame.
After the tragedy in Mulhouse, journalist Elisabeth Levy of the magazine Causeur accused Algeria, where her Jewish family hails from, of having blood on its hands. That fateful day, Brahim Abdessemed should not even have been in France, she argued, but in his home country. ...