As we have now discovered, Kamel Bourgass, aka Mr Ricin, the man who murdered a policeman, was not alone. There are lots of Algerians living here, quite a few of them illegally. It is not possible to say that they are all perfectly horrible Algerians like Mr Bourgass.

Some of them might well be nice Algerians, I suppose: people who have fled their homeland not because it is insufficiently Islamic, but because even with a comparatively secular government in Algiers it is still altogether far too Islamic.

These nice Algerians may have arrived here wanting for nothing more than a swift half down the local and a chance to join the golf club, rather than to murder us all by daubing strange concoctions on our car door handles (which seems to me a rather inept programme for mass extermination. What happens to people, like me, who don’t drive?) Anyway, they might be prepared to like us, these nice Algerians, rather than consider us cockroach-infidel-whore type people, fit only for the unquenchable, cleansing fires of Allah.

Certainly, this is what the wage-slaves of the asylum industry believe. Talk to the UNHCR or the Refugee Council and your fears, or prejudices, will be laid to rest very quickly. Kamel Bourgass is but a singularity: it would be cruel and invidious to tar all asylum seekers with the same (frankly, racist) brush.

There are, as Michael Howard has helpfully elucidated, a quarter of a million illegal asylum seekers at large somewhere in the country — and only the merest handful of them are cultivating weird stuff on sacks of rotten meat in the basement of a Wood Green townhouse.

Your worry is therefore disproportionate, they argue. There are people cultivating weird stuff on sacks of rotten meat who are NOT illegal asylum seekers. Some of them might be, for example, legal asylum seekers. And one or two are probably naturalised or even born British.

All of which is partly true, I suppose — if somewhat glib. The whole truth about Algerian immigration is more morally complex, though, and leads us to the kernel of this whole bitter issue: how we should treat those acquitted in the Bourgass trial.

When, several years ago, the comparatively secular Algerian government decided to make a break with convention and hold free and fair elections, the wrong side won.

This is not simply my view: it was the view of all western governments and, crucially, the view of the sitting Algerian government which decided that, upon reflection, the public had made a bad mistake and the results should be ignored.

The political party cheated of its victory was of the very radical, fundamentalist Islamic kind — so here we have our first moral quandary: back then, should we western, liberal, democracies have reacted with outrage at this betrayal of the will of the Algerian people or instead applauded the sitting government for ignoring the result so that a secular “democracy” could be maintained? Difficult one, I grant you. What we did, as it happens, was say nowt and cheer silently, under our breaths.

Something close to civil war then ensued in Algeria and the government gave as good as it got: if not better, according to several human rights organisations. There is no doubt whatsoever that people who supported the radical Islamist party (and were vociferous in their support) had real reason to fear for their lives.

And so, some of them fled their benighted country and came here.

Now, this brings us to our second moral quandary: should we have let them in, these people who were the genuine victims of oppression but who are also, as it happens, opposed to pretty much everything we stand for? And then a third moral quandary: after they have arrived here and settled themselves down and taken over the Finsbury Park mosque, what do we do then? Deport them to Algeria where they might well be killed? International law says we should not.