THE FRENCH INTIFADA, The Long War Between France and Its Arabs by Andrew Hussey, Granta Books, 2014. Hussey is Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris. Hussey was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2011 for advancing cultural relations between the UK and France. A review by Harold Goldmeier
The French Intifada is the scariest
non-fiction book I‘ve read.
Andrew Hussey builds a convincing case
that jihadist Islamists seethe with ugsome fury for impious Western civilization. Ruthless violence is the tool of preferred
choice to mete out revenge to their oppressors, and deconstruct Western
society.
Hussey
concludes their world, whether living in the banlieue, Paris slums, or rural villages in North Africa, are
prepared for a long war with the West. The West either pathologically ignores
this reality, or is to too arrogant to accept it. Citizen of the French Republic
first, Muslim second, is what they expect.
The hallmarks of French colonialism were cultural arrogance, avarice, and racism that inflamed Arab nationalism. Terror, brutality, and fear against colons and innocents, became Islamist
trademarks in rebellions across Morocco, Tunisia, and most gruesomely in
Algeria.
The French Intifada reads like a novel,
but is true to its sources. Footnotes are plentiful drawing on historical
research texts, official documents, personal journals, and anecdotes. Stories
from Hussey’s own travels add color. Hussey weaves a picture of a lustful
nation wanna-be empire peeking over its shoulder to spot Brits crossing the
Channel. Martinet, facile governors, and French elitists enforced colonial
policy.
The
book has four themes. First, France’s
invasion of North Africa protected Catholics and their holy sites in Muslim
countries. Catholics and Muslims had to be protected from British evangelists.
(The French witnessed their disastrous impact on the Chinese in the 1850’s (read
God’s Chinese Son by Jonathan D.
Spence).
France
“controlled their colonies by pursuing the ‘civilizing mission’,“ remaking
their subjects “culturally French.” France felt and still feels a sense of
ownership of the Arab world. While plundering
the colonies, they spread their “Frenchness” through “peaceful penetration.” French writers, musicians, and artists found the
Casbah, Casablanca, Marrakesh, and Algiers, dark and exotic. Orientalism
influenced their art and literature. “French poets dreamed of an East that they
saw as sensual, sexual and outside the everyday demands of the capitalist world.”
Hussey’s
second theme describes the Islamist “long war” against Western civilization. The
banlieues of Paris, Lyons, and
Marseille are soldiers in the ‘French intifada’. The nation “itself is still under attack from
the angry and dispossessed heirs of the French colonial project.”
Many
of the 5 million living in France are first Muslims and citizens of the
Republic second. To the French this is impossible. In their country
‘difference’ is sectarianism and a threat to the Republic. To many religious
Muslims, civilization means acculturation and assimilation. Their memory keepers
educate young Muslims about life under the yoke of colonialism, the massacres of
Arabs by French military, and the glory for God in wins like the battle for
Algiers. Current French army forays in Somalia and Mali are seen as attacks on
Islamist God worshipers. The Muslims do not want reforms of French society,
“They are looking for revenge,” writes Hussey.
The third theme in The French Intifada paints a picture of ruthless Arabs imbued with
feral evil disposition for violence. Muslim ranks are swelling with converts
from the West and Black Africa. Novitiates
often collaborate in the ferocious Fourth World War, as Hussey describes it.
The battlefield is without borders.
French soldiers milling around off duty, Jewish children in a Tolouse school,
and visitors in the Brussels Jewish Museum, are legitimate targets for Islamist
French citizens. In 2006, French Muslims targeted a Jewish young man. Calling
themselves the Barbarians, they kidnapped him, starved and tortured him for six
weeks, mutilated and burned his body, and left him dead tied to a tree.
Neighbors in Muslim slums hearing the screams did nothing.
Hussey
does not relent in describing in gory detail how Islamist freedom fighters
committed mass murder of Muslim and foreign civilians, collaborators, and
French colonialists. They cut throats and beheaded them for Allah and national
resistance. Hussey describes this
madness over hundreds of pages. Readers are worn down with stories to the point
of ravelment.
Hussey
does not ignore dreadful French atrocities and ethnic cleansing. They exploded
a bomb in a house in Casbah killing seventy Muslims. The French army threw
enemies out of helicopters, feet encased in concrete, into the port of Algiers
to terrorize the population in glacial horror. Nevertheless, there is an
imbalance that at times leaves the reader the impression the French were merely
reacting to Arab terrorism.
The
fourth theme is, everybody hates the Jews. Attacks on Jews in North Africa long
preceded events of 1948 and 1967. Jews were “guests” of their Muslim rulers. In Algiers,
for instance, Jews were lower in society than Bedouins, Berbers, and Black
African slaves. Jews were made to walk
barefoot passing a mosque, forbidden to drink from a well in front of a Muslim,
forced to be public executioners, and
“Their wives were often violated in their own houses, in full view of
the family.”
During
the Holocaust, a Tunisian secluded a Jewish woman for much of the war. Khaled
Abdul-Wahab is the only Arab ever nominated by the Israelis as a Righteous
Among Nations for non-Jews who saved the lives Jews.
The Europeans brought their ancient religious
hatred of the Jews to North Africa. It was inter
alia French anti-Semitism that gave gravitas to Jew hatred among
Arabs. Hussey illustrates this with a
fascinating not well-known story on the heel of the Dreyfus Affair. Doctor
Mauchamp was murdered by an Arab mob in Marrakesh. The Arabs labeled him an
agent of the French there to control the local population through the use of
new technology. Rather than confront the Moroccans directly, the French Foreign
Ministry blamed the murder on a German Jew, Judah Holzmann, an employee of the
local pasha. A convenient scapegoat, since everybody hates the Jews.
The
last chapter is “Muslims in Prison.”
This is a huge challenge for the French government. The guards describe
them as, “a secret army, working against you. You can never know what they’re thinking,
but you know they hate you…. They constantly threaten us and swear revenge.”
Hussey
makes no predictions, Recent election of right wing parties to the EU
Parliament reflect how deeply French people despise and are fearful of Muslims.
Le Pen is demanding tightening
border controls, housing jihadists in segregated prisons, and stripping them of
French citizenship. The “blowback” to all Hussey describes may be coming sooner
than imagined.
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