Learning From the Real Battle of Algiers

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Intertitle: Movies Are a Moral Landscape

The Battle of Algiers, (1965) directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, a perennial favorite on college campuses, is hailed as a modern classic. Certainly the skillful use of black & white cinema verite is highly effective, making the viewer feel as if he’s been plunged into the heart of the Algerian maelstrom. The scenes of torture and terror are stomach churning and bring chills to any civilized viewer.

But let’s be clear, the film is a work of leftist propaganda, beautifully crafted, to be sure, but a film that seeks to justify Islamic terror by proposing that the French were so brutal that the Algerians had no choice but to resort to unrestrained terror.

Sound familiar?

You better believe it.

When homicide terrorists first struck in Israel, spokesmen for Fatah, Hamas, Hizbullah and the slick terrorist network, Al Jazeera, immediately claimed that the, ahem, powerless Palestinians, had no choice against the brutal and inhuman Israelis.

In short, Jewish victims–the murdered, the maimed and the psychologically broken–were blamed for the bloody Islamic atrocities.

Director Gillo Pontecorvo was an assimilated Italian Jew from a wealthy family. But like so many secular Jews, he was drawn to the fanatical religious cult of Communism. The Battle of Algiers is his penultimate work of cinematic propaganda. It’s right up there with Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s fawning documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia, which elevated Hitler and Nazism to the status of pagan Gods. Riefenstahl’s finely crafted films helped set the stage for the Holocaust by promoting the notion of a Aryan master race destined to cleanse and rule the world.

But now, let’s examine the real Battle of Algiers, free from the powerfully romantic, but deeply dishonest imagery presented by Pontecorvo where Islamic terrorists are accorded heroic and mythic status. In truth, they were a bunch of sharia-spouting thugs, oppressors of women, and virulent Jew haters–your basic, blood-thirsty Islamofascists.

The finest source for the history of the Algerian conflict is A Savage War of Peace, Algeria, 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne.

It is the definitive account of, undoubtedly, the dirtiest colonial war of the 20th century. We tend to think of the French as a bunch of pussies, their tanks and troops welded into reverse gear, but in Algeria, the French were determined and unbelievably ferocious. Once the Algerians revolted, the French army and especially the French Foreign Legion–including numerous German POW volunteers, plus several Nazi war criminals escaping persecution–followed a scorched earth policy.

In 1954, the Legion was deployed from Indochina to Algeria. The shock and humiliation of the defeat at Dien Bien Phu was fresh in the minds of the proud Legionnaires and they were determined to erase that shameful episode. But the Legion were not the only troops ready to sacrifice and claim victory.

“…the [French] army, incorporating Sengalese units legendary for their ferocity, subjected suspected Muslim villages to systematic ratissage–literally a ‘raking over’, a time-honored word for pacifying operations. This involved a number of summary executions. Of the less accessible mechtas, or Muslim villages, more than forty were bombed by Douglas dive-bombers…”

And this was just the opening salvo of the battle. It got worse. Much worse. The level of ferocity–on both sides–almost unimaginable.

Interpolation: Because Yours Truly Sees Connections Between Past & Present

The Palestinians are a lucky people.

Because their enemies are Jews.

Any other foe, especially other Arabs, would have wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago.

Item: In February 1982 the Syrian regime, feeling threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood, committed a massacre of over 25,000 men, women and children in the town of Hama, where the Brotherhood was centered. Scores of young girls were gang-raped by the Syrian soldiers and then shot in the public bathroom ‘Hamam Alsadia.’

If Israel is foolish enough to surrender Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians, as she did with Gaza, then Jordan will have to square off against Hamas and Hizbullah who will step into the vacuum, for the Palestinians will certainly move to overthrow the detested Hashemite Kingdom. Payback for the 1970 Black September.

Anyhoo.

If that happens, buckle up for some old fashioned blood-letting. You can bet that the Jordanians will not use targeted assassinations like the Israelis. Uh-uh, it’ll be mountains of Palestinian corpses choking the River Jordan. Or the conflict will spell the end of the Jordanian state–created by Winston Churchill–and you can just say, “Howdy” to a completely insane Iranian proxy state.

End Interpolation: Now You Know, There are Worlds Within Worlds

The leaders of the Algerian revolt kept telling one another and their cadres to have patience. Democracies, they lectured their followers, cannot stand long wars; democracies have a built-in weakness: elections. And wars are bad for elections. Democracies demand immediate results.

“We can hang on forever,” Ahmed Ben Bella explained to his men, “we can fight and fight, whereas democracies like France have to go to their citizens and explain why their men are dying. And sooner or later, they will grow sick of it. Democracies are inherently weak for they have no patience.”

This theme rises again and again in Horne’s amazing book, and though the French fought in Algieria for eight long and bloody years, Ben Bella was right. In fact, the Battle of Algiers almost brought revolution to the streets of France, and mutiny in the French army.

Now, let’s be clear, the current wars in Iraq/Afghanistan and a dozen other shores where the Islamists sow their bloody work, are not colonial wars. The French had a million citizens in Algeria living as privileged subjects. The wars in Iraq/Afghanistan, etc., are wars of liberation against fanatical, sharia-yearning terrorists who are part of a worldwide caliphite pansurgency. The war in Iraq was a war to overthrow one of the worst dictators this planet has ever seen. Plus: Saddam Hussein was actively supporting Mideast terror. Let’s not forget that he was paying $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

But the idea about the lack of patience in democracies is lodged in my cortex like a steel spike. Everywhere I go I hear people lamenting: “How long is this war going to take?” As if they are standing in line at MacDonald’s.

Perhaps we are too used to instant solutions in our lives.

And the Islamic terrorists know it.

They count on it.

This is not The Battle of Algiers, and this is not Viet Nam. If we had pulled out of Iraq before the successful troop surge–opposed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden–well, no ally would trust us ever again, and the terrorists would have won an enormous victory.

And that would have been disastrous.

Truly, we need to learn patience.

Dissolve:

One could easily argue that Al Qaeda and the worldwide Islamic terrorist pansurgency has its roots in the Algerian War.

The Algerian insurgents were, at the beginning, a mix of westernized intellectuals and Muslim fundamentalists, but soon enough the Islamic jihadists took control. Simply put, they were merciless, willing to commit the kind of atrocities that placed them in the vanguard.

It is vital to understand that what’s going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines and, of course Israel, is part of an old and reliable guerrilla playbook. If you don’t understand Islamic terror and it’s parallel political stages, then you are fated to be crushed beneath the wheels of the Islamic fascists. There is nothing improvised about the daily homicide and roadside bombings. It is a carefully constructed tactic that is part of a grand strategy aimed at the soft heart of the western middle class.

And the Battle of Algiers is where the terrorists first perfected, well, terror.

The strategy for modern terrorism was well defined by the Brazilian guerrilla leader, Carlos Marighela, before he was hunted down and killed:

“It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.”

Marighela’s philosophy is simple: using terrorism will inevitably provoke the forces of law and order to strike back with overwhelming force and repression, thereby alienating the hitherto uncommitted native population. The idea is to polarize the situation into two extreme camps and make impossible any dialogue of compromise by eradicating the “soft center.”

Wrote Marighela:

“The government can only intensify its repression thus making the life of its citizens harder than ever… The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in having recourse to the actual physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the country will become a military situation…”

It was along this simple but effective doctrine that the Algerians started their war against civilians–without mercy, without quarter.

The opening attack came in a small hot place called Philippeville.

Establishing Shot:

Philippeville was a small mining center of about 130 Europeans and about 2,000 Muslims, who for years had coexisted amicably. Apparently, labor relations were extremely good with a rare degree of equality between Muslim and European.

It appears that the whole Muslim community was aware of what was about to happen on August 20, 1955. A number of Muslim families even left town.

But no one warned the Europeans.

Montage:

Shortly before noon, four groups of fifteen to twenty Muslim men attacked the village, taking it completely by surprise. They were led by Muslim mineworkers who knew each house and their neighbors. Intimately.

Telegraph lines were cut, the emergency radio transmitter was found to be “out of order” and the village constable who was equipped with warning rockets had “disappeared.”

The Muslim attackers went from house to house, slaughtering all the European occupants: men, women, children, and infants. All the time egged on by Muslim women with their eerie ululations. From the Mosque came exhortations to slit the throats of women and nurses in the cause of jihad.

It was not until two o’clock in the afternoon that a French Para unit managed to reach the town. An appalling sight greeted them. In houses literally washed with blood, European mothers were discovered with their throats slit and their bellies slashed open by billhooks. Children had suffered the same fate, and infants in arms had had their brains dashed against the wall. A mother disemboweled, her five-day old baby slashed to death and replaced in her open womb.

Four entire families had been wiped out to the last member; only six who had barricaded themselves in a house in the center of the village and had held out with sporting rifles and revolvers had survived.

Men returning from the mines had been ambushed in their cars and hacked to pieces. Altogether thirty-seven Europeans had died, including ten children under fifteen, and another thirteen had been left for dead.

Not surprisingly, Pontecorvo did not include the Philippeville massacre in his film. Dramatically, it would have shredded his carefully constructed thesis.

The reaction of the French army was immediate. Out in the streets they found:

“…bodies literally strewed the town. The Arab children, wild with enthusiasm–to them it was a great holiday–rushed about yelling among the grown-ups. They finished off the dying. In one alley we found two of them kicking in an old woman’s head. We had to kill them on the spot: they were crazed…”

Wide Angle:

The reprisals were severe. The Algerians claim that as many as 12,000 were killed by the French. The French claim, 1,273. We will never know the truth.

But the Philippeville Massacre had its intended impact. The polarizing effect that Marighela spoke of immediately took place. The Battle of Algiers went on for eight long bloody years, and the brutality on both sides was unspeakable–for there was a burning river of blood between the French and the Algerians after Philippeville.

In Iraq/Afghanistan, Israel, etc., the genocidal terrorists are working from the exact same playbook. They are murdering innocent civilians indiscriminately. The hope is that the governments will clamp down with even greater ferocity and the population will join the terrorists.

With General David Petraeus, his updated Counterinsurgency Manual, and the successful surge, the Americans are playing it smart. They are reacting calmly and professionally. The terrorists are getting desperate, thus the horrific and futile use of homicide bombers, the majority of them outcast Muslim women and young children, many mentally challenged.

But on the home front, the mainstream media, and especially Hollywood, have not a clue as to the grand strategy the terrorists are using. They see car bombs, body parts, chaos and assume that all is lost. They do not understand warfare.

Worse, they do not understand evil.

In fact too many journalists enable evil with their foolish dispatches. And Hollywood strengthens the bloody hands of the Islamic terrorists with a shameful parade of anti-American movies–all which have failed miserably at the box office.

But there are some of us–yes, in Hollywood–who understand Islamic terrorists, some of us who understand evil, comprehend that this is a long war that will be fought on a hundred far shores. We must be patient and yes, steadfast. It takes time, blood and treasury to defeat evil, but it can and must be done or we will be thrown back to the seventh century and its barbarian masters.

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Exciting Coming Attractions: Don’t miss Part II where we will meet the, er, colorful leaders of the Algerian terrorists, and explore the tragic fate of Algeria’s ancient Jewish community.

Robert J. Avrech