The suicide bomber denies the rules so painfully acquired by human societies, the outline of a moralization of war. It is a reversal of the gradual h… - Albert Memmi

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The suicide bomber denies the rules so painfully acquired by human societies, the outline of a moralization of war. It is a reversal of the gradual humanization of human societies. They cut the throats of journalists, who are only doing their job, abduct or machine-gun tourists, who have arrived from another part of the world and had the misfortune to want to amuse themselves. A tract that appeared in Casablanca before a horrendous attack, one that was distributed only in the mosques, exhorted its readers to make no exceptions for women or children—all of them were considered guilty and deserved to die. The same justification has been advanced by Palestinian leaders: all Israelis without exception must be attacked. Islamic terrorism appears to have declared war on the entire world, including the Arab countries that fail to align themselves with its objectives. Tunisia, Morocco, even Saudi Arabia, the leading sanctuary of the Arab-Muslim world, have been struck. Until recently, Palestinian bombers concentrated on Israeli or Jewish targets; now the battle has extended to the world at large.

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About Albert Memmi

Albert Memmi (Arabic: ألبرت ميمي‎; born 15 December 1920, in Tunis, died 22 May 2020 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) was a Tunisian Jewish writer and essayist who migrated to France. His most famous work is The Colonizer and the Colonized.

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Additional quotes by Albert Memmi

It was as if, by denouncing their rulers, I had insulted the people, which was exactly the opposite of my intent. For by illuminating these lapses, I believe, rather, that I have helped to demystify the situation. Therefore, I devoted exactly four pages to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The subject is inexhaustible and convenient. I pointed out the deplorable situation of the Palestinians and urged the creation of a Palestinian state—something I have done for thirty years, even when no one else was willing to do so, including the Arab states (see my Juifs et Arabes [Jews and Arabs], Gallimard, 1967). But I wondered why there had been such emphasis on the conflict, with its four thousand dead—deplorable like all deaths but hardly comparable to the millions of deaths in Africa, for example. As I write this afterword, a massacre in Darfur has left thirty thousand dead and displaced close to a million people. I have suggested that such chaos has been one of the most effective pretexts for tyrants to excuse their hold on power and the state of catalepsy in which they maintain their populations.

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There is no mystery to the Arab texts used for domestic consumption; they openly discuss the destruction of Israel. Didn't the first president of the Algerian republic, Ben Bella, go so far as to declare that, if he had had an atomic bomb, he would have launched it against Israel, which had become a kind of absolute evil?

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