To the Editor:
Although I had no intention of intervening in the very interesting debate on Algeria [Ray Alan, Joseph Barry, Samuel Blumenfeld, “Algerian Independence & the Jews,” June], Mr. Blumenfeld’s flat statement that the FLN “last December in Algiers staged one of the worst pogroms since World War II” went far beyond what one can stand idly by and take. Pogroms are foreign to our soil, last December and every other December, back to the arrival of the Jews in Algeria. . . .
A. Chanderli
Permanent Representative
Algerian Front of National Liberation
New York City
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To the Editor:
[According to Ray Alan] Mr. Blumenfeld’s statement that the 1958 revolution was “the most significant regenerative event in French history since the 1940 defeat,” can be called “pure Rivarol”. . . . [But] if anything emerges from a reading of that hate-filled expression of pure fascism, it is a sense of how completely the [Rivarol] group despises and rejects de Gaulle and all he stands for. I am sure that Mr. Blumenfeld is praising the regeneration of France under de Gaulle and not a “squalid Algiers riot.” Further, I think Alan would know this if he were not so attached to the lost cause of the embittered Mendèsist group. . . .
J. Fabre
Saint Mary’s College, California
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To the Editor:
. . . Ray Alan betrays an astonishing ignorance of the facts when he reduces the significant revolution of May 13, 1958, to a “squalid Algiers riot.” There are any number of authorities as well as hundreds of photographs to attest otherwise. Mr. Hal Lehrman, known to COMMENTARY readers as a reporter of integrity, was in Algiers at the time and his reaction to the events supports my opinion. Furthermore, it is not from Rivarol (as if that were the only pro-Algérie française journal in France!) that I derived my analysis of the May 13 uprising, but purely from my own investigation and understanding of what took place. I am not bound by an ideology, as is Mr. Alan, to reduce everything in French political life to left and right. Particularly in the Algerian affair, these designations are meaningless. After all, the Algerian Moslem nationalists preach a racist national socialism all their own, and if the only solution to the Jewish problem in Algeria is a mass exodus to Israel, as Mr. Alan suggests, then I would assume that the FLN’s fascism is at least as dangerous as Hitler’s and ought not to have Mr. Alan’s support.
Furthermore, I challenge Mr. Alan to prove that such intellectually honest journals as Carrefour, La Nation Française, Aux Ecoutes, and Le Journal du Parlement (the latter two Jewish owned and edited)—all of which vigorously support French Algeria—receive financial support from any Algerian “settler organization.”
Again, it is malicious and perfidious to accuse the moderate French right of disliking Jews when many of them are themselves Jews. It is also criminal to pin the fascist label on all of Algeria’s Europeans. . . .
Permit me to quote from Albert Camus who I think even Mr. Alan would concede was not a neo-fascist dupe. This is taken from a preface to “Actuelles III” (April 1958) : “An Algeria constituted in federal states and linked to France appears to me, without comparison, preferable, in consideration of mere justice, to an Algeria linked to the Islam empire, which would create within the Arab people merely an increase of misery and suffering, besides tearing the Algerian French population apart from its natural fatherland.”
. . . As for Mr. Barry, I am afraid that he lives in a dream world all his own. Mr. Alan at least suggests that the Jews get out of Algeria should the French leave. Mr. Barry doesn’t even think there would be any danger at all for Jews in a Moslem Algeria. Fortunately, Algerian Jews think otherwise and have decided to class themselves in the same category with the French settlers (Jewish Chronicle, June 2, 1961). This should finally end all speculation as to where Jewish interests lie in Algeria. . . .
As for Mr. Barry’s equating the FLN’s terrorism to Zionist terrorism in Palestine, I can only say that terrorism as a weapon against the enemy is one thing; terrorism used against one’s own people is something else entirely.
Samuel L. Blumenfeld
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . I have read attentively though belatedly the two original articles by Alan and Barry [“Algeria & the Fifth Republic,” January] and must say that both gentlemen have set down their personal likes and dislikes in guise of commentary and report on the situation in Algeria and France. . . .
I have known Algeria since before World War II, and my contacts there have been and still are both business and social. . . . (Let me note here that I was for many years the correspondent in France for the New Leader.). . . I would say that there is no more anti-Semitism in France and Algeria, probably much less, than here in the United States. And just as anti-Jewish feeling knows no political boundaries in our country, so it does not elsewhere. If Mr. Alan or Mr. Barry knew Paris before World War II, they may have heard some highly-placed partisans of the Paul-Faurist faction of the SFIO refer slurringly to the “Bretons”—“pour ne pas dire ‘des juifs,’” as a Paul-Faurist friend explained to me. . . .
Now for the other side of the coin. In June 1953, in the region of Oran, well before the start of the rebellion, I dined as the guest of three businessmen, a Moslem, a Jew, and a Catholic, three close friends from early childhood, devout followers of their particular religions, each of whom had a natural respect for the belief of the others. In the restaurant, the Moslem specified he wanted no hors d’oeuvres made from pork and no wine . . .; the Jew ruled out pork for himself; and the Catholic, as it was a Friday, would have no meat at all. . . . They saw nothing strange in all of this, nor did the waiter. . . .
It may be said that one incident proves nothing. But it seems to me that both Mr. Alan and Mr. Barry are so wound up in their emotional “intellectualism” that nothing they do not want to believe could be proven to them.
Benjamin Protter
New York City
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