{"id":117551,"date":"2024-12-08T17:05:40","date_gmt":"2024-12-08T15:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=117551"},"modified":"2024-12-07T14:03:44","modified_gmt":"2024-12-07T12:03:44","slug":"08-05-112","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=117551","title":{"rendered":"Novelist Boualem Sansal Is Being Murdered by the Algerian Government"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Novelist Boualem Sansal Is Being Murdered by the Algerian Government<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nLiel Leibovitz<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Ask yourself why you\u2019re not hearing about this story
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\u00a9 Iberfoto \/ Bridgeman Images<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Boualem Sansal, one of France\u2019s most acclaimed authors, disappeared on Nov. 16. For more than a week, his whereabouts were unknown. Finally, and under mounting pressure, the Algerian government admitted that it had seized Sansal and was holding him on charges of \u201cendangering the nation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Sansal was born in Tissemsilt, in Algeria, and trained as an engineer. He also completed a Ph.D. in economics, and went to work for the Algerian government. He was a content and richly rewarded bureaucrat, working for the Algerian Ministry of Industry, but his homeland, he realized, was changing, falling under the sway of Islamism. And so, Sansal, by then a 50-year-old man with no previous literary experience, began to write.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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His first novel, 1999\u2019s\u00a0Le Serment des barbares<\/em>, was a hit, though it made some people uncomfortable. The book tells the story of an aged detective who investigates two murders and learns more than he bargained for about the corruption of Algerian society during the nation\u2019s \u201cBlack Decade,\u201d the bloody civil war that claimed as many as 150,000 lives between 1992 and 2002. It won a host of awards, and it made Sansal, who grew up right down the block from Albert Camus\u2019 house, a celebrated French writer.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Which soon proved a problem. In 2003, after narrowly surviving the devastating earthquake that shattered Algeria, he published\u00a0Dis-moi le paradis<\/em>, a novel about a man who travels in postcolonial Algeria and witnesses the chaos, incompetence, and corruption of its first years as an independent nation. The tone was too candid for the government\u2019s taste, and Sansal was forced to leave his position in the ministry.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Like all writers worth a damn, Sansal refused to cower and chose, instead, to fight.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Most authors would take the hint, and pursue more subtle stuff. Sansal went the other way. In 2008, for example, he published\u00a0Le village de l\u2019Allemand<\/em>, translated into English as\u00a0The German Mujahid<\/em>. It tells the story\u2014based on a real-life account\u2014of a Nazi officer who flees to Algeria, helps the National Liberation Army violently kick out the French, and retires to a small village. When his children discover his secret identity, they have to wrestle not only with their lurid family lore but also with the question, virtually undiscussed before or since in the Arab world, of the affinity between Arab leaders and the Nazi party and ideology.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The work, advocating moral responsibility over tribal prejudice, infuriated many in his native country, but by then Sansal didn\u2019t care. He was, he frequently said, a man exiled in his own homeland, committed first and foremost to telling the truth. So when an invitation came, in 2012, to attend Jerusalem\u2019s Writers Festival, Sansal gladly accepted.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a writer, he\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the Israeli press at the time, he was sensitive to words and how they were used, and couldn\u2019t stomach the thought that most Arab countries frowned upon people speaking freely about \u201cIsrael\u201d or \u201cthe Jews,\u201d a form of censorship, he added, that poisons minds and hearts.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAs soon as there is freedom of speech,\u201d he said, \u201cit will be possible to disagree with Israel if one wishes to do so\u2014only without the hate. This is the reason I traveled to Israel and this is the reason I will return. We can argue about a certain Israeli policy, but the most important thing is to be friends.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The same year, Sansal won a Editions Gallimard Arabic Novel prize, but the award\u2019s sponsors, France\u2019s Arab Ambassadors Council, revoked the 15,000 euros promised to the winner, arguing it could not reward anyone who had visited, and had nice things to say about, the Jewish state. The council\u2019s decision, the director of France Culture radio later\u00a0revealed<\/a>, was influenced in large part by Hamas, which successfully lobbied the council\u2019s members to punish Sansal.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI wouldn\u2019t wish Hamas upon my worst enemy,\u201d Sansal said in response. \u201cIt is a terrorist movement of the worst kind. Hamas has taken Gazans hostage. It has taken Islam hostage.\u201d And the Arabs, he added, had \u201cshut themselves in a prison of intolerance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Some French intellectuals stood up for Sansal. Many others marked him as reactionary, someone who foolishly defied the \u201cred-green alliance\u201d that brought together radical Marxists on the one hand and fervent Islamists on the other under one trendy banner. When his next book,\u00a02084<\/em>, was published in 2016, it received mixed reviews. A riff on George Orwell\u2019s famous dystopian novel, the book tells the tale of a postapocalyptic civilization governed by a fundamentalist cult that bears more than a passing resemblance to Salafism. And to many on the chic left, it was just another example of benighted boobs hating on the religion of peace.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIn twenty years, when the Islamophobic waters of France have ebbed, we will wonder how we could have gotten so excited about such a slow thriller,\u201d\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0the editor at the time of the magazine\u00a0Paris Match<\/em>, adding that \u201cfear is an excellent appeal\u201d and that Sansal was merely exaggerating the threat Islam posed to the Western world.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Earlier this year, Sansal, feeling that his own safety in Algeria could no longer be guaranteed, became a French citizen. President Macron attended the ceremony. And yet, the writer refused calls to stay away from his native land. Like all writers worth a damn, he refused to cower and chose, instead, to fight.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And now he\u2019s in custody, held by an authoritarian regime and accused of imaginary crimes. And while some of the literary world\u2019s braver souls are standing up and demanding his release\u2014a tip of the hat, as always, to the brave Salman Rushdie\u2014most of our bien-pensants\u00a0<\/em>are silent. The same mediocrities who collected awards while squawking about the fictitious genocide in Gaza are once again siding with the marauders, betraying a far greater writer seized for the sin of adhering to humanism\u2019s core commitments.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Every reader must demand the immediate release of Boualem Sansal, or, at least, the complete ostracization of the Algerian government until he is freed. And until Sansal is back home with his loved ones, the least we could do is show our respect to his courage and his values, the values of Western civilization, by spending the days he languishes behind bars reading his books and praying for his safe return.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Liel Leibovitz<\/strong> is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and the host of its weekly podcast,\u00a0Rootless<\/a>, and its daily Talmud podcast\u00a0Take One<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Novelist Boualem Sansal Is Being Murdered by the Algerian Government Liel Leibovitz Ask yourself why you\u2019re not hearing about this story . \u00a9 Iberfoto \/ Bridgeman Images Boualem Sansal, one of France\u2019s most acclaimed authors, disappeared on Nov. 16. For more than a week, his whereabouts were unknown. Finally, and under mounting pressure, the Algerian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117551"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117551"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117581,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117551\/revisions\/117581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}