…So Tunisia is turmoil. Algeria next door has had its riots, and Algeria has them periodically at least for a quarter-century. In 1988, there were food riots there because the government raised the price of bread, which led to the army not the civil police being called out to contain the demonstrators; which demonstrations were stopped by killing 500 of them.

This led after a couple of years to an attempt at democratic elections called by the dictatorship to pacify the people. As in Arab Yesha in 2006, when Hamas won – much to the chagrin of the famous Middle East experts and ignoramuses Condoleeza Rice and Monitor Jimmy Carter. It was as if these two had not heard that 14 years earlier in Algeria, the Islamists had won such an election against the old-time Marxist-Leninist FLN elite, who had proven themselves since 1962 to be as corrupt as the Janissaries in Algiers when it was still a pirate city. The FLN had called for that election, but then the next day the results displeased the FLN, so post facto they canceled the results. Talk about p.o.-ing the people. Promising elections, then holding elections, then canceling the results. Well…

This then led to more than a decade of rebellion which was about as satanic as you can get. 200,000 people not killed, not soldiers fighting other soldiers, but 200,000 civilians at random butchered, ambushed on the roads, children beheaded in front of their parents.

I’ve been to Algeria. It is a scary place. These are thuggish people. I was glad to take the train at the end of my stay across the country into Tunisia where the atmosphere was very different. When the founding father of Tunisia Habib Bourguiba replaced the departing French colonial regime in 1956, he wisely chose to maintain civil relations with France. And over the years, one major Tunisian business has been tourism for Europeans who line the beaches in winter staying in hotels providing good and friendly service.

Versus Algeria. Have you ever heard of anybody going on vacation to Algeria? Probably not, and there is a reason for that. They are a xenophobic, suspicious bunch. They don’t like foreigners. In Algiers, when I was there in 1983, only the crudest kind of map for foreigners was available. And in any case the street signs had deliberately been left in place since the French had departed in 1962; bilingual signs in French and Arabic, only twenty-one years later they had not been replaced only defaced by the regime. The French name of the street was painted over with a slash of blue paint, leaving only the Arabic. So even with one of these crude maps of the capital city, if you didn’t read Arabic it was pretty hard to get around. And thus do the Algerians enshrine and perpetuate their hatred and resentment of the French who ruled them for 132 years…