Algerian nationalists invoked Jewish genocide rhetoric to exploit French guilt.

Evidence

A potentially problematic element of the comparison was that Algerian nationalist discourse has sometimes, such as in a declaration by the then President of the National Council of the Algerian Revolution, Benyoucef Ben Khedda, banded around too freely the word ‘genocide’, perhaps in an attempt to play on European guilt about the fate of the Jews, knowing how sensitive a theme this was for French society. This was an exaggeration: however brutal the war, there was never any state policy to kill every Algerian. Nevertheless, exterminationist sentiments were not absent from the minds of some policemen. One Algerian victim of police violence, Abdelkader Khannous, testified that while being beaten with iron bars at a police station, the police shouted ‘what the fuck are you doing there in our country; if you stay there, we’ll kill you all’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1388

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the broader antisemitism-Islamophobia comparison literature and Chakrabarty/Spivak-style subaltern speech using the oppressor’s wound against them.