Nightmare In Bordj Badji Mokhtar

Bordj Badji Mokhtar is an Algerian town in the Sahara Desert on the border with Mali, 1368 miles south of Algiers. As of 2008, there were 16.937 inhabitants in Bordj Badji Mokhtar.

Since what I shall euphemistically call “the troubles” began in the Sahel, young men from Bordj Badji Mokhtar have taken to crossing the border into Mali to train as jihadis (plenty of offer there) then return and terrorise the town. As if this was not bad enough, Algeria has retained its ancestral clannish mentalities. Although they more often than not disapprove of their relatives’ activities, families cover up for the jihadis in their midst. This makes repression almost impossible and the Algerian authorities are now impotently watching the south of the country being gangrened by the ultra violent jihadism of sub-Saharan Africa.

Civil servants are a prime target of those newly-minted jihadis. Insults and threats to female, and to a lesser extent, male civil servants have become so common in the past three years that the authorities in Algiers have been alerted. But nothing was done, even after men broke into primary schools at night and stole cash and computers.

Trade unions begged the government not to post any female civil servant to Bordj Badji Mothkar, and when possible to relocate those already working there. Again, those reasonable requests were ignored and the situation worsened. Jihadis took to intimidating and robbing civil servants in broad daylight, burgling administrative buildings at night and harassing teachers.

Khadidja, Hedda, a second Khadidja, Zahra, Djamila, Houria, Zohra, Aïcha and Akida were school mistresses at School Number 10 in Bordj Badji Mokhtar. Aged beween 25 and 30, none of them was a native of the town but had been sent there from other, quite distant parts of Algeria. Three of them were married, five single, one was engaged, the wedding due to take place in the summer. Mouna, the 18 month-old baby girl of one of the married teachers lived with them.

All nine young teachers and the baby had been provided with a three-bedroomed flat inside the school. It had no porter and no security guard, despite repeated requests from the local education authority to the ministry  in Algiers, and no air conditioning. On hot summer nights the teachers and the baby had to sleep in the school yard.

For several weeks, they had been subjected to insults, threats and insinuations so unsettling that all nine had considered giving up their jobs and going home, but they came from poor families and could not afford to lose their wages.

On Monday, May 16, 2021, it was still cool enough for Khadidja and her colleagues to spend the night inside. They were fast asleep when at two o’clock on the Tuesday morning four men armed with knives and swords broke into the flat. It was later discovered that four other men had been left outside to keep watch.

The criminals woke up the teachers with violent blows, dragged them all into the living room and started beating them up. One miscreant grabbed baby Mouna and holding a long knife to her throat, threatened to slash it if the women called for help. The eldest teacher tried to snatch the little girl from him. She was viciously stabbed in the hands.

Three of the assailants continued beating and occasionally stabbing the teachers’ forearms while a fourth one ransacked the flat, stealing anything he considered valuable: cash, computers, mobile phones.

When he returned with his loot, he locked himself into one of the bedrooms with two of his accomplices and summoned the teachers there one at a time. This lasted for two excruciating hours.

What kind of horror took place in that bedroom is not known. Algerian society is cagey about sexual assault, but a week later the eldest of the teachers remarked bitterly to a trade union representative, “What do you think happened…”

It was four o’clock in the morning when the jihadis finally left. The victims were able to call the police using a mobile phone the robber had not found. It had been carefully hidden several weeks before, just in case…

The police took a formal complaint intending to file it away immediately notwithstanding the fact that two of the attackers had been identified. It was not even suggested that the victims be examined by a police surgeon.

But then something happened. News of the assault in Bordj Badji Mokhtar spread through Algerian social media and society reacted as if it had been rocked by a seismic shock.

Teachers up and down Algeria immediately went on strike, all the perpetrators were arrested. It transpired from the interrogation that the jihadis had changed their minds at the last minute: their original intention had been to kill the school mistresses and the baby before leaving. Every single female teacher was evacuated from Bordj Badji Mokhtar either by plane or bus. As teachers tend to intermarry, many male teachers fled with their wives. This resulted in a shortage of teaching staff so dire that to this day many children cannot be schooled at all.

Khadidja and her colleagues were flown by special plane to Adrar, admitted and given treatment at a private wing of the hospital. A detailed gynaecological examination was carried out supervised by a police surgeon. For security reasons, only close relatives and teachers union representatives were allowed to visit them. The union representative responsible for women in SATE (the Algerian equivalent of the NUT) told a francophone newspaper the baby was so traumatised that after 48 hours she still could not stop crying.

Under Algerian law, the penalty for gang rape is life imprisonment, but Algerians want the death penalty this time.

One would assume that, considering France’s historical ties to Algeria, this story would have been front-page news here. One would assume wrong. I read about it quite by chance on an obscure dissident blog where many pieds-noirs* comment.

Shortly before the assault in Bordj Badji Mokhtar, French feminists had been busy raising hell as they do every two years, or so. A woman called Julie had just been murdered by her ex-husband and another unfortunate lady had been stabbed to death and set on fire by her jealous spouse in broad daylight on a busy street. Needless to say, our feminist friends were careful to omit the fact that poor Julie’s murderer was Muslim, and in the second case, that both killer and victim were Turkish immigrants.

Fat, hairy, bedraggled feminists stormed the streets of France armed with buckets of glue, gooey brush mops, piles of crude homemade posters under their tattooed arms, and proceeded to disfigure the cityscape a bit further. Overnight, every wall, nook, and corner looked as if it suffered from some malignant skin disease. Small white sheets with just one poorly calligraphed word on them were stuck in a row so as to form an accusing sentence. Those harpies excel at guilt-tripping (and not much else; certainly not art). If you listen to them (which nobody does), French women live under a literal reign of terror. They cannot set foot out of the house without being raped and murdered, and even in the privacy of their own homes can find no safety.

One disturbingly ugly, seven-foot-tall specimen called Alice Coffin (no, I did not make her name up) toured television and radio stations. Even mainstream journalists, many of them women, had to disagree with her harrowing description of women’s condition in France. I have to admit that I was quite surprised considering the reverence in which feminism is usually held.

Another overweight, hairy, and pimply specimen called Pauline Harmange, a married woman if you will believe it, published a book listing the seemingly endless reasons why she hates men. The first grammatical mistake appeared in the title itself, which gives my beloved readers an idea of the literary value of pimply Pauline’s pamphlet.

As an aside, something has always amazed me about that kind of books: we are always told that millions of copies sold and yet, even among my liberal friends, I have never met anyone who had heard of, let alone read them. Who (or what) buys those books is a mystery I must investigate one day.

Shortly before what they termed their “feminicide” campaign (Friendly piece of advice from me to you: always beware of those who make new words up.) feminists had gone to war with the Louvre museum in Paris over a Fragonard painting entitled “The Bolt” which they accused of promoting rape. One has to be indulgent: how can one expect creatures whose grasp of their mother tongue is inferior to that of my dog to be artistically literate, to know, for example, what a triptych is?

In this instance, strangely enough, feminists did not succeed in having the museum take down the painting, yet French Wickedpedia now calls it a depiction of rape.

And yet, when horrendous violence was inflicted on nine harmless school mistresses across the Mediterranean, feminists remained  silent. Was it, by any chance, because it had happened in a distant country no-one had ever heard of and where nobody speaks French? Was it because no Algerian has ever lived in France, and news from that country is hard to find?

Not so. More than five million Algerians live in France, roughly seventy percent of Algerians speak French, many francophone newspapers and magazines are published every day in Algeria, the Bordj Badji Mokhtar assault was headline news for several weeks in Algeria, and finally there are several Algerian feminist groups and bookshops in France.

So no, it was impossible for French feminist organisations (and the French press, by the way) not to know about the attack in Bordj Badji Mokhtar. In the face of extraordinary brutality towards women, an organisation which pretends that it exists to protect women’s rights chose to remain silent. Silence is consent.

French feminists live in a schizophrenic world in which France is Bordj Badji Mokhtar and vice versa. While blowing any wrongdoing by French men out of proportion (and more often than not, simply inventing said wrongdoing) they actively hide and deny the situation of women in many parts of the world.

This has had tragic consequences such as girls barely out of their teens going camping in North Africa and ending up beheaded, or a young artist hitch-hiking across Turkey just long enough (two hours) to be abducted and strangled.

Not content with being irrelevant and deeply dishonest, French feminists are also cowards. Where is the risk in bullying a civilised museum into taking down an eighteenth century masterpiece? It is another story to expose psychopaths who rob, stab, and gang rape school mistresses in their own home especially if one considers that those monsters may well have acquaintances in France.

I have also come to suspect feminists of ethnocentricism. Such an accusation may strike my readers as over the top since feminists are always boring us silly with their anti-racism, but consider the fact that they hardly ever display any interest in women’s issues outside of their own group. Women who genuinely value their own sex ought to feel immense concern when a country the size of Algeria has to evacuate its female civil servants from certain areas.

The truth is that feminists could not care less about women. Their movement is about the narcissistic resentment, the rage, the sense of entitlement, the denial of personal guilt, and the shifting of blame typical of spoilt brats. Most of all, it is about destruction. The very definition of evil.

The result of more than a hundred years of feminism is an unmitigated disaster: the family lies in tatters, men and women have been rent asunder, mistrust weakens society, which then turns to the state for safety. Children are the ones who pay the heaviest price, staggering haggardly through childhood, being passed from one stepfather to the next, with the consequences we all know of. For this alone, feminism deserves merciless punishment, then oblivion.

*French people born in Algeria before its independence in 1962.
 

© Doxie 2022