The denigration of “ancestral culture” goes around the world!… latest stop: OSLO, November 2014
On November 26, the House of Literature in Oslo (Norway) organized a debate around a documentary entitled “Nadia’s Journey”.
This one is made by a woman who claims to be an Algerian feminist of Kabyle origin, but the report is actually a work of Algerianist propaganda designed to make the whole world believe that Kabylia is even worse than Kabul… because, according to director Nadia Zouaoui, the condition of women in Kabylia is due to ancestral Kabyle culture (which confines, violates and mistreats women) and not to Islamic laws, which have nothing to do with the condition of Kabyle women…
A look back at an anti-Kabyle propaganda report.
Sponsored by Canada, with the kind support of the Algerian Embassy in Canada and the Qatari Arabic channel Al Djazira, the screening and debate around this anti-Kabyle propaganda documentary is currently touring the world. So, on November 26, 2014, it was scheduled at Oslo’s House of Literature. Fortunately, there are a few grains of Kabyle sand in Norway who have made it a habit to go and jam the Algerian machine of Arab-Islamic assimilation, wherever it manifests itself in this Nordic country, our Kabyle grains of sand were there to set the record straight and unmask the zealous propagandist Nadia Zouaoui.
The event, billed as a documentary on the status of women in Kabylia, was presented by the Canadian ambassador himself. He is, of course, accompanied by the Algerian ambassador. The debates were supposed to take place in their presence, but at the end of the documentary, just before the debates, the two ambassadors discreetly slipped away after spotting one of the Kabyle “troublemakers” in the room, who had already ridiculed the World Music Festival in Oslo (see our article on this subject). The two ambassadors fled and avoided the debate, leaving Nadia to face the “reset” alone.
The documentary is supposedly the autobiography of the Algerian director, of Kabyle “origin”, who tells the story of a 19-year-old girl who goes to Quebec to join an Algerian husband, twice her age, following an “arranged” marriage.
18 years later, the young girl “given in marriage” by her father speaks of virginity, honor, violence, confinement and honor killings of which women are said to be the victims in Kabylia … more than anywhere else in Algeria. To hear her tell it, you’d think Kabul was in Kabylia!
In her propaganda report, the Aldjazira TV employee insinuates that the retrograde and obscurantist practices she denounces are due to Kabyle culture itself and not to Islam, forgetting that the Algerian family code, which she supposedly criticizes, is directly inspired by Islamic Sharia law. But no, according to Nadia Zouaoui, it’s due to Kabyle culture, and with her documentary, she describes the extent of the tragedy of Kabyle women; a tragedy in which men are prisoners of an ancestral culture; the ancestral culture being, of course, Kabyle culture.
So it’s the victim, Nadia Zouaoui, who makes her own documentary in her native village, Tazmalt, in Kabylia (it’s not certain that the women of Kabul can do the same); and it’s her beloved little daddy, precisely the one who forced her to marry an “old man”, who acts as guide so that his poor daughter can demonstrate the disastrous “condition of Kabyle women” that he himself has subjected her to (very curious indeed)….. And strangely enough, the victim of this forced marriage doesn’t seem to hold a grudge against her darling daddy, who has ruined her life and her youth. On the other hand, she has a huge grudge against Kabyle culture, which she blames exclusively for the marriage contracted by her own father…
Nadia Zouaoui, the director of this report, supposedly denounces the Algerian family code, but omits to specify that the laws of this code are directly inspired by Islamic Sharia law…, because the main thing for this “Kabyle”, whose work is in collaboration with the Algerian and Canadian embassies _ and, what’s more, on behalf of the Arab Qatari TV channel: Al Djazira _ is to question the Kabyle culture and absolve the Arab-Islamic culture of the serious consequences it has on the cultures it has had to approach… (the West will soon be biting its fingers off, much more seriously than it already is).
At the end of the documentary, it was finally time for the debates to begin. But the two ambassadors – the Canadian, who is sponsoring the event, and the Algerian, who is collaborating on it – discreetly slipped away after noticing the presence of the “grains of Kabyle sand” who have the annoying habit of “jamming the machine” of Algerian Arab-Islamic assimilationism wherever it occurs in Norway.
Unsurprisingly, the Algerian Nadia, the unfortunate director of Kabyle origin, is cowardly “abandoned” and finds herself alone in front of an audience invited to debate this “horrible” Kabyle culture which has such a sad fate for women. The debates take place around a small banquet with the menu: Petit four, “white wine”, “red wine”, fruit juice etc…
So, at the opening of the debate with the audience, many questions were asked, the most important of which was: “Is the situation of KabyleAl Djazira due to the surrounding culture or to Islam?
On this point, contradicting de facto the image conveyed by the documentary, the Kabyles present in the debate immediately protested against the image of Kabyle culture conveyed by this “documentary”. They pointed out that Kabylia has always been secular, and that it was the Algerian state, an Arab-Islamic dictatorship, which imposed the family code, inspired by Islamic law, on the Kabyle people. They will also point out that it is only in Kabylia, and nowhere else, that there have been demonstrations against these Islamic-inspired laws that curtail women’s freedoms. Not to mention that the only political organizations calling for gender equality are exclusively Kabyle.
Other participants asked why, in this report, the only Kabyle woman shown wearing a headscarf while performing the Islamic prayer was none other than Nadia Zouaoui herself? That is, the author of the report, and it was a lonely moment for Nadia Zouaoui, who couldn’t come up with any explanation for this strange get-up to close her documentary…
Then a Norwegian woman, who had lived in Algeria for three years, intervened and remarked to the Algerian director that she “didn’t recognize Kabylia at all” as she presented it in her report.
Another Norwegian, who had also lived in Algeria, said the same thing, adding that it was only in Kabylia that she had seen a certain freedom and respect for women, who could move around freely without being insulted or harassed, and that it was also only in Kabylia that religion and the consumption of alcohol (or not) were a matter of individual freedom, unlike in other regions of Algeria where there was a great deal of hypocrisy in relation to these issues…
So, cornered on all sides, and very annoyed at having been recognized as the Kabyle woman who prays with a headscarf on her head at the end of the documentary – a posture she was unable to justify – Nadia Zouaoui was forced to retract her statement that it wasn’t Kabyle society she was talking about, but her “private life”; whereas she had argued exactly the opposite in her report. But one of the Kabyles present pointed out to her that it was not possible for the Canadian embassy to spend a fortune promoting, through all its embassies around the world, the private life of a single person. This speaker maintained that Canada was rather preserving its interests with the Algerian mafia, with whom several contracts had been signed, and that in return, it was acting as a relay for the demonization of Kabylia.
What’s more,” continues the Kabyle, “this woman does her report in a little skirt and with her hair out in the open for the whole report, and she ends her pseudo-documentary with a bewildering scene in which she shows herself doing the Islamic prayer with a veil over her head, and she wants us to believe that this is the condition of women. She also gets some very old Kabyle women to talk about how their husbands had beaten them, as if violence against women were a Kabyle specificity or that it was a Kabyle invention!
“This woman, who is financed by the Canadian Embassy and Qatar, and sponsored by the Algerian Embassy in Canada, wants the whole world to believe that Kabylie is the inspiration for Kabul,” confided another Kabyle to the Norwegian, who said she didn’t recognize Kabylie as Nadia Zouaoui described it.
The intellectual dishonesty of this report is staggering. Starting from her own particular case and generalizing it to the whole of Kabylia, the director claims to portray the ancestral culture of the Kabyle people as being particularly retrograde towards women. When Nadia speaks of the confinement of Kabyle women, she forgets to mention that this confinement (formerly) only existed among the religious dignitaries of Kabylia, i.e. the marabouts, and even then, only among the maraboutic bourgeoisie, and that these did not claim to be part of “ancestral culture”, but rather of Islamic culture…
As for the rest of the Kabyle, including the “penniless” marabouts, women worked in the fields, picked olives, wood and figs, went to the fountain and freely visited their neighbors. Need we remind you that it was under the command of a woman, and a marabout at that, that the Kabyle resisted the French conquest?
Who can deny that Fadhma N Soumer was a woman, that she was Kabyle and a marabout, and that she was the spiritual and war leader of Kabylia? Who can deny that Katia Bengana was a young Kabyle high-school student who was murdered because she refused to wear the Islamic veil? Who can deny that Nabila Djahnine was a Kabyle feminist activist murdered by the Islamic hordes? Who can deny that only the women of Kabylia demonstrate en masse against the family code or against the Algerian state, which murders its children in the name of Arab-Islamic Algerian identity?
Nadia Zouaoui is a disgrace, because when she talks about violence against women in Kabylia, she assures the public that this violence is part of Kabyle culture, not Islam. She speaks as if there were no Koranic verse in Islam that speaks of the husband’s “right” to hit his wife if he fears her disobedience… And yet this verse does exist, just as, throughout the world, including France, Canada and the USA, violence against women claims more victims than cancer or AIDS.
As a reminder, according to WHO figures: in Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the USA, 40-70% of female murder victims were killed by their partner. In France, the greatest country of human rights, a woman dies at the hands of her partner every 2 days, and in Algeria it’s 4 times more…so how can violence against women be a specifically Kabyle affliction?
CONCLUSION: The worst thing about this affair is that this Algerianist produces her propaganda reports with funding from the Qatari Arab channel Aldjazira:
The first to stigmatize Kabylia and present it as a retrograde cultural entity that despises women, confines and enslaves them, and that the condition of women in Kabylia has nothing to do with Islam and is due solely to Kabyle culture;
The second documentary was made to denounce Islamophobia in the West since the September 11 attacks… “Fear, anger and politics”.
And for her third documentary, this Algerian woman plans to make it soon on MATOUB LOUNES!