You had to dare. He did it.
In The pointthis April 24, 2025, Kamel Daoud gratifies us with a masterpiece of intellectual obscenity: a classification of corpses. Yes yes. A hierarchy of the dead, as we classify products on the shelves. To his left, the Algerian martyrs; To his right, the Palestinian corpses. And between the two? Its sufficiency.
Chronicle title: These Palestinians who come to bother us. Everything is there. The Palestinian dead becomes embarrassing. He takes up too much space. He shades the Algerian death. And according to the great surveyor of suffering, it would be necessary to redraw the contours of acceptable pain.
We read that, and we don’t want to debate. We want to vomit.
Because it is not clumsiness. It is a strategy. No more time when Kamel Daoud denounced, wrote, indignant. Today, he sorts. He assesses. He certifies. He buffers legitimate pains and throws others into the basket. He swapped the pen of the witness for the cachet of the registrar of contempt.
And say that in 2009, in Oran’s daily lifethis same Daoud ignited against the silence of Western televisions in the face of Gaza massacres. He then wrote: “West TV: no corpses, so no crime!” »». Fifteen years later, here he recycles the sentence upside down: “Too many Palestinian corpses, therefore too much noise”.
What a turnaround! No, sorry. What a fall.
But you have to believe that in some salons, to exist, you have to learn to bite your own. Kamel held the lesson well. He no longer writes to enlighten, he writes to please. He no longer denounces the powerful, he reassures their tired nerves. “Rest assured, gentlemen, the Palestinian cry too much,” militates badly, disturbs the image. And the Algerian dead man? He uses it as a deposit, as a currency. A martyr brandished against another. Pitiful.
Obscene comparison. Sordid rhetoric. And the morbid obsession of the “corpse”, which he repeats on each page, like a crow hungry for bone and silence. Nothing remains of the writer. Just a columnist who watches himself write while the world burns.
And let it know: we do not compare the dead. We do not negotiate memory. We do not weigh the shrouds.
The Palestinian, the Algerian, the Syrian, the Lebanese, the Yemenite, all those that the bombs and the boots have crushed, are united in the same struggle. That of standing, even dead. That of not being reduced to a footnote in a sponsored chronicle.
While Kamel Daoud class, sorts, opposes … We remember. We cry ours. All. Without distinction. And above all, without betrayal.
There are writers. And there are lacans.
Toufik Hedna, publisher and writer
