CHRONICLE. Iran, Gaza, colonization: so many narrative mobilized to cultivate an electorate. Autopsy of a policy that turns injured identities into political capital.
BY KAMEL DAOUD / The Point
Published on 03/10/2026 at 14:00
Defending the mullah is defending the Muslims and having Islamists help each other to win in France. This is my committee, my army, my "service people", my exotic fruits.
Let's listen to the head of a community broker to become a leader or an intellectual of contrition in France:
"Why am I for the mullahs and against the US attacks in Iran, when I live in France, in a free, secular, democratic country - until I can slap a president without being dissolved in acid by his secret policies?"
My answer: because it's complicated when you make a living trading exotic fruit.
If I support the mullahs against the Iranians who die, rise again, continue to protest against their dictatorship, it's because there is a link between my political career, here in France, and the mullah. Which one, four thousand two hundred miles? The story. Here's how: the mullah is the Islamist. That is, the Muslim. That's not true, isn't it, according to the saying? But that's no reason for this not to be true. You just have to make it believe. This is my job. I repeat, to my voters in France.
Because if I support Trump's hits, it means I'm pro-American, pro-Israel and pro-Jewish, if not a Jew. The mullah being a Muslim, condemning him is condemning my Muslims. How does it concern me, me, in my Paris under my head and confuse keffieh and revolution? Because muslim is my voter in France. My only army of disadvantaged, excluded, people with nowhere to go, nowhere to return - except the past. So I help them live in their past.
Electoral plantations
You see, it's a bit like running a plantation: I'm using the country's community labor to grow my electoral crops. But this time, Labour believes it. I no longer give the whip or the law, I give stories to my "boy": I cultivate his beliefs, his intimate Allah, his imaginary Gaza, his skins, his flags, his fears, his debts to his ancestors.
It's as simple as hello we switch from sugar plantations of the past to electoral plantations. And it will work for free to elect me. I'm smart because that's exactly what the settlers didn't understand: people work for free when you make them believe they work for a paradise.
I don't take people their salaries but their hopes. I don't promise them a future, I tell them their past, where they feel best, safe in time, where they are proud even though they were not born. I tell them it's their chance that comes with me when it's just mine. I tell them I'm Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian, or Arab, Malagasy, and they're happy. White skin, black mask That's what no one got before me, or so little.
The settlers of yesteryear didn’t get it. Explaining that one plus one equals two is tiring. It's exhausting. It condemns the world to reason, to balance, to the desire to sleep, to work. But to support, against all, that one plus one equals ten, this makes dreaming, absolutly, allows to lie on your back to count the stars, to wait for revolution and chaos to get rich, to dream as a righteous man. Dreaming of overthrowing order and accounting, it makes you believe anything.
Keeping my clientele
So yes, I support the mullahs while I live in France and the mullahs kill. And the Iranians who are dying? Would you say. So I'll answer you, since we're here between us: how does this concern me? This is not my war. It's not enough to die to interest me.
What if they ask me about Gaza? So I'll be frank: Palestine is the dream country of my French clients. It's a bit about the story of the stolen country, settlers who arrive, lands that are taken back by the use of war, Muslim people who lose and dream of winning. So I'm adapting the cinema.
I adapt to the clientele. Ideological plantations need to add dreams, splendid past, future - as in the past, rum was added in the morning and songs at night; it rests the labor, even if it burns the health of the brain.
This is what you don't understand: I can't leave the mullahs in Iran. It's my work, my fortune, my clientele that are at stake in France. The mullahs, the caliphate, the flying carpets, the revolts against the masters, the Jews plotting, the turbans, the colonization: it's all mixed, connected. You can't sell one without buying the other.
Do you see? I can't say that Algiers is a dictatorship, for example, and count the daily arrests and terror in the stomachs of the people who live there. And I can't contain my indignation when a mullah is killed. And I can't deal with Somalia or Kabul because it's bad to keep my clientele. Related I tell ya. In my case, exotics and politics are the same thing. This is a tropical fruit.
And if, for example, I write in a newspaper in France that Algiers is imprisoning, it means my "favorite victims". So I keep quiet, I don't write anything, I'm looking away. And then - and especially, of course - I'm smart, I've been thinking a lot: we can't make these people work for their sugarcane, safaris, or farms. So I make them work for my ballot boxes, my career, my party.
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