http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/10/dhimmitude-jihad-that-imagined-secular.html
Dhimmitude, Jihad, & That Imagined “Secular, Democratic State”
During the early 1970s the celebrated Tunisian-born French Jewish author and essayist Albert Memmi – who, I seem to remember, remarked in one of his early books “It is a tragedy to be born a Jew, just as it is a tragedy to be born a woman or a negro” – attended a colloquium in Paris organised by the newspaper Le Monde. Muammar Gaddafi was the main attraction, and Memmi had no hesitation in laying into him, asking him, inter alia:
“Is it enough to have been born an Arab to be entitled to everything and to have been born a Jew to have a right to nothing, except to be condemned to remain eternally second-class citizens, exposed to humiliation and periodic massacres? And if you seriously wanted to avoid our gathering together in that corner of land we call Israeli to renew a most ancient tradition, why have you pursued and hunted us down throughout all the regions where your [Islamic] writ runs?”
I found this anecdote in an article in the Jewish Chronicle (7 November 1975) by Marc Tsiboni, who unfortunately does not tell us what the Libyan dictator (whose own halachic Jewish status was already known, by the way, since Maariv had reported in 1972 that his mother was a Jewish woman from Benghazi who converted to Islam on marriage) replied.
