We've heard for the second time, by interposed people, that you want to meet Guy (after having met up with Rene-Donatien and Rene[1] without alluding to anything).
Several weeks ago, you said to Gianfranco [Sanguinetti] that you truly do not understand what we have reproached you for. This means, not only do you take Gianfranco for an imbecile, but, as you must not have doubted that he would repeat this remark to us, we have the bitterness of establishing that you consider us to be imbeciles, too.
O, Mustapha! How long will you feign to be ignorant of what you know quite well? We will now tell it to you again. Without saying anything of your errors of political judgment (Palestinian revolution, etc.), with which we no longer occupy ourselves here, but only to evoke your deficiencies in your relations with us, therefore in the consequences to which they oblige you:
1) You engaged yourself in the F.D.P.L.P.[2] before notifying us and before resigning from the SI. We did not protest at [the conference of the SI in] Venice because the image of the precipitous revolutionary passion that threw you towards the weapons in Aman, nobly revealed by you to the conference, touched our too-good hearts.
2) Immediately afterwards, you contradicted your Venetian lyricism by remaining [in Paris] more than three months to intervene in pitiful sub-political negotiations, closer to the style of the Maghrebin students than to that of Pancho Villa, which we have seen you overturn. You have remained, here and over there, closer to the leaders -- and such leaders! -- than to the proletariat in gestation, with which you beat our eardrums.
3) You have shamed us in Jordan: not undertaking any political struggle, was this the weakest tendency or the simplest personal protest against the leaders who are as unlucky as they are stupid? Whom will you convince that you are the only one in the world who knows that Hawatme[3] lies when he declares that he is a Maoist?
4) All the same, you are less incapable than Vaneigem at expressing a practical struggle in writing (posting manuscripts on the walls if the mimeos are truly inaccessible) or in speaking loudly and clearly, if not on television, then at least in Hawatme's seraglio (or, to say it more properly, in his harem)!
5) Is it necessary to speak of your return, which is as pitiful as your departure? You must immediately, and there is no lack of people to remind you of it, tell all of the concrete truth, without sparing anyone, not only to render a last -- pardon, a first -- service to the Palestinian lumpenproletarians doomed to be massacred, but also to save, by a precise and honest autocritique, your old reputation, your seriousness, your honor.
6) Without doubt, you do not insist that, a contrario, we recall the twenty-four miserable theses that you co-signed with an individual, whose insertion into a flabbily anti-Bourghibist piece of scribbling you solicited, and whose name escapes us.[4] The principal content of these theses is their numbered form: and, to be honest, these are theses of typography, which has also exercised its verve in the telephone book or a novel by Henri Troyat. The frock doesn't make the fedayeen. We pass.
We know your eminent qualities when you are surrounded well. Unfortunately, we have always found, where you are concerned, an annoying tendency to place yourself in bad company. We agree to deplore it, but no longer hope to hide it. We believe that there is nothing more to add. But in case you would like to respond to us in writing, we are ready to meet you again one more time, all together, to give you all the specifications that you deem necessary.
With our sorrowful sentiments,[1] Rene Vienet and Rene Riesel, respectively.
[2] Front democratique et populaire de liberation de la Palestine [Democratic and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine].
[3] Nayef Hawatme, President of the F.D.P.L.P., which was born in 1969 from the schism with the F.P.L.P. (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded in 1967 by Dr Georges Habache).
[4] Waiting for the Massacre, 1 August 1970, by Latif Lakdar and Mustapha Khayati, published in the Trotskyist journal An Nidhal.
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 4, 1969-1972. Footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! June 2005.)