Earlier, France was my model — even if I also resented this. But my ideal was to be French, to act like the French: to have my wife, my kids, my car, my apartment, my house in the country, to become an average Frenchman and live in peace. . . . [E]ven before I had French citizenship or I had work, in my mind, I wanted to conform to the image of the average Frenchman, to be like them, to make myself in their image. But at the same time I had the feeling that this was more or less impossible: they didn’t want me, even if I had citizenship and all the rest. They looked down on me, they treated me like I was nothing, they despised me. This contempt was killing me. Were we really so despicable? . . . I went back and forth between what I was and what I wanted to be: a little Frenchman. Whereas I was an Algerian. I was tortured by it. Some days, I couldn’t fall asleep, I had the impression that my life had no meaning, that my part in life had been unjustly denied me.
Interesting in that many of these exact sentiments fueled Franz Fanon in writing Wretched of the Earth as a statement of disillusionment with France and especially his realization that as an Martinique born citizen of greater France he would never be accepted as French. I have to believe that Rosenthal is playing on that parallel with his paragraph heading French masks, Muslim faces because Fanon's first book was titled Black Skin, White Masks,. Fanon advocated communism as the answer to colonialism. Rosenthal makes the point that the French Jihadists advocate radical Islam as an answer to French "racism".

Best

Tom