One more article written by Souleiman Raissouni.
Lessons from Bachir Skiredj
Three lessons can be learned
from the videotape in which the actor Bachir Skiredj brazenly insulted the
royal family. The first lesson is that the way the royal palace communicates
with Moroccan citizens must be reconsidered, and the first step to be taken in
this regard is to reactivate the function of the official spokesman for the
royal palace, instead of keeping a loose rein on the owner of the Facebook page
that is run in the name of Soufyan al-Bahri. The function of the palace
spokesman should not be limited to announcing what royal activities are
official, but rather to act as an administration that tracks news and rumors
circulating frequently about members of the royal family, and to address it by
confirming, correcting or denying it, or
even alerting that such-and-such issue is a private matter of such-and-such
individual from the royal family, and that in case that any publication or
electronic newspaper includes defamation, insult, or harm to the private life
of the king's person, the person of the crown prince, or members of the royal
family, or a breach of the duty of reverence and respect for the king's person,
that person responsible for that will be prosecuted according to the laws in
force.
The sultanistic logic based on
the fact that the citizen does not have the right to engage in three areas,
namely politics, sharia and the person of the sultan, no longer exists except
in the latter field, since discussing politics and sharia by the public has become
accepted. But digging in the personal life of the person of the king and
members of the royal family is no longer restricted by the rules of ancient
royal morals only, but also by modern rules of morality that reject digging
into the private lives of individuals, so how about the private life of the
head of state and his family? However, if the Moroccans find themselves, from time
to time, confronted with news and rumors leaking from the cracks of the royal
palace, which are further fueled by the international press, or they are
confronted with confused statements issued by a person who does not stop
presenting himself as a clown to the king, and who has relations with generals,
in-laws and senior officials, in order to give credence to his words, it
becomes clear that setting out a communication policy for the royal palace is
imperative. A policy that re-activates and expands the role of the official
spokesperson for the royal palace, and that also develops a strategy for royal meetings
with the press, which, for two considerations, begins with conducting a royal
dialogue with Moroccan journalists. The primary consideration is that the first
people to be concerned with the situation of Morocco and the views of its king
are Moroccans. Secondary, to dispel the notion that the royal environment
underestimates the Moroccan press and journalists. The value of the king’s
dialogue with responsible and courageous journalists lies mainly in making him
talk about important matters that those around him do not dare to ask him
about. In his interview with the magazine Paris Match in 2002, the king did not
hesitate to correct the widespread information that his brother-in-law is a
senior bank official. He said: “My brother-in-law is an educator who lives in
Fez, and my wife is an information technology engineer.” Also, in the dialogue
he held with the media in Madagascar two years ago, he touched upon a matter
that would have an aftermath, regarding the debate on freedom of belief, when
he said: “The King of Morocco is commander of the faithful for all religions
... and Morocco absolutely does not seek to impose Islam.
The second lesson, which can
be learned from the video of Skiredj, is that the relationship that the financial
and decision-making circles establish within the state with artists,
intellectuals and journalists, pretending to be loyal to those circles, is a
relationship that is weaker than a spider thread, because it associates loyalty
with giving, and whenever the second (i.e. giving) stops, the first (i.e.
loyalty) is cut off. Rather, sometimes submissiveness turns into hatred, as Abu
Hayyan al-Tawhidi explains through the concept of “dhahl” (rancor), which was
explained by the Egyptian philosopher Abd al-Rahman Badawi by saying: “Dhahl is
the repeated feeling of previous abuse that a person has experienced, while he
was not able to revenge to those who did this to him, because he was unable to respond
immediately, and so he will be remembering it from a distance. "
The words of Bachir Skiredj were
filled with shameless audacity and mixed with a lot of lies and allegations and
so they were not included in this contribution. But his words enter into the
artist’s relationship with authority, a relationship ruled by hypocrisy and overacting
in praise instead of criticism, and therefore, many artists affiliated with the
authority, like the dependent politicians, find in closed sessions a space for
breathing, and "stick up the middle finger from under the jalabas" as
stated in the well-known joke.
The third and final lesson,
which must be learned from Bachir Skiredj, is entitled: Playing with fire, as
the authority has worked in recent years to create and encourage dozens of
newspapers, or even crimepapers, both in printed and electronic form, whose
sole mission is to defame politicians, jurists, and independent journalists,
and dig into their private lives and fabricate unethical stories about them. These
newspapers and websites are the ones that recently took te lead of the gang
responsible for the character assassination of their colleague journalist
Tawfiq Bouachrine, to the point that the editor-in-chief of a printed weekly magazine
and website of this category was not satisfied with the false news he had
published against his detained colleague, and so during the last month of
Ramadan he threw himself on contacting party leaders to tell them that the
court will show a tape of Bouachrine together with his sister-in-law. By chance
I was with a political official when this wicked colleague called him, so I was
able to assure him, and later to others, that Bouachrine's wife has no sister at
all. Whoever signed the decision to manipulate the press and turn it from a
news gathering body into an intelligence gathering body, does not know that he
is playing with fire that will grow out of control, because when we uproot the
professional press and plant the defamation press in its place, it is certain
that we will harvest generations that do not care about news, analysis and
journalistic investigation, but rather will they search for indecent rumors. Just
like a drug addict who is looking for his dose of heroin.
The original Arabic version of this article can be found here:
Website: freeraissouni.com
Translated with help of Google Translate and edited by me. English is not my mother tongue.
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