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AHMED TAIBI
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 02-03-2010- Washington--Someone’s negligence, not rain, is what killed forty-one people and injured over seventy in the collapse of the Bab Berdieyinne Mosque, Meknes.
There are nagging questions that lurk in the background of the Meknes tragedy. When Ahmed Al-Tawfiq, Morocco’s minister of Awqaf and religious Affairs, appeared on “Hiwar – Dialogue,“ a Morocco’s channel One news program, I thought we were getting answers; instead, he described, with lamentable detachment, the collapse of the wind-whipped and rain saturated minaret and a three-thirds of the Bab Berdieyinne Mosque as being “Allah’s will and unexpected;” |
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AHMED TAIBI
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 Even as Morocco’s Minister of Foreign affairs Taieb Fassi-Fihri, during his meetings in Marrakesh with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton within the framework of the Forum for the Future, continues to tout, in his usual saccharine tone, the country’s “soaring democracy,” his nepotistic government sustains its hypocritical and duplicitous campaign against freedom of political expression subjecting the independent media to convulsions capable, I fear, of decimating the country’s prospect to an unfeigned democracy. Its deliberate immolation of Akhbar Al Youm carried on this week when the Moroccan police, at the behest of the ministry of interior, extrajudicially seized the newspaper and prevented its dissemination. Last Friday, in a Casablanca circuit court, a judge sentenced the paper’s publishing director, Tawfik Bouachrine, and caricaturist Khalid Kadar to a suspended jail sentence of eight years, a combined forfeiture of $412,118.00, and ordered its offices sequestered indefinitely. Prior to the sentencing, the offices of Akhbar Al Youm had been summarily shut down for 36 days. Bouachrine and Kadar were sentenced in accordance with article 267 of the penal code and article 41 of the press law.
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AHMED TAIBI
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 The Moroccan government’s unremitting onset against freedoms of the press and of expression has been gaining momentum recently. After the arrest of Idriss Chahtane, the managing editor of the weekly Al Michaal, and the sentencing of Rachid Mhamid and Mustapha Hirane, two journalists working for the same weekly, the gavel struck again in the case of Ali Anouzla, the managing editor of Al Jarida Al Oula, and Bouchra Eddou, a journalist of the same daily. Both journalists were handed suspended jail terms of a year and three months respectively. Sentencing of Tawfik Bouachrine, the publishing director of Akhbar Al-Yaoum, and Khalid Kadar, a caricaturist for the same paper, was postponed till October 30th. A jail sentence, it seems, will soon constitute a required journalistic credential to establish the bona fides of Moroccan independent journalists and activist bloggers who write in defense of democratic principles in Morocco. |
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AHMED TAIBI
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For the past three years, at the start of each school year and ever since Mohamed Zafzaf’s novel
Mohamed Zafzaf
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“An attempt to living” was introduced into the Moroccan Schools 9th grade curriculum, Islamic political parties and activists in Morocco have been calling for its banning. They contend the novel desensitizes the students to debauchery and entices them into un-Islamic behavior. Al-Tajdid, the official newspaper of the Salafist party Al Adala Wa Tanmiya – Justice and Development, published an article on 25 September, 2009, decrying the inclusion, once again, of the “immoral” novel in this year’s curriculum and calling for its removal.
The banning of literary books is not idiosyncratic to Morocco or Islam. More open societies indulged in the delineation of its artists; in the majority of the cases such repression is driven by religion. European and American conservatives and religious zealots have banned quite a few books. George Orwell’s “1984” was banned in Jackson County, FL for being “pro-communist and containing sexually explicit material;” Selman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was banned, yes! yes! by Ayatollah Khomeiny’s Iran, but also by the Wichita, KS, public library for being blasphemous to the prophet Mohammed;
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AHMED TAIBI
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 A van belonging to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center and transporting one of its most serious mental patient was involved in a serious accident, early morning, Wednesday, September 23, 2009, in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, just around the corner from the United Nations headquarters. No injuries were noted, but the patient, who is said to be suffering from psychiatric comorbidity and excessive manifestations of hubris, escaped. He was later spotted at the United Nations Assembly lecturing world leaders to sleep.
All joking aside, there is a reason why it took Qaddafi, the king of kings, the leader of leaders, the imam of all Muslims, forty years to finally step before the United Nations Assembly, He wasn’t ready.
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AHMED TAIBI
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 I resisted commenting on the arrest of the six members of the e-group “Alternative movement for individual freedoms,” known as “MALI,” who crash-landed on reality and caused much of a bedlam in Morocco recently when they decided to eat publically during the fasting hours of Ramadan in an attempt to call for the abrogation of article 222 of Morocco’s penal code. I thought the group vain, their protest self-serving and quixotic, their initiative worthy, but their judgment poor. Their actions were those of a temerarious group of privileged youths who, despite living in Morocco, lack perspective on the social trepidations of the average Moroccan. I also thought the group lacked courage. Why call for the right of Morocco’s Muslims to disregard Ramadan if so they choose when the real issue is the right of Morocco’s Muslims to tergiversate on Islam?
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AHMED TAIBI
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The National Action Group for Solidarity with Iraq and Palestine and its chief coordinator, Khaled Soufiani, in conjunction with other Moroccan human rights and civil activists and associations organized, on September 9, 2009, a demonstration in the heart of Morocco’s capital Rabat in support of Palestine and to protest the discernable traits of normalization of relations between Morocco and Israel.lations with Israel is treason and whoever supports it is a criminal and complicit in the atrocities Israel perpetrates on the Palestinians.” |
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AHMED TAIBI
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I cannot imagine what the life of Zainab Shtet is like. And nor can you.
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Photo: Al Massae
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Her father, Mohammed, compelled by dire
 "Touche pas à mon enfant" an association that helps abused children, and its president, Ms. Najat Anwar, took on the case of Zainab; they hired lawyers to defend her in court. Anyone willing to provide financial support to Zainab to contact the Association directly.
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financial circumstances, placed her as maid for a pittance when she was barely ten. His excuse can never abrogate his responsibility in his daughter’s unspeakable ordeal. Her employer is an affluent family of five, a husband and his wife and their three sons, living in a large villa in the swanky Al-Wahda neighborhood, in the suburbs of Oujda. The husband is a judge, an arbiter of justice, a guardian of society’s moral compass. Zainab, who is eleven-years old today, was their servant, their beast of burden, their slave. And much like when Moroccan nobility owned slaves, the dignified judge and his family thought they had the right of life and death over her. |
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AHMED TAIBI
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 To enhance its air combat and air defense capabilities, the Moroccan Royal Air Force (RAF) had requested from and was approved by the United States Congress to purchase AIM-120C-7 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air missiles (AMRAAM) from Raytheon, a U.S. company specializing in Defense technology. Some sources reported that Morocco’s purchase request and commitment was for 96 missiles; other sources reported a much lower number. AMRAAM will allow RAF to maximize on the operational capabilities of its recently purchased F-16 Block 52+ aircraft.
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VIEWPOINT -
AHMED TAIBI
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Cultural and Religious heavy Clothes
youssef Jounaidi
Some of you are outraged, while others are wondering about the purpose of the magazine or the woman. Is money behind this astonishing sacrificial portrait or is it courage? We might not know, but as for now only one thing matters. Something has been exposed in plain sight to the disbelieving eyes of a society that view women as pure sacred flesh.
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In.an. already bifurcated country, The November issue of Femmes du Maroc – Women of Morocco, a Moroccan magazine that caters to the interests of Moroccan women with a panoply of feminine subjects is bound to turn into lascivious fodder for a misguided and testosterone charged fringe of society, an opportunity for vitriolic religious condemnations and exhortations to aspiring jihadists to perverted religious zealots, and a cause for celebration to post-feminists and advocates of women’s rights. |
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AHMED TAIBI
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Reporter Driss Chahtane being Arrested |
If you want to find journalists, human rights activists, and bloggers that speak their mind in Morocco today, look first in the government’s prisons. Then, check the holding pens of the country’s judicial system. You will find them clustered in groups waiting to be slaughtered. Driss Chahtane, Mostapha Hairan, and Rachid Mhamid of Al-Mashaal have just been meted out excessive prison sentences and fines for their publication of what the government alleged was false information on the king’s health. |
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AHMED TAIBI
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 Morocco’s ministry of interior ordered the seizure and banning of independent Moroccan newspaper Akhbar Al Youm for three days in a row, 26-28 September, 2009. According to a ministerial communiqué, the banned paper published a caricature of Mouly Ismail, the cousin of Mohammed VI, as he was celebrating his wedding with as a backdrop a Moroccan flag centered by… a Star of David. Taoufik Bouachrine, the owner of the newspaper, inveighed against the government’s decision to ban the Monday and Tuesday prints of his newspaper since the controversial caricature was published over the weekend. He denied the caricature depicted a Star of David. The Wiccan star on the Moroccan flag lacks the criss-crossing pattern shown on Akhbar Al Youm.
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AHMED TAIBI
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The recent arrests by Morocco ‘security services of twenty-four members of a terrorist network reinforces the country’s position as a viable partner to the U.S. in the global war on terrorism and a major contributor to regional security. The arrests culminated a sophisticated operation that required coordination and deconfliction between multiple security and intelligence disciplines in a number of towns and cities across the kingdom and extensive cross-cueing between Morocco’s territorial security department and U.S. military intelligence and European law enforcement assets. |
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AHMED TAIBI
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 On March 2008, I reported on Morocco ’s purchase of 24 F-16 Block 52+ fighter jets from Lockheed Martin at a cost of $2.4 billion dollars. The purchase was in response to Algeria’s March 2006 $8 billion military-technical cooperation agreement with Russia $1.3 billion of which was allotted for the purchase of 29 single-seater MiG-29SMT fighters and six two-seater MiG-29UB fighters. Algeria terminated the contract in 2007 upon receipt of the first batch of MiG-29s which, after a technical inspection, were deemed defective and of inferior quality than stipulated. |
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AHMED TAIBI
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 Every time a Moroccan newspaper or magazine is banned from publication, a journalist or an editor investigated by the government, freedom of speech advocates and international media, like El Pais and Le Monde, cry wolf. They refuse to look beyond the fact that the government is “harassing” journalists and “suppressing” freedom of the media. They mount a campaign decrying the actions of the government as if they were unjustifiable, as though unethical, biased journalistic reporting were a myth. |
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Ahmed taibi, is a moroccan American writer who lives in Washington and writes about political issues relating to Morocco, North Africa and the Mediterranean region. his blog is at http://cabalamuse.wordpress.com.
