Moroccan Regime Is Calling On Obscure Figures To Respond To Benjamin Stora

The Moroccan regime has jumped on the “bandwagon” of lamenting Boualem Sansal, but not to defend the French writer. Rather, it is trying to exploit his statements related to history and geography to promote its outdated narrative, or what it calls its “legitimate territories,” based on what is stipulated in the Constitution of the Alaouite Kingdom.

To support Boualem Sansal’s statements, which were debunked by the renowned historian Benjamin Stora in a previous program aired on a French public television channel last week, the arms of the Alaouite regime in Rabat resorted to a hired Franco-Moroccan historian named Bernard Lugans to defend Sansal’s words and attack Benjamin Stora.
This is because the latter, being the most credible and reliable, exposed Sansal and debunked his words.

The French writer currently detained in Algeria claimed that areas in western Algeria, such as Mascara and Tlemcen, were part of the Alaouite Kingdom before the French occupation. However, Benjamin Stora was surprised that such statements came from someone described as a writer, and addressed him saying: “Sonsal forgot two historical events in western Algeria that should not be forgotten.”
Mascara was the capital of the Algerian resistance led by Emir Abdelkader in the early years of the French occupation. And Emir Abdelkader is a national hero in the imagination of the Algerians. Emir Abdelkader is from Mascara. As for Tlemcen, it is the birthplace of the father of the Algerian national movement, Messali Hadj.

Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote an opinion piece in a Moroccan newspaper owned by Monir El Majidi, the personal secretary of the Moroccan king, Mohammed VI, in which he acknowledged that the nucleus of the current Kingdom of Morocco originated from the emirates of Fez and Marrakech.
This is almost the same situation that applies to Algeria, which inherited two prosperous emirates, Béjaïa and Tlemcen, according to the author of the article.

Then Bernard Logan, whose identity as a writer or historian remains undisclosed, begins to say that the Alaouite Kingdom is an extension of the entities of Fez and Marrakech, to demonstrate the continuity of the Moroccan state throughout history. However, in a moment of blatant subjectivity, he retracts in the case of Algeria, saying: “We are actually faced with emirates (referring to Bejaia and Tlemcen), although they were prosperous, they did not form the nucleus of a pre-existing state.”

And this was nothing but a prelude from the hired writer, to later claim that “when the French forces landed in Sidi Ferj in 1830, Algeria did not exist as a state,” a statement that French politicians repeat every time, the latest being French President Emmanuel Macron, in a meeting with French youth, some details of which were reported by the French newspaper “Le Monde” in the fall of 2022, and which led to the Algerian authorities’ decision to withdraw their ambassador from Paris at that time, Mohamed Antar Daoud.

The strange thing about this person is that he says one thing and its opposite. At one moment, he claims that France was the one who named “Algeria,” and then he goes on to say in another instance that the Ottoman Empire called it “Eyalet of Algiers,” even though the Ottoman presence predates the French occupation of Algeria.

And it seemed from what Logan wrote that the man cannot tolerate historians discussing Algeria’s rich history, especially those with high reliability, like Benjamin Stora, who in a moment dismantled the thesis of the Moroccan regime and its affiliates, who try to cast doubt on Algeria’s defeat of France and the creation of the greatest revolution in modern history, which is what the Alaouite Kingdom lacks, as it lives on historical illusions that even Moroccans themselves do not believe.

The writer did not dare to say that the current Moroccan regime’s history dates back to the beginning of the French protectorate in Marrakech in 1912, and that Marshal Hubert Lyautey is the founder of the current Kingdom of Morocco, for whom a massive statue was erected in the Moroccan city of Casablanca even today, 78 years after the end of this French protectorate.