{"id":79589,"date":"2026-09-02T17:57:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T17:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/79589\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T17:57:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T17:57:07","slug":"samir-bennis-spains-cynical-moor-hunt-will-leave-indelible-marks-on-morocco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/79589\/","title":{"rendered":"Samir Bennis: Spain\u2019s Cynical \u2018Moor-Hunt\u2019 Will Leave Indelible Marks on Morocco"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marrakech \u2013 \u201cMorocco is becoming a collateral victim of the internal struggles taking place within the Spanish state.\u201d That verdict from Moroccan author and political analyst Samir Bennis<\/a> landed on X this Wednesday like a scalpel pressed to a wound Madrid keeps reopening.<\/p>\n

Bennis was reacting to fresh reporting<\/a> in El Pa\u00eds confirming that the director of Spain\u2019s National Police, Francisco Pardo Piqueras, had informed Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska that the report before the Audiencia Nacional does not pin the late-July mass migration at the occupied city of Ceuta on the Moroccan state. That report, Bennis charges, had been \u201cpresented and distorted<\/a>\u201d by El Espa\u00f1ol \u2013 an outlet he brands without ceremony \u201ca far-right newspaper run by a fascist.\u201d<\/p>\n

What makes the disavowal so damning is that it was hardly the first. The fixation<\/a> on Moroccan culpability has never once let up, though Spain\u2019s own officials have ruled it out at every turn. Only Monday, Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez told<\/a> Cadena SER that his security forces, the CNI, and other intelligence services had furnished \u201cno information\u201d tying Rabat to the arrivals of July 30 and 31. He went further, crediting Morocco with cooperation he called \u201cfrankly positive,\u201d and noting that Moroccan authorities had swiftly reinforced their police presence near the enclave to stem further crossings.<\/p>\n

Rabat, for its part, had already rejected any suggestion of orchestration; Interior Ministry spokesperson Rachid El Khalfi held<\/a> that the events were \u201cneither the result of temporary circumstances nor spontaneous developments,\u201d but the product of digital manipulation, disinformation, and human-trafficking networks. None of it slowed the machine.<\/p>\n

El cinismo del PP y de la prensa espa\u00f1ola dejar\u00e1 huellas indelebles en Marruecos<\/p>\n

Acabo de leer un art\u00edculo de El Pa\u00eds en el que se informa de que el jefe de la Polic\u00eda Nacional acaba de comunicar al ministro del Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, que el informe policial que\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2014 Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) September 2, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

The distortion is the whole story. El Espa\u00f1ol had trumpeted on Tuesday night that a dossier from the Centro Nacional de Inmigraci\u00f3n y Fronteras (CENIF) blamed Moroccan gendarmes, acting under plainclothes agents, for engineering the entry of tens of thousands of migrants on July 30 and 31 under the guise of a migratory emergency \u2013 an episode the publication prefers to call an \u201cinvasion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within a day, the country\u2019s top police official gutted the claim, informing his own minister \u2013 after meeting with Extranjer\u00eda officials and examining the document for the first time himself \u2013 that no police report exists attributing the planning or execution of those days to Moroccan security forces. The paper\u2019s scoop, in short, was disavowed by the very institution it invoked.<\/p>\n

For Bennis, this lays bare something larger than one tabloid\u2019s overreach. \u201cWhat exists in Spain is an internal crisis, a pitched battle, a struggle between different sectors and services of the Spanish state,\u201d he argues. He maps the fault lines with a cartographer\u2019s care.<\/p>\n

On one flank stand the CNI and Defense Minister Margarita Robles, whose reading held that the events could not be traced to any deliberate Moroccan action; Grande-Marlaska has kept to that line, and S\u00e1nchez has publicly dismissed any suggestion that Rabat marshaled the crossings, crediting Morocco instead with \u201cinstantaneous, immediate cooperation.\u201d On the other flank sits El Espa\u00f1ol, manufacturing guilt \u201con the basis of a supposed report,\u201d Bennis writes, \u201cfull of accusations that attribute to Morocco the authorship of what happened without offering any conclusive proof.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read also: There Is No Morocco-Spain Crisis, Only a Rift Inside Madrid\u2019s Government<\/a><\/p>\n

He presses the evidentiary void with a prosecutor\u2019s cadence. Who gave the order, if an order was ever given? Where is the proof of it? Where is the chain linking plainclothes men, security forces, and gendarmes? What Bennis finds instead is a scaffolding of \u201cinsinuations, conjectures, approximations, and interpretations, all directed toward reaching a previously established conclusion.\u201d No documentary proof, no command structure \u2013 only a verdict written in advance and evidence conscripted to fit it. That El Espa\u00f1ol dressed its theory in operatic detail, cataloguing waves of swimmers in wetsuits and later families in flip-flops, changes nothing: the police director still would not sign his name to the charge of state authorship.<\/p>\n

The internecine character of the affair is not incidental; it is the point. El Pa\u00eds reports that the investigating magistrate, Mar\u00eda Tard\u00f3n, had ordered police officials to withhold the document\u2019s contents from their own superiors \u2013 which is why Grande-Marlaska learned of it from a newspaper and fired off a midnight letter demanding answers. A ministry blindsided by its own police, a police corps split from its intelligence service, a right-wing press<\/a> wielding leaks as ordnance: this is the \u201cpitched battle\u201d Bennis describes, and Morocco is the body caught in the crossfire.<\/p>\n

The sharpest edge of his post is reserved for Alberto N\u00fa\u00f1ez Feij\u00f3o. Even after the CNI and the Interior Ministry cleared Rabat, the Partido Popular (PP) leader has persisted in claiming that \u201cthe operation came out of Morocco, was consented to by Morocco, and everything seems to indicate it was also coordinated by Morocco,\u201d while demanding the government summon Morocco\u2019s ambassador \u201cimmediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bennis\u2019s retort is merciless: Feij\u00f3o \u201cis shooting himself in the foot.\u201d The PP chief and \u201cthe media armada accompanying him\u201d have so insulted Morocco, and prosecuted their particular \u201cMoor-hunt\u201d \u2013 caza al moro \u2013 so doggedly, that Rabat could never receive him as a credible partner should he one day reach the Moncloa. All of it, Bennis holds, amounts to \u201cthe culmination of the instrumentalization of Morocco\u2019s image for purely electoralist ends.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here his argument reaches for history, and here it bites deepest. The campaign will leave \u201cindelible marks,\u201d he warns \u2013 not only on Moroccans, who are noting that \u201ccertain ghosts of Francoism and of the era of Isabella the Catholic still survive in Spain,\u201d but on the Moroccan state itself. Rabat, he contends, watches \u201cbroad sectors of the Spanish deep state\u201d cling to the ancient prism through which so much of this shared history was refracted: the creed that \u201cthe prosperity and strength of Spain had to be accompanied by the weakness of Morocco.\u201d<\/p>\n

That creed deserves to be named plainly. What surfaced in El Espa\u00f1ol\u2019s fabrication was not journalism but reflex \u2013 the colonial muscle memory of a political and media class that still cannot picture a strong, sovereign Morocco except as a threat to be contained. The occupied enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla remain the unfinished business of that mentality, and every manufactured panic about the frontier is, at bottom, an attempt to freeze an anachronism in place. That the smear had to be dismantled by Spain\u2019s own police, rather than by any Moroccan rebuttal, only sharpens the humiliation.<\/p>\n

Bennis closes on the wreckage such cynicism leaves behind. The graver casualty may be trust itself \u2013 the confidence between two neighbors, and between their intelligence services, that \u201cnow runs the risk of being profoundly damaged, perhaps in a way that is difficult to reverse.\u201d Governments can issue clarifications overnight, as Pardo Piqueras did. Reputations laundered for votes are not so easily restored. The PP and its press auxiliaries have, for a fistful of ballots, mortgaged something Spain will find far costlier to buy back.<\/p>\n

Read also: Ceuta Crossings: Why the Viral, Conspirationist Case Against Morocco Doesn\u2019t Hold Up<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marrakech \u2013 \u201cMorocco is becoming a collateral victim of the internal struggles taking place within the Spanish state.\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[27046,28346,399,29913,17,14360],"class_list":["post-79589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-ceuta-mass-crossing","tag-ceuta-mass-migration","tag-morocco-and-spain","tag-samir-bennis","tag-spain","tag-spanish-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}