Words that come at a very bad time for the rapprochement between France and Morocco a few days before President Emmanuel Macron’s trip to Rabat. By evoking the drug trafficking that is rampant in France, the French philosopher Michel Onfray shattered the kingdom and King Mohamed VI.
Curiously, the Moroccan media and other representatives of the royal palace pretend to have seen or heard nothing. For much less than that, Algerian entrepreneur Mehdi Ghezzar suffered an unprecedented lynching only a month and a half ago. Will Michel Onfray be removed from Cnews like RMC did with the Algerian columnist?
Emmanuel Macron is expected in Morocco at the end of the current month. The two countries are in the middle of their honeymoon after several years of estrangement and serious offenses against the French president.
He ended up giving in to pressure from Rabat by recognizing “Moroccan sovereignty” over Western Sahara at the end of July and considering the autonomy plan presented by Morocco as the “only basis” for reaching a solution to the conflict. .
This reconciliation, desired by the French right and far-right, has obviously not changed too much the perception of the kingdom on the other side of the Mediterranean and throughout the world. Morocco is perceived in France and elsewhere as a kingdom of drug trafficking and that will not change for a long time, honey or not with the West.
Questioned on Saturday October 12 by Laurence Ferrari on Europe 1 and Cnews, two channels in the Bolloré galaxy, on the rise of drug trafficking in France, Michel Onfray responded very spontaneously that instead of indefinitely chasing small users, we must strike at the source of this traffic. And he specifically names Morocco, which he classifies in the box of “rogue states”. Its King Mohammed VI is designated as “the boss”.
Drug trafficking in France: Michel Onfray shatters Morocco and its King Mohammed VI
“We must contact the boss of Morocco, the boss of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the boss of Mexico. There are a lot of countries that we know are rogue states. These are rogue states and we are hitting small consumers,” he said.
And Michel Onfray continues: “Emmanuel Macron is in a way insulting the King of Morocco and the Arab people have a kind of dignity, we don’t talk like that to the African world. At some point, you can say: it’s coming out of your house anyway, the escape. You are the ones who produce this drug that reaches us. »
Morocco is considered the world’s leading producer of cannabis, the cultivation, processing, sale and consumption of which it legalized in 2021. A large part of the quantities entering Algeria and Europe come from this Maghreb kingdom in a A significant part of the rural world lives from the cultivation of hashish.
“It’s a state affair. We need a head of state who is capable of going to see the heads of state and telling them: now you have to calm down and you will stop growing poppies. Today, you know well where the poppy fields are, we know where they are,” added the French philosopher close to the far-right.
Words which sound like a denial of the praise recently made to Morocco by the French Minister of the Interior.
Thursday October 3, Bruno Retailleau declared on RTL that he was going to “dialogue” with Morocco, a country that he “respects enormously”, on the question of returning illegal immigrants to the borders. With Algeria, on the contrary, he promised to go to the “arm wrestling”.
The exit of Michel Onfray confirms that even his “friends” of the extreme right do not hold Mohamed VI and his kingdom in very high esteem.
Curiously, this sequence did not provoke any reaction in France or Morocco. It went unnoticed and no major media reproduced it, even Cnews and Europe 1 did not.
