Prince Hicham found refuge with an old Belgian acquaintance who for twenty years assiduously wrote for him announcing all kinds of cataclysm for Morocco

 While the French press seemed tired of his outings, Prince Hicham found refuge with an old Belgian acquaintance, Baudoin Loos, who for twenty years assiduously wrote for him announcing all kinds of cataclysm for Morocco. Even if all of Prince Cassandra's prophecies have turned out to be false, his Walloon protégé is not budging, this time with new bad omens inspired by the global pandemic of the new Coronavirus. Loos thus started a blog page in Le Soir de Bruxelles [a daily Belgian newspaper] to allow Prince Hicham to exist beyond his confinement in Morocco. Of course, in order to justify this contribution, Hicham Alaoui had to boast about being the cousin of the King of Morocco and of his pompous title of "Harvard University Research Associate" obtained through a donation, in the absence of a diploma, as those from Princeton and Stanford University had expired. Without it, he would be nothing. With no activities, from his house the prince also earned the title of "political specialist" to serve as a "test" amidst the virus that the kingdom is fighting against.  With nothing to say about the responsiveness of the authorities, the soundness of their decisions, the means deployed, the effectiveness of the strict quarantine and containment policies, acclaimed throughout the world as a "reference model" that the great Western powers envy the kingdom for, he racked his brains to see hidden signs of imaginary revolt or sedition.  The concept that he pulled out of his illusionist hat is that of a "disturbing reality". Which one? According to him, it was the one that Morocco had taken the lead on and had done better than the most advanced democracies solely because of the fragility of its health and education system or its employment policy.  So, if one tries to follow the tortuous reasoning of the bored prince, Morocco can only legitimise its success in the face of the Covid-19 crisis by its social shortcomings!  An idea so iconoclastic that it would smile if it came from a clever mind, but coming from the brain of a man who claims to be close to Harvard academics, his sickly state of self-conviction is worrying. Tinkering with economic concepts as antagonistic as they may be, he argues that Morocco follows an unbridled liberal doctrine, "adopted by national planners for two decades". In the classrooms of these American schools, did he not learn that he's subsidising millions of dollars to add a line to his short CV and that the words "liberal" and "planning" cannot be put together in a sentence without startling a first-year economics student? And to dig deeper into the furrow of his fantasy, the prince-researcher affirms that threats are hanging over Morocco. He believes that the resurgence of a second wave of the pandemic will occur this winter (a prediction that remains widely debated in the scientific community) and he hangs on to it like "existential threats of this kind." And from there, by adding a pinch of fairy dust on global warming, this leads to the fact that the country's economy will not recover and the population will not be protected from Covid-19 due to social inequalities, once again shaking up the situation settled after two years of demonstrations in the Rif [a cultural region in Northern Morocco]. To sum up the Prince's smoking thought: Covid-19 would be a more of a fatality for Morocco than in the rest of the countries he is so fond of and yet they accumulate without counting the cases of infection and deaths and even ask the Moroccan industry to provide them with masks and hydro-alcoholic gels…The Prince does not blush about this of course… It is then with a monologue on the Arab Spring from 10 years ago that the prince, obviously clued up on this bygone time, tries to explain what the authorities will have to do, advocating a Tunisia that has been drained of blood and cataloguing de facto Morocco in the camp of the evil authoritarian regimes. Yet, the country has not managed the situation as a dictatorial regime would, nor has it forced its population through any kind of ultra-nationalist brainwashing. On the contrary, and with singular tact, as much as the distancing measures were explained and practised by the exemplary and voluntary work of the people, the State has innovated by providing subsidies to sectors and households affected by the crisis. Even the administration that the Prince has constantly criticised in recent years has found the financial and technological resources to maintain its services without disruption or damage. In comparison, the chaos in New York, London or Milan is for him nothing but non-existent. Better still, Hicham Alaoui has only found distant Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan to sing their praises, turning a blind eye to old Europe or their beloved America, which have fallen into problems and disorganisation despite their state of democracy, whose model he wants to apply to the Moroccan case at all costs. And of course, the budding political scientist has erased more than fifty years of history from these Asian dragons who proceeded at their own pace to establish the rule of law after militarised regimes whose inherited order and discipline have served today in the face of this exogenous shock. The "historic opportunity" that the Prince continues to talk about in order to minimise the efforts and undeniable successes of Morocco is that of the entire planet, affirmed by the greatest thinkers and intellectuals of the moment. Bringing this back to the country that has best dealt with this pandemic in the region is bordering on blatant bad faith. Especially since he still gets hollow and useless sermons out of it.  Hicham Alaoui should meditate on his good fortune to have been in his country that protected him from this insidious evil, for in his golden exile, people are dropping like flies. No, surely he is not the "free spirit" he claims to be, for the life lesson he could have drawn from that experience should have led him to revise his discourse of anger, but for that, a certain humility and reasoning are necessary, and the prince tortured by his Machiavellianism is very far from the honest man, something he will never be.

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