While a recent Essaouira lawsuit is raising troubling questions about religious co-existence in Morocco, some observers are questioning the real motive for the action.

A lawsuit filed this month in Essaouira by a Moroccan Jewish restaurant owner against members of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) is provoking intense debate.

The AMDH responded to the action by Noam Nir, stating on August 5th that the Moroccan group "embraces the human rights system with its comprehensive and global nature and cannot be hostile to anyone based on their religion, colour, race, or ethnicity".

AMDH central bureau member Samira Kenani, one of the three defendants in the case, explained the situation surrounding Nir's allegations.

"On July 27th, we visited the city of Essaouira with a group of children as part of a summer camp organised by our association," she told Magharebia. "We chanted our usual slogans, praising the association and Palestine, but we were surprised by someone we did not know videotaping our activities."

"It is impossible for our association to use slogans containing slander and libel against the Jews. On the contrary; some of our association members are themselves Jews," Kenani said.

She added that the AMDH would speak out about the affair. "We vow not to keep silent about this case; he's a provocative person who boasts about being a Zionist," she said. "We'll seriously think about suing him for slander because he doesn't have the right to discredit an important association like ours."

Al-Hussin Boukbeer, also named in the lawsuit, said the alleged anti-Semitism was "unlikely in Morocco".

Noam Nir "provoked the members of our association in the march that we organised to mark Earth Day on March 29th in the city of Essaouira," he said. "He presented himself as a correspondent of Israel's Maariv newspaper, and a clash took place between him and the members of our association, who asked him to show his professional identity card. After that, we contacted the Ministry of Communication, which asserted to us that it had rejected an application to approve him as correspondent for some Israeli newspapers."

Boukbeer continued: "On July 27th, he appeared again and videotaped the summer camp visit which the association organised in the city of Essaouira, and then posted the video to YouTube under the title 'Anti-Semitic Talk'."

Political analyst Mustafa al-Khalafi said the goal of the lawsuit was simply to tarnish the image of the AMDH.

"The history of the association shows that it is fully distant from such accusations," he said.

"In addition, the lawsuit is also not based on clear evidence of anti-Semitism. It's only an attempt to discredit the association on the international level and an attempt to affect its solidarity with the just causes of peoples around the world," he said. "Moreover, it's a strike against those who reject the resumption of relations between Morocco and Israel."

"There's an attempt, on the one hand, to push Morocco towards the normalisation of its relations with Israel, and on the other, to weaken any endeavour to oppose such a step," he added. "In 1994, Morocco opened a bureau for Moroccan-Israeli communication, but it was shut down in 2000... in expression of the Moroccan people's rejection of [Israel's] policies."

According to a recent sociological study by the University of Maryland in the US, "the Moroccans are one of the most sympathetic peoples with the Palestinians," al-Khalafi noted.

Source: By Naoufel Cherkaoui for Magharebia in Rabat