Moroccan expert, politician and former tourism minister Lahcen Haddad blasted over the racist remarks made by Soren Lippert, anchor of Danish Tv2 News, where he compared Moroccan football players hugging their mothers to monkeys.
The remarks were made following one of the historic wins by the Moroccan team as part of 2022 World Cup.
In a series of tweets, Haddad, also a university professor, debunked the simplistic narrative put forward by the journalist.
Haddad said that Lippert is destabilized by a manifestation of family values because he never stepped outside his own culture.
The Moroccan academic dissected Lippert’s statement from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, explaining that racism is “a look at otherness as a form of subject supposed to know”. He gave the examples of Blacks’ sexual prowess, Arabs’ lasciviousness and Jews’ greediness which are forms of Jouissance that only the Other knows and possesses.
That jouissance is coveted and rejected, at the same time, in hermitic views like the current Danish one. The concerned person wants it because he cannot have it, yet it confuses his imaginary order of values and pushes him to make such blatant statements.
Haddad noted that different cultural gestures do unsettle the immaculate and pure nature of Westernness and Whiteness. “Such immaculateness of identity is itself the basis of racism!”
The Moroccan analyst pointed out that the Danish anchor strayed from the path of multiculturalism, a universal value, by commenting on a mother wearing a scarf dancing with her son who just prostrated in the soccer field to thank Allah. “The sheer difference of others was so unsettling for this anchor,” he remarked.
Haddad also warned against the myth of purity of race or belonging which led to atrocities in the not so distant past.