Samir Bennis: Spain’s Cynical ‘Moor-Hunt’ Will Leave Indelible Marks on Morocco

On Sep 2, 2026

Marrakech – “Morocco is becoming a collateral victim of the internal struggles taking place within the Spanish state.” That verdict from Moroccan author and political analyst Samir Bennis landed on X this Wednesday like a scalpel pressed to a wound Madrid keeps reopening.

Bennis was reacting to fresh reporting in El País confirming that the director of Spain’s 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 “presented and distorted” by El Español – an outlet he brands without ceremony “a far-right newspaper run by a fascist.”

What makes the disavowal so damning is that it was hardly the first. The fixation on Moroccan culpability has never once let up, though Spain’s own officials have ruled it out at every turn. Only Monday, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told Cadena SER that his security forces, the CNI, and other intelligence services had furnished “no information” tying Rabat to the arrivals of July 30 and 31. He went further, crediting Morocco with cooperation he called “frankly positive,” and noting that Moroccan authorities had swiftly reinforced their police presence near the enclave to stem further crossings.

Rabat, for its part, had already rejected any suggestion of orchestration; Interior Ministry spokesperson Rachid El Khalfi held that the events were “neither the result of temporary circumstances nor spontaneous developments,” but the product of digital manipulation, disinformation, and human-trafficking networks. None of it slowed the machine.

El cinismo del PP y de la prensa española dejará huellas indelebles en Marruecos

Acabo de leer un artículo de El País en el que se informa de que el jefe de la Policía Nacional acaba de comunicar al ministro del Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, que el informe policial que…

— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) September 2, 2026

The distortion is the whole story. El Español had trumpeted on Tuesday night that a dossier from the Centro Nacional de Inmigración 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 – an episode the publication prefers to call an “invasion.”

Within a day, the country’s top police official gutted the claim, informing his own minister – after meeting with Extranjería officials and examining the document for the first time himself – that no police report exists attributing the planning or execution of those days to Moroccan security forces. The paper’s scoop, in short, was disavowed by the very institution it invoked.

For Bennis, this lays bare something larger than one tabloid’s overreach. “What exists in Spain is an internal crisis, a pitched battle, a struggle between different sectors and services of the Spanish state,” he argues. He maps the fault lines with a cartographer’s care.

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 Sánchez has publicly dismissed any suggestion that Rabat marshaled the crossings, crediting Morocco instead with “instantaneous, immediate cooperation.” On the other flank sits El Español, manufacturing guilt “on the basis of a supposed report,” Bennis writes, “full of accusations that attribute to Morocco the authorship of what happened without offering any conclusive proof.”

He presses the evidentiary void with a prosecutor’s 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 “insinuations, conjectures, approximations, and interpretations, all directed toward reaching a previously established conclusion.” No documentary proof, no command structure – only a verdict written in advance and evidence conscripted to fit it. That El Español 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.

The internecine character of the affair is not incidental; it is the point. El País reports that the investigating magistrate, María Tardón, had ordered police officials to withhold the document’s contents from their own superiors – 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 wielding leaks as ordnance: this is the “pitched battle” Bennis describes, and Morocco is the body caught in the crossfire.

The sharpest edge of his post is reserved for Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Even after the CNI and the Interior Ministry cleared Rabat, the Partido Popular (PP) leader has persisted in claiming that “the operation came out of Morocco, was consented to by Morocco, and everything seems to indicate it was also coordinated by Morocco,” while demanding the government summon Morocco’s ambassador “immediately.”

Bennis’s retort is merciless: Feijóo “is shooting himself in the foot.” The PP chief and “the media armada accompanying him” have so insulted Morocco, and prosecuted their particular “Moor-hunt” – caza al moro – 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 “the culmination of the instrumentalization of Morocco’s image for purely electoralist ends.”

Here his argument reaches for history, and here it bites deepest. The campaign will leave “indelible marks,” he warns – not only on Moroccans, who are noting that “certain ghosts of Francoism and of the era of Isabella the Catholic still survive in Spain,” but on the Moroccan state itself. Rabat, he contends, watches “broad sectors of the Spanish deep state” cling to the ancient prism through which so much of this shared history was refracted: the creed that “the prosperity and strength of Spain had to be accompanied by the weakness of Morocco.”

That creed deserves to be named plainly. What surfaced in El Español’s fabrication was not journalism but reflex – 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’s own police, rather than by any Moroccan rebuttal, only sharpens the humiliation.

Bennis closes on the wreckage such cynicism leaves behind. The graver casualty may be trust itself – the confidence between two neighbors, and between their intelligence services, that “now runs the risk of being profoundly damaged, perhaps in a way that is difficult to reverse.” 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.

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