It appears to me that whenever I stay away from the pen, there seems to be a new scandal to draw me back to my blank pages. Sadly my ink always happens to be the blood of a new victim of the most beautiful country in the world.
It was folly to ever believe we could go a month or a year without facing a new wave of shameful acts and diaphanous declarations. The reason for which I felt compelled to write, was the horrific scene, I sadly encountered, and coming to us from the saint city of Marrakesh, of an elderly caught molesting a child, a boy, like if the specificity mattered.
This act is rather transcendental for way too many reasons. For the abysmal act in itself, for the timing of the outburst of the clip , during a supposedly holy month, and to add fuel to the fire , for the words of the camera man , the savior of that little boy , that left us quite bewildered. Before saying anything here is the video of the pedophile caught with a scared crying boy and the fuss surrounding his arrest, if I may use the word.
Now catching this criminal shouldn’t be considered an achievement. Seeing how old the man is, this must have been going on for quite some time, and catching him this late should only warn us of the victim toll there might be. However the most alarming thing about this video isn’t the fact that the man begs for mercy saying “This was my last time“ and How generous of him to give us the courtesy of retiring, but it’s rather the words we can hear coming from the camera man. For non Arabic speakers I shall translate and I’ll try to do it as smugly as the man himself “For shame, for shame old man, what you’re doing is wrong. If only it were a little girl, we could’ve understood. Men have the same vice, but a boy? How could you. How is this boy going to grow to be the man of tomorrow? You’ve got him scarred for life”
These words do represent for the time being the opinion of one man, but express silently that of a larger mass of people. We need deep and good analysis to try and find a rational explanation to why a person would make such declarations. However no good thinking person would venture to barf such atrocities, if they weren’t the late symptoms of an already sick society. We live in a patriarchal country, tarnished with sexists and machos and narrow minded people. When you see the high representatives of Morocco, in the image of its Prime minister, comparing the woman to a collection object, only meant to be kept inside the walls of a household. Destined to exclusively foster the children, and to take care of the man, the God, the mystical creature. It is only when hearing words such as these that you can start connecting the dots. We harangue daily about how Islam liberated the woman, gave her weight in a society controlled by men driven by their unquenched thirst for power and leadership. But at the sight of these situations you can’t fully fathom this ambivalence between our words and our acts. How could we possibly imagine that an act of pedophilia on a girl could be acceptable, understandable under any circumstance? Doesn’t she have the right to grow up to be the woman she has dreamt to be? Can’t she be the doctor, engineer, space woman, and inventor, anything a person could aspire to be? What’s the psychological difference between her and a boy that would scare him and spare her? What would happen to the man of tomorrow without the woman of tomorrow?
Looking back at our prize list so far , we married a rape victim to her rapist, and therefore caused her suicide , we freed a pedophile Spaniard who has only served little time of his sentence and now we are encouraging rapes and pedophilia on little girls. I think it’s safe to say we’ve entered the hall of fame of sick behaviors and terrible decision makings. Abetting infatuations, wasting time on moot issues has become our trade mark. Our problem isn’t religious or intellectual; it is rather social and educational. Our country is unkempt, our leaders uncanny and no matter how hard we’ve struggled to keep our image immaculate we’ve only managed to sully it further more.
Sadly whenever anyone tries to openly discuss these issues reasonably, using texts of law and human logic they are bigoted and turned into missionaries of the west and enemies of the country. I am utterly disgusted to witness such horrors happen in my beloved land to my own brothers and sisters. Words alone can’t strife against such cancers that foresee a darker future for our next generations. But they remain our unique way to alleviate the pain we endure constantly. They provide us with the equanimity needed to tackle such serious conjectures.
I believe we may have reached a new level of sexually driven crimes that a new society of eunuch “men” shouldn’t be disregarded. Desperate measures for desperate times.
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