Algeria Elite’s Discourse of Hate: Making of Morocco an Enemy

Abstract

For decades, the Algerian elite have specialized in unjustified verbal attacks against Morocco. Academicians, politicians, high-ranking retired military members, diplomats, parliamentary members, and media figures have launched a viral campaign against the kingdom. Their discourse is marked by hatred to make of Morocco an ‘enemy’ of the Algerian people. To analyze this issue, this study adopts critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine overtly expressed structures of hate and to argue that the discourse of the Algerian elite is aggressive, insulting, and threatening. Practically, recurrent hate speech acts embedded in metaphors and mental frames are pure and explicit incitement to violence. To explain the implications of these acts, the study relies on videos posted on YouTube across roughly two months from mid-July to August 2021. The choice of this time span is important because it represents a culminating point in the conflict between Morocco and Algeria due to the succession of these events: 1) the call of the Moroccan ambassador, Omar Hilal, to the United Nations during the meeting of non-aligned countries for the ‘independence of the Kabylia people’ in Algeria, 2) the Pegasus leak, 3) the outburst of violent forest fires in North Algeria and the lynching and immolation of a young activist in the courtyard of a police station in Kabilya, 4) the visit of the Israeli foreign minister to Morocco, and 5) the breakdown of diplomatic ties between the two countries. To attain the current study’s aims, 44 videos have been identified to cover the five stages. The results show that the Algerian elite’s discourse towards Morocco is full of hate, derogatory, and incites violence and racism. The many metaphors and mental frames adopted in the excerpts are to serve the political agenda of the state by making of Morocco an ‘enemy’.