TIME on Moroccan Expulsions

It appears that TIME is the first mainstream American media to devote significant coverage to the recent expulsions here.

The Village of Hope deportations are part of what appears to be a widespread crackdown on Christian aid workers in Morocco. An estimated 40 foreigners — including Dutch, British, American and Korean citizens — have been deported this month, including Broadbent and his colleagues. Among them were an Egyptian Catholic priest in the northern city of Larache and a Korean-born Protestant pastor in Marrakesh who was arrested as he led services in his church. And this past week, authorities searched an orphanage founded by American missionaries in the town of Azrou called The Children's Haven.

They dare to ask a question that most media outlets, Moroccan as well as foreign, have refused to ask.

According to the Moroccan government, the deportees all broke the law, using their status as aid workers to cover their proselytizing. "They are guilty of trying to undermine the faith of Muslims," Interior Minister Tayeb Cherkaoui said in a press release.

But were they?

The attachment of a video from the day of expulsions seems a bit tacky. I wonder who is filming and what they hoped to capture when they started recording. We don't see much at all. Really, we just hear the cries of children in the background. It is only three minutes from the few hours before the families were forced to leave and the editing jumps around.

The article itself focuses mainly on an ideal of "tolerance" that Morocco supposedly embodied more in the past but does so less now. In very broad terms, this is perhaps true. But it over-simplifies things a great deal.

Even appeals to human rights seem a bit suspect in my book. After Guantanamo Bay, secret renditions, and other excesses in the "War on Terror", the United States hardly has the moral ground to make any sort of accusations about human rights violations.