Damien Rieu is neither a coach nor Franco-Moroccan, but he is one of the French people most passionate about the course of the Atlas Lions at the 2022 Football World Cup: this identity activist, part of the Reconquest party ! of Eric Zemmour, does not miss a crumb of the overflows which follow the Moroccan victories. After the success of Morocco against Belgium, in the group stage, he had widely propagated the images of the violence committed by their supporters in Brussels. A “extreme minority” circumscribed to “a very small area” of the capital, had specified the mayor Philippe Close; the images given on the fachosphere, suddenly taking interest in Belgian news, gave the illusion of a civil war, brought to the front page of the magazine Current Values. The next day, Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally (RN), commented on these facts using a quote – slightly distorted – from the historian Max Gallo: “There are people who are from here but whose soul is unquestionably elsewhere. »
Since, the executives of Reconquest! keep a meticulous Time.news of the manifestations of joy of the Moroccan diaspora in Europe or the incidents it causes, relayed by certain elected officials RN or Les Républicains (LR). Damien Rieu and the supporters of Eric Zemmour see in the France-Morocco semi-final a “Clash of Footballing Civilizations”. Noting the support of the African continent and the Muslim world in Morocco, the first country in the region to reach the semi-finals of the World Cup, they repaint this semi-final in “a match between the Ummah [la communauté des musulmans] and the West »or in a new act of a fantasized colonization of France by the Maghreb.
Sunday, December 11, on BFM-TV, Mr. Zemmour took up the verse started in his time by Jean-Marie Le Pen, suggesting that the France team was, in his eyes, made up of too many players from the immigration : “The team must resemble the country. (…) Imagine the Morocco team, if there were ten players named François and Jean-Claude in the Morocco team, I think the King would wonder. » In the same program, the polemicist estimated that a Franco-Moroccan had no other option than to support the Blues, judging that the French of Italian or Portuguese origin did not ask themselves the question; the sign of a worrying amnesia, when one thinks of the multiple reports in the communities originating from these two countries before the finals France-Italy (World Cup 2006) and France-Portugal (Euro 2016).
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