'The World Sees Us': telquel.ma and Its Smoke and Mirrors

Fatou Sarr — Dakar, Sénégal — 2026-09-05

telquel.ma (Moroccan digital newspaper) asks itself: "how does the world see us?" Touching humility — until you reach the answer, which boils down to: badly, and it is the Algerian press's fault. You have to be dreaming. So the whole world sees Algeria through the eyes of the Algerian press? Someone should tell Washington, Paris, Beijing and New Delhi they are watching the wrong channel.

The truth, which telquel.ma brushes against without daring to look it in the face, is this: if "the world" has a poor view of Morocco, it is not the Algerian press's fault — it is Moroccan reality's fault: occupation, repression, inequality, and that tiresome habit of silencing any criticism by crying foreign conspiracy.

And this obsession with "the world's gaze" is itself an admission: confident countries do not interrogate the world about their image, they build their reality. Those who spend their time asking "how do you see us?" always end up hearing an answer they do not like.

Algeria, for its part, does not ask the world to look at it: it simply exists, it counts, and it is right on the facts. Perhaps that is the real difference — some go looking for a mirror, others build a house.