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Taleb Alisalem, known on X as Taleb Sahara, is a so-called “Sahrawi activist” based in Spain whose notoriety relies less on intellectual rigor than on his ability to mobilize racial and security discourses against Morocco. Presenting himself as the voice of Sahrawi resistance, he opportunistically recycles the narratives of the Spanish far right—criminalization of migrants, infiltration by political Islam, “hybrid warfare”—to fuel a morophobic rhetoric dangerously aligned with the postcolonial logics he claims to denounce.
In his op-eds, such as the one published in ABC about Torre Pacheco (on July 9, 2025, in Torre Pacheco, Murcia region, Spain, the isolated assault of a 68-year-old white man was followed by a wave of racist violence against Moroccans and Maghrebis, fueled by unverified rumors on social media and instrumentalized by far-right groups), Taleb Alisalem exploits social tensions and the Moroccan diaspora to accuse Rabat of geopolitical manipulation, without ever producing serious evidence. Under the guise of identity activism, Taleb constructs the figure of the Moroccan as a structural threat, while offering white and security-obsessed Europe the moral comfort of a “native” who confirms its worst fantasies.
After the independence movements, Frantz Fanon warned that the greatest danger for liberation movements lay in the internalization of colonial logics under the pretext of resistance. Today, figures like Taleb Alisalem represent a troubling mutation of this warning: activists of identity politics who, in the name of emancipation, reproduce the same epistemologies of racism, hierarchy, and essentialism that colonial power once used to dominate the “native.” In this essay, I argue that Talebalisalem represents a paradigmatic case of racialized postcolonial militancy, which mobilizes Eurocentric morophobia to define “identity,” while undermining the moral and ontological legitimacy of the subject he claims to liberate.
But beyond mere activist rhetoric, it is the psychic mechanics of this positioning that deserve to be deconstructed. To understand how Taleb Alisalem constructs the Moroccan as a repulsive figure, we must examine the unconscious foundations of this identity construction. Behind every public denunciation lies a more intimate anxiety — that of threatened identity, seeking purity and coherence.
- The Psychoanalytic Seduction of Purity
Taleb Alisalem’s rhetoric revolves around a fantasy of racial and moral purity, opposing the “civilized Sahrawi” to the supposed “delinquent Moroccan.” Through the lens of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, we detect a classic mechanism of projection and scapegoating. The abject Other — in this case, the Moroccan migrant — serves to stabilize a deeply fragile Sahrawi self-image. This mechanism constructs identity through negation: I am Sahrawi because I am not Moroccan. Drawing this symbolic boundary is a response to postcolonial anxiety: an attempt to fix identity in the face of historical fragmentation, hybridity, and geopolitical ambiguity.
But this negation of the Other is a dead end: as Judith Butler reminds us, identity is never self-sufficient; it is always relational, citational, and rooted in power. The Sahrawi subject as constructed by Taleb Alisalem is only conceivable through the dislocation of the Moroccan. This is not liberation, but a psychic repetition of colonial racial thinking.
- The Racial Instrumentalization of the Migrant
Taleb’s claims — that Morocco “exports delinquents” to Spain as part of a hybrid war — reproduce word for word the conspiracy narratives of the global far right. The irony is brutal: in seeking to demonize the Moroccan state, he recycles the same racist discourse used by Vox, the National Rally, or the AfD to exclude all Maghrebis from the European political imagination.
Here, Taleb illustrates what Paul Gilroy called “new raciologies”: postcolonial actors who co-opt racial biopolitics in the service of ethnonationalist projects. By portraying Moroccan migrants as delinquents by default, he reproduces the colonial trope of the “unassimilable native,” whose very presence threatens the integrity of the Western state. This is not anti-colonial critique; it is racial ventriloquism.
More troubling still is his use of state pardons as “proof”: he suggests that Moroccan prisoners released at the end of their sentences are “armed” to commit crimes in Europe. No data, no causality, just paranoid inference. His accusation rests not only on an empirical void; it is conceptually perverse. It fits perfectly within what Edward Said called a “parody of liberation”: mobilizing colonial frameworks of control and suspicion in the name of postcolonial freedom.
III. Identity as Fetish, Race as Tool
The contradiction in Taleb Alisalem’s discourse lies in the fact that while invoking anti-colonial language — “liberation,” “resistance,” “self-determination” — he uses race as a tactical weapon. But, as Stuart Hall taught us, race is not a solid foundation upon which to build identity. It is a floating signifier, shaped by the ideological work of power.
Taleb instrumentalizes race to divide, criminalize, and stigmatize, reintroducing colonial logics of racial classification into the discourse of resistance. He does not dismantle the coloniality of power: he reconfigures it with new targets. This is identity-as-fetish: a reified and purified ideal that obscures complexity, plurality, and the shared history of Maghrebi peoples.
Postcolonial thinkers like Achille Mbembe or Homi Bhabha have shown us that identity is always impure, always becoming. Building it on a foundation of exclusion is not only politically dangerous: it is philosophically unsustainable. It turns difference into deviance, and solidarity into suspicion.
- The Political Economy of Morophobia
Taleb’s discourse cannot be dissociated from a broader European context in which morophobia — this racialized fear of Moroccans — is increasingly used to shape migration policies and diplomatic balances. His narratives are not isolated: they feed into a transnational economy of fear, aimed at devaluing Morocco’s strategic partnerships in Africa and the Mediterranean.
But here lies the great contradiction: while accusing Morocco of using migrants as pawns, he himself instrumentalizes them as political symbols. He invokes the figure of the Moroccan prisoner, stripped of name, voice, and humanity, to perform a rhetorical act of Sahrawi purity. The migrant becomes a mere screen, onto which are projected fantasies of contamination, criminality, and geopolitical conspiracy.
This is not anti-imperialism. It is the reproduction of imperial power — this time in the hands of the postcolonial activist.
- Conclusion: The Trap of Reactive Identity
Taleb Alisalem’s discourse illustrates the dangers of what I call reactive identity politics: the construction of the self not through affirmative liberation, but through the negation of the Other. This is not a politics of becoming, but a politics of the border.
As Fanon said, “the oppressed always ends up believing the worst about himself.” Taleb goes further: he believes the worst about others in order to justify an imagined virtue. But in doing so, he resurrects the skeletons of colonial racial thought, while disguising them as resistance.
True liberation does not come through scapegoating. It demands solidarity, plurality, and a total rejection of racial logics — especially when they claim to be called emancipation.
