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French Comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala Stands Trial Over Anti-Semitic Comments

Source: JPupdates.com | Friday, 30 January 2015 | Click here for original article

Extreme situations test society. After the horrifying events in Paris, Europe has woken up to the threat of racism and anti-Semitism, and their dire consequences. The reaction must be weighed against essential freedoms. A French comedian called M’bala M’bala is making a career out of spewing anti-Semitism and hate speech, and testing the limits of those freedoms in the French courts.

M’bala M’bala was in court yesterday, being tried for saying that it was a pity that a prominent Jewish journalist did not die in “the gas chambers”. He stands accused of inciting racial hatred. The charges date back to 2013 when he was filmed by a hidden camera. The film was broadcast on France 2, including his comment about the journalist, Patrick Cohen. The comment helped prompt a police investigation and a government ban of his show. France has stringent laws restricting racist speech. A verdict of guilty could bring with it a sentence of one year in prison and a fine of 45,000 Euros, or about $51,000. He has been charged at least 38 times with crimes of hate-speech before this. He has successfully used the internet and social media to continue, without facing criminal charges and coping with bans on his performances. It is disturbing to note that he has a large following.

In a bizarre twist of logic, he uses the recent Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris to strengthen his case, saying that it is legal to insult Muslims but not Jews. He was arrested because of another twisted piece of logic. In a macabre reference to the “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), a social reaction to the Charlie Hebdo killing in which the public expressed solidarity with the victims of terror, M’bala tweeted, ” Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly,” a reference to the slogan (Je suis Charlie). Charlie Coulibaly was the terrorist who murdered 4 Jews at the Hyper Kosher in Paris. He was arrested on charges of condoning terrorism.

Know Your Enemy

Dieudonné M’bala M’bala (born 11 February 1966), generally known by his stage name Dieudonné is a French comedian, actor, and political activist. In a strange turnaround, Dieudonné initially achieved success with a Jewish comedian,Elie Semoun, humorously exploiting racial stereotypes. He campaigned against racism and was a candidate in the 1997 and 2001 legislative elections in Dreux against the National Front, the French far-right political party that he perceived as racist. He said about that period in his career, “Onstage, I used to forget that I was the Jew and he the black guy,” Mr. Semoun said in an interview. “We were profoundly anti-racist. We were the symbol of anti-racism.”

On 1 December 2003, Dieudonné performed a sketch on a TV show about an Israeli Settler whom he depicted as a Nazi. Some critics argued that he had “crossed the limits ofanti-Semitism” and several organizations sued him for incitement to racial hatred. Dieudonné refused to apologize and denounced Zionism and the Jewish Lobby. Dieudonné approached Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front political party that he had fought earlier, and the men became political allies and friends. Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson appeared in one of his shows in 2008. Dieudonné described Holocaust remembrance as “memorial pornography”. He was convicted in court eight times on anti-Semitism charges that year. Dieudonné subsequently found himself with increasing frequency banned from mainstream media, and many of his shows were cancelled by local authorities. Active on the internet and in his Paris theater, Dieudonné has continued to have a following. His recent appearances and videos are often rants in which the “Jewish lobby” and “Israel lobby” are characterized as controlling things.

His quenelle signature gesture became notoriously famous. French youth use a slang in which words are reversed (i.e. ‘cop’ becomes ‘poc’). The quenelle involves holding the arm straight, at a downward angle and touching the other arm to the elbow. It is an “opposite” Nazi salute, meant to mean the same thing as the Nazi salute itself. Its dubious nature and ambiguous meaning have befuddled French courts and they have yet to treat it on the same level as the original Nazi Salute.

After Dieudonné was recorded during a performance mocking a Jewish journalist, suggesting it was a pity that he was not sent to the gas chambers, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls stated that Dieudonné was “no longer a comedian” but was rather an “anti-Semite and racist” and that he would seek to ban all Dieudonné’s public gatherings as a public safety risk. The ban on his shows has been upheld by French courts.

In 2012, Dieudonné made his directorial debut in a film called L’Antisémite (The Anti-Semite), in which he starred as a violent and alcoholic character who dresses as a Nazi officer at a party, and also features the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, as well as imagery that mocks Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners. The movie was deemed dreadful in an article in Le Nouvel Observateur, and the executive director of the film market in Cannes, Jérôme Paillard, said the screening was cancelled because “we ban the presence of any movie which affects public order and religious convictio

For a time his theater, La Main d’Or, hosted a bar called the Hezbollah Club, and served as the unofficial headquarters of a group close to the far right called Égalité et Réconciliation.

In a very telling manner, he is strongly and actively anti-Israel, and he does have a failry prominent political presence.

In the nature of fairness, I would like to present a bit of his side of the argument, as painful as it is for me to do so.

He argues that he is playing a vital role in a complacent and racist French society. “I’ve been able to laugh at everything except Jews,” he said in an interview this month. “I realized that it was forbidden to laugh about them. I am the king’s jester, and the jester is the one who puts his finger on certain truths that the court doesn’t want to hear.”

He claims that his humor is imbued with a disenchantment of a society that lies and “protects its own interests.”

He decries what he calls the “domination of Zionists” in Western societies and the overemphasis on the horrors of the Holocaust to the exclusion of other crimes, like slavery and racism. “Our submission to the Shoah has come to such degree that it became a new religion,” Dieudonné said in the interview. Compared with other suffering, like slavery, “it is not unprecedented on a human scale,” he said.

That was as much open-mindedness as I could bear. Now it is up to you to decide if he is a hateful racist, or if he made a valid claim.