Diana Johnstone

The Move to Muzzle Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala

French mainstream media and politicians are starting off the New Year with a shared resolution for 2014: permanently muzzle a Franco-African comedian who is getting to be too popular among young people.

In between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, no less than the President of the Republic, François Hollande, while visiting Saudi Arabia on (very big) business, said his government must find a way to ban performances by the comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, as called for by French Interior Minister, Manuel Valls.

The leader of the conservative opposition party, UMP, Jean-François Copé, immediately chimed in with his “total support” for silencing the unmanageable entertainer.

In the unanimous media chorus, the weekly Nouvel Observateur editorialized that Dieudonné is “already dead”, washed up, finished. Editors publicly disputed whether it was a better tactic to try to jail him for “incitement to racial hatred”, close his shows on grounds of a potential “threat to public order”, or put pressure on municipalities by threatening cultural subsidies with cuts if they allow him to perform.

The goal of national police boss Manuel Valls is clear, but the powers that be are groping for the method. The dismissive cliché heard repeatedly is that “nobody laughs at Dieudonné any more”.

In reality, the opposite is true. And that is the problem. On his recent tour of French cities, videos show large, packed theaters roaring with laughter at their favorite humorist. He has popularized a simple gesture, which he calls the “quenelle”. It is being imitated by young people all over France. It simply and obviously means, we are fed up.

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Mike Gurstein

As the avalanche of Snowden revelations resumes after it’s brief organizational regrouping and holiday hiatus a few learnings and even more direct and pertinent questions are starting to emerge.

Evgeny Morozov in an otherwise interesting piece in the Financial Times is surely incorrect in his bald statement that “Snowden now faces a growing wave of surveillance fatigue among the public”. The emotion isn’t “surveillance fatigue” but rather shell shock at the revelations as they keep coming, in wave after uncomfortable wave. The first reaction of course was shock (and awe), the second was a feeling of anger and rising resistance. But as the revelations have kept coming, each one more disturbing than the last; but now shifting from pointing to quantity of surveillance (everything, everyone, everywhere, forever), to quality (from metadata to communications content to networking to instantaneous full-spectrum profiling); the emotion is now–what on earth can we do–this is impossible, democracy or even any form of popular sovereignty is at immediate risk, but what on earth can we do?

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Gilad Atzmon

In a uniquely dishonest piece, The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland paid a tribute today to Israel’s veteran PM Ariel Sharon.

According to Freedland, Sharon, “as one of Israel's founders… had the credibility to give up occupied territory – and even to face the demons of 1948”. Freedland speculates also that “Sharon's final mission might well have been peace.” This is indeed a big statement, but how does Freedland support his creative historical account?

“Sharon's final act” says Freedland, “was to dismantle some of the very settlements he had sponsored. In 2005 he ordered Israel's disengagement from Gaza, seized in the 1967 war in which Sharon had been a crucial, if maverick, commander.”

Let alone the fact that Freedland comes short of reminding his readers about Sharon’s colossal war crimes, he actually completely distorts the political narrative that led Sharon to the 2005 unilateral disengagement.

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