Court overturns ban on French comic Dieudonné
A French court has overturned a ban on a show by controversial comic Dieudonné M'bala M'bala due to be performed on Thursday night. | The show in the city of Nantes will open Dieudonne's tour. He has seven convictions for [so-called] "anti-Semitic hate speech" and was recently recorded making anti-Semitic remarks about a Jewish journalist. Interior Minister Manuel Valls has said he will appeal to the Council of State, France's highest administrative court.
Diana Johnstone: The Bête Noire of the French Establishment ■ 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. To invent a pretext for destroying Dieudonné, the leading Jewish organizations CRIF and LICRA, (which enjoys special privileges under French law) have come up with a fantasy to brand Dieudonné and his followers as “Nazis”. The quenelle is all too obviously a vulgar gesture roughly meaning “up yours”, with one hand placed at the top of the other arm pointing down to signify “how far up” this is to be. But for the CRIF and LICRA, the quenelle is “a Nazi salute in reverse”. (You can never be too “vigilant” when looking for the hidden Hitler.)
Gilad Atzmon on Dieudonné and the Quenelle
Dieudonné threatens to sue over French ban for antisemitism