President backs ban on ‘anti-Semitic’ comedian
Print Edition
French President Francois Hollande yesterday backed attempts to ban controversial comic Dieudonne as a furore intensified over routines that have been widely condemned as anti-Semitic.
Weighing into a debate that has gripped France, Hollande urged local officials to take a hard line in applying an interior ministry circular which authorizes city mayors or police prefects to cancel Dieudonne performances on public order grounds.
“The government has issued instructions to ensure that no one can use a performance for the goals of provocation and the promotion of overtly anti-Semitic theories,” Hollande said in a New Year address to civil servants.
The Socialist leader said local officials had to be “vigilant and inflexible” in their response to what he described as “shameful provocation” without specifically mentioning Dieudonne.
Mayors of several French cities lined up yesterday to ban the shows of the comedian the government accuses of insulting the memory of Holocaust victims and threatening public order with anti-Semitic jibes.
Local authorities in Nantes barred the opening date in Dieudonne M’bala M’bala’s tour set for Thursday, hours after similar shows were banned by mayors in Marseille, Bordeaux and Tours.
The row is the latest upset to ties between France’s large Muslim and Jewish communities. It won international attention last week after former France striker Nicolas Anelka celebrated an English Premier League goal with a salute popularized by Dieudonne which critics say has an anti-Semitic connotation.
Lawyers for Dieudonne, who has been fined repeatedly for hate speech, said they would take legal action to defend him. They accused the Socialist government of using the issue to rally voters ahead of municipal and European elections in coming months where widespread anger at unemployment is seen fuelling a strong vote for the far-right National Front.
Its leader, Marine Le Pen, has striven to distance the party from its earlier anti-Semitic leanings. She told Le Figaro newspaper she was “shocked” by Dieudonne but criticized the government for exaggerating the importance of the affair.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls pushed to ban his shows after Jewish groups complained about his trademark straight-arm gesture, which they call a “Nazi salute in reverse” and link to a growing frequency of anti-Semitic remarks and acts in France.
In the worst recent anti-Semitic incident, a French Islamist killed a rabbi and three pupils at a Jewish school last year in the southwestern French city of Toulouse.
Dieudonne, 46, Paris-born son of a Cameroonian father and French mother, says the gestures is a statement of his anti-Zionist and anti-establishment views, not anti-Semitism.
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