A French “comedian” is sinking to the lowest depths for his “humor,” doing an act containing seemingly anti-semitic statements.
OOPS! I’m one of them so you’d expect that of me. Well, then, why don’t YOU judge for YOURSELF?
A flare-up of racial tension has been sparked off in France after a black stand-up comic, Dieudonné, was reported to have said that the 60th anniversary commemorations of the Holocaust were “remembrance pornography”.
Amid wide reporting of the comment by the half-French, half-Cameroonian performer, vandals attacked prominent Muslim and Jewish sites. Swastikas were daubed both on the walls of the Grande Mosquée in Paris and a Second World War railway carriage that stands as a Jewish memorial at a deportation assembly point in the suburb of Drancy.
Concidences, of course. Also, consider the context: France has been a hotbed of anti-semitic activity for some time now. Dieudonné’s bilefest won’t help defuse it. MORE:
Police did not suggest that Dieudonné had sparked the attacks but it became clear that his comment was in line with the position of a new internet petition calling for the crimes of colonialism to be recognised and suggesting that Zionists had inspired the French state ban on Muslim headscarves.
Dieudonné’s comment was made at a press conference in the Algerian capital, Algiers, last week and picked up by a website covering Middle Eastern affairs as “offensive to the memory of the Holocaust”. Dieudonné held a press conference in Paris at the weekend in which he attempted to explain his views.
“I criticised the hype of Holocaust commemoration,” he told the press conference. However, he stopped far short of his comments in Algeria last week: “The Zionists have a kind of impunity. For them, if a child at school is called a dirty Jew, they are up in arms. To me, Zionism is the Aids of Judaism. For people like me, it is different. We feel the Zionist lobby has claimed a monopoly of suffering.”
Well, not to be a harsh critic, but you sound like the hemmroids of standup-comedy. We digress:
Despite his attempts to calm spirits, Dieudonné met with widespread condemnation. The Socialist party’s first secretary, François Hollande, and a former anti-racism campaigner, Harlem Désir, described the comedian as “the biggest anti-Semite in France” and called for a boycott of his shows.
Oh, but that’s probably overstatement. Is it? Last year the 36-year-old comic had several shows cancelled because they couldn’t guarentee his safety:
At the time, he had attracted criticism for a television sketch in which, dressed in military fatigues and wearing a wide-brimmed hat associated with Orthodox Jews, he said: “I urge all of you [viewers] to convert like me [to Judaism]. Join the axis of Good, the American-Zionist axis.” He ended his sketch with a Nazi salute and the cry “Isra-Heil”.
He also said:”I prefer Osama Bin Laden’s charisma to that of George W Bush.”
Are you laughing yet?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.