France’s Crackpot Comedian
At FrontPage, Steven Plaut looks at the ugly career of antisemitic French comedian Dieudonné: France’s Crackpot Comedian.
It has been reported that Dieudonn� described the Holocaust as a “memorial pornography.” In his standup sketches, Dieudonn� does an impression of Bernard-Henri L�vy, the Jewish-French philosopher, haggling with a street potato seller. Dieudonn�-as-L�vy says: “How can you ask me to pay so much when 6 million of us died in the Holocaust?”
Dieudonn� also insists that Jews were behind the slave trade that brought Africans in chains to the Western Hemisphere. He also says Jews played a “central role” in the 15th-century slave trade. (In fact, they did, but as slaves; in the 15th century, virutally all European slaves were from Europe.)
And Dieudonn� does not limit himself to verbal attacks on Jews. This April, for instance, he was walking down a Parisian avenue with his two kids when two Jewish passersby, one aged 19 and the other 25, recognized Dieudonn� and walked up to him to express their dislike of some of his more openly anti-Jewish remarks. They told him that they believed that his bigotry lay behind the recent torture and murder of a Jewish teenager in Paris, Ilan Halimi.
Dieudonn� did not take their criticism well. After walking his two kids home, he took out a tear gas canister and went back out to the boulevard, searched out his two Jewish critics, and sprayed them with the tear gas. It was obviously a pre-meditated assault; the victims reported the attack to the gendarmerie and Dieudonn� was arrested. But his publicist told the French media that Dieudonn� had himself been attacked by “two right-wing Zionists from the Extremist Right,” adding that their verbal “attack on him” proved how “extremist Jews and Zionists are.”
UPDATE at 5/3/06 2:05:20 pm:
Previous LGF posts about Dieudonné: lgf: search.