At FrontPage, Steven Plaut looks at the ugly career of antisemitic French comedian Dieudonné: France’s Crackpot Comedian.

It has been reported that Dieudonné described the Holocaust as a “memorial pornography.” In his standup sketches, Dieudonné does an impression of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Jewish-French philosopher, haggling with a street potato seller. Dieudonné-as-Lévy says: “How can you ask me to pay so much when 6 million of us died in the Holocaust?”

Dieudonné 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 Dieudonné 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 Dieudonné 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.

Dieudonné 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 Dieudonné was arrested. But his publicist told the French media that Dieudonné 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.