RIGHTS-FRANCE: Anti-Semitic Comedy No Laughing Matter

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Mar 3 2004 (IPS) - French stand-up comedian Dieudonné makes nobody laugh any more.

Not since his television show Dec. 2 in which he played an extremist Rabi. Dieudonné appeared in military uniform and exhorted French youth from poor suburban centres “to join the American-Zionist axis.”

At the end of the show he raised an arm to form the Nazi salute, and seemed to speak the word ‘Israel’.

Many French Jews insist he said “Israel-Heil”. That could be true; in French ‘Israel’ and ‘heil’ rhyme closely. Dieudonné denies he said that.

In the face of strong criticism, Dieudonné apologised to “victims of the Holocaust who might have resented my sketch.”

The show seen widely as an anti-Semitic outburst has renewed controversies that many thought had been put to rest. But concern over Jewish rights is complicated by others over an artist’s rights to free expression.

Dieudonné, who is known only by that single name, is facing censorship of a kind unparalleled in modern French cultural life. Jewish demonstrators attacked a theatre last month in the city of Lyon where Dieudonné was performing. The demonstrators threw acid and tear gas in the packed theatre. Several were injured in the scramble to leave.

Later last month anonymous letters were sent to the Olympia theatre in Paris, threatening to attack the playhouse if it did not cancel a scheduled Dieudonné show. The show was cancelled after the theatre management said it could not guarantee safety for the public.

About a dozen theatres all over France, and one in Geneva have cancelled Dieudonné’s shows. Several television and radio networks have ordered Dieudonné off the air.

These orders are not official. But they were confirmed by Laurent Ruquier, anchorperson for a talk show on the public television network France 2. “The management has advised us not to invite him,” Ruquier told IPS.

The effective censorship of Dieudonné is dividing French intellectuals.. Several human rights groups are condemning censorship on principle. Some Jewish intellectuals say it is unfortunate that the protests have turned Dieudonné into a victim and the symbol of a fight against censorship.

“I wish I could ignore Dieudonné,” Alain Finkielkraut, a Jewish professor of philosophy and strong defender of Israel’s policies told a radio show. Finkielkraut said Dieudonné had shown himself to be anti-Semitist, but to say this “is no longer possible now that he presents himself as a hero of civil rights.”

Other French Jews are defending Dieudonné’s right to perform freely. The campaign amounts to “censorship and public lynching”, says Roger Salamon, professor at the medical faculty of the University of Bordeaux.

“Dieudonné’s only mistake is to have dared to criticise publicly the deleterious policy of the Israeli government,” Salamon wrote in a letter to the newspaper Liberation. “All the hypocrites who cry anti-Semitism every time that one criticises Israeli policiesàfeed the impression that Jews really build a mighty, blind, irrational pressure group.”

Dieudonné is not the only French artist facing accusations of anti-Semitism.

French-Israeli documentary filmmaker Eyal Sivan is involved in a controversy over a documentary that says Israel has repeatedly violated United Nations resolutions since it was founded as a state in 1948.

The film titled ‘Route 181, fragments of a voyage in Palestine and Israel’ was shown on the French-German television channel Arte last November. The title refers to UN resolution 181 of 1947 which supported the separation of Palestine into two states along a border that the film says Israel never respected.

In his radio talk show, Prof Alain Finkielkraut called the film “a lie, a call to kill all Jews.” He accused Sivan of being “one of the players in the anti-Semitism we’re suffering right now.”

French Jewish intellectual and filmmaker Arnauld Desplechin accused Arte of giving Sivan a platform for “such a contestable ideological message.”

Sivan has received death threats. An anonymous letter came in with a bullet and a brief message saying, “The next bullet will not come in the post.”

Sivan told IPS that the “self-proclaimed friends of Israel try to intimidate all political adversaries by accusing them of being Nazis, to avoid all evocation of the criminal Israeli policy towards the Palestine population.”

He said that such “verbal violence, harassment and blackmailing with accusations of anti-Semitism mirrors Israel’s policy, which considers itself beyond all international principles and laws.”

Sivan has filed libel charges against Finkielkraut and others who have attacked his work. “I hope that French justice, while dealing with my complaint, will remind all these people of the limits of a democratic debate, and put an end to this strategy of intimidation.”

The current controversy over anti-Semitism and censorship has also hit Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of Christ’, which has been condemned by Jewish organisations all around the world as renewing anti-Semitic myths. It appeared for several weeks that the film would not be shown in France. But a distribution company bought rights earlier this week.