- A flare-up of racial tension has been sparked off in
France after a black stand-up comic, Dieudonne, was reported to have said
that the 60th anniversary commemorations of the Holocaust were "remembrance
pornography".
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- 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 Mosquee 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.
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- Police did not suggest that Dieudonne 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.
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- Dieudonne'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".
Dieudonne held a press conference in Paris at the weekend in which he attempted
to explain his views.
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- "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."
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- Despite his attempts to calm spirits, Dieudonne met with
widespread condemnation. The Socialist party's first secretary, Francois
Hollande, and a former anti-racism campaigner, Harlem Desir, described
the comedian as "the biggest anti-Semite in France" and called
for a boycott of his shows.
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- Last year, Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, 36, had several shows
cancelled - including at the 2,000-seater Olympia venue in Paris after
organisers said they could not guarantee the safety of the audience or
the performer. 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".
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- The sketch led to a court case and a Euro10,000 (£6,800)
fine. Dieudonne was cleared on appeal. The performer claimed he was of
mixed race and thus "knew no borders".
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- In 2002, the comic considered running for President of
France but another joke scuppered his chances of collecting the 500 signatures
needed. At the time he said: "I prefer Osama Bin Laden's charisma
to that of George W Bush."
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- ©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=613484
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