PARIS: France moved yesterday to try and ban performances by controversial comic Dieudonne just days before the start of a nationwide tour of a one-man show containing anti-semitic material.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls said he had advised local police officials that Dieudonne’s shows could be banned if they are deemed to present a threat to public order. “With the tour about to begin, I believe I had no choice but to take action,” Valls told reporters.
The comedian has prompted outrage with his anti-Jewish comments — one of his latest being a joke about gas chambers — and anti-racism protests have been planned around his upcoming shows.
Amid the outcry, government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said there would clearly be a threat to public order around the first leg of the planned tour, due to start on Thursday in the western city of Nantes.
Officials in a number of other cities are looking at ways of preventing Dieudonne from performing in their theatres.
But such steps are complicated legally in light of France’s powerful constitutional provisions on the freedom of speech.
Long a controversial figure, Dieudonne’s prominence has increased recently as a result of the growing popularity of his trademark arm gesture, dubbed the “quenelle”.
Many see the gesture as a reference to the Nazis’ Hitler salute, but the comedian’s supporters say it is a generic “up yours” show of defiance towards the establishment.
Dieudonne fans have spread photographs of themselves performing the quenelle gesture online.
Some of these appear to be pranks, such as when a smiling Valls posed for a picture with a group of teenage boys who all adopted the pose without the minister noticing.
But many of them have had sinister overtones with the pictures being taken outside synagogues, a holocaust museum and the school in Toulouse where Islamist gunman Mohammed Merah killed a rabbi and three Jewish children in 2012.
AFP
