French government's relentless bullying of Dieudonne just makes him more popular

A month ago I'd not heard of Dieudonne or the "quenelle". It was the hysterical over-reaction of mainstream media to French-African footballer Nicolas Anelka's quenelle to celebrate a goal that brought both the quenelle and its inventor onto the world stage.

French President Francois Hollande and his inner circle suddenly saw an opportunity. Hollande the Crusader has been stymied in his attempt to "earn his spurs," as the great BHL has put it, in those troubled African colonies, and his already record-low standing in the polls continues to sink. The brain trust came up with a brilliant idea! If Hollande the Conqueror can't earn his spurs on the backs of those Africans in Mali and the CAR, perhaps he can earn them by crushing that uppity African who has been selling out shows all over France with his racially offensive comedy routine!

After all, virtually the entire Hollande cabinet has been on the butt end of Dieudonne's sarcasm at one time or another; time for their collective revenge. The entire legal apparatus of the state was unleashed in a desperate attempt to silence the vile black anti-semite. This unseemly effort is not unexpectedly being cheered on most loudly by the usual professional anti-semitism spotters who claim to speak for all Jewish people.

They don't of course, as this article in Jewlicious makes plain. I agree wholeheartedly with Gil Tanenbaum. If you don't agree with Dieudonne, change the channel or speak out, but don't harness the machinery of the state in the service of stifling free speech, no matter how offensive.

Thanks to Hollande's misguided vote-pandering, Dieudonne now has a bigger international profile than he could ever have imagined.

And Hollande is still chasing those spurs...

Quenelle fever

Must say the "quenelle" controversy was below my radar till about a week ago.

Strikes me as a too-subtle version of a rude gesture widely interpreted as meaning "up yours" or "fuck you" when I was coming up. Popularized mostly by my Italian friends, if I remember correctly. Usually accompanied by a "fungula" or a "batcha mi coula."

Aye, but there's controversy a-plenty. No less an authority than the professional antisemitism spotters at the Simon Wiesenthal Center have declared the gesture "Nazi-like". (See # 10 in the top-ten antisemitic trends of 2013)

Diane Johnstone has an excellent rebuttal on view at Counterpunch.

I suspect the Hollande gang may have plenty of other beefs with Dieudonne than his alleged antisemitism. I further suspect that Dieudonne might have more first-person experience with racism in contemporary France than most of his critics.

Strikes me as a bit of a distraction, a make-work project for fear-mongers. There's more than enough racism in the world without resorting to making shit up.