Fear of antisemitism in France and Belgium


This posting has 4 short items:
1) Foreign Policy: After Mocking Holocaust, French Comedian Gets 2 Months in Belgian Jail;
2) JTA: Family of Paris attacker: ‘We are not antisemitic’, we were at at a Dieudonné show at the time;
3) ShalomLife: Belgian Café Posts “No Jews Allowed” Sign;
4) JTA/Forward: Jews in Belgium and France Receive Antisemitic Threats;


The base of the Statue de la République is defaced with a swastika as a protest in support of Palestinians turns antisemitic, Paris, July 26, 2014. A demonstrator complained that the police “are on the side of the Jews who own all the stores in the area.” Vice news Photo by Etienne Laurent/EPA/Corbis.

After Mocking Holocaust, French Comedian Gets 2 Months in Belgian Jail

By Siobhán O’Grady, Foreign Policy
November 25, 2015

2012, French stand-up comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala climbed on stage in a Belgian comedy club, and in front of a crowd of more than 1,000 people, called Adolf Hitler a “sweet kid,” challenged the existence of gas chambers during the Holocaust, and said the Jewish Talmud is a “shit book.”

Surprise, surprise: Not everyone found it funny.

And now Dieudonné, who goes by his first name and has built his personal brand on provocation, is paying the price for his poorly planned jokes. On Wednesday, a Belgian court fined him roughly $9,500 and sentenced him to two months in prison for incitement to hatred over the 2012 comments, which they labelled as racist and antisemitic. Dieudonné did not appear in court and it was not immediately clear whether he planned to appeal the charges.

Wednesday’s verdict is just the latest in a string of run-ins with the law that amount to nothing short of a terrible year for the controversial comic, who counts among his claims to fame the creation of the “quenelle,” a salute considered by many to invert the Nazi gesture and be a symbol of anti-semitism.

In January, after gunmen stormed the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, killing 12, and another gunman killed four at a Kosher grocery store in Paris, Dieudonné was arrested for posting on social media that he “felt like Charlie Coulibaly.” The statement mocked the French “Je Suis Charlie” movement intending to show solidarity with the victims by adding in the last name of the gunman responsible for the massacre at the kosher grocery. Dieudonné was later found guilty of condoning terrorism, but escaped a lengthy prison sentence by paying a large fine.

There’s no question his January comment was intended to provoke, but even some of Dieudonné’s adversaries pointed out the irony that French authorities arrested him for his comment but hurried to the defence of Charlie Hebdo, also known for their political and religious instigation. France has in recent years been forced to walk an increasingly narrow line between freedom of speech, secularism, and prevention of hate crimes. According to data gathered by the Office for Democratic and Human Rights, which documents hate crimes around the world, there were 851 hate crimes motivated by antisemitism in France in 2014. That’s up from 450 the year before.

Earlier this month, Dieudonné lost an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which ruled that he was not protected by freedom of speech for bringing a known Holocaust denier, dressed in striped pyjamas with a yellow star that said “Jew,” on stage during an earlier performance in France. Dieudonné hoped to repeal a French court’s verdict that found him guilty of hate crimes in connection to that performance, which cost him more than $10,000 in fines.

Although he’s managed to gain a significant following in France, especially in the African and Maghrebi diasporas (he is half-Cameroonian), French spectators have complained for years that his relentless references to Judaism and the Holocaust amount to hate speech. And in 2013, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said he agreed with that assessment.

Controversial entertainer Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. Supporters say his attacks on the establishment make him popular with the poor and alienated; but as he sees ‘the establishment’ as dominated by Jews the charge of antisemitism remains unanswered.

 

 

Valls announced he would seek to legally ban Dieudonné, who maintains a large following, from performing publicly in France and called his performances a “public safety risk.” But he is not without allies in the political sphere. Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of France’s far-right National Front party, and father to its current president, Marine Le Pen, is reportedly one of his close friends. The older Le Pen once called the Holocaust a “mere detail of history.”

And the younger Le Pen hasn’t been without her own controversies, facing charges this fall for hate speech after she compared Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation. But she has also struggled to separate herself from her father’s legacy, and has taken a harder stance on the comic’s rhetoric against Jews. Although she called suggestions to ban his performances a sign of “totalitarian excess,” she admitted that comments he made publicly about a Jewish journalist and a gas chamber last year were “against the law.”



Family of Paris attacker: ‘We are not antisemitic’

Relatives of Bataclan theatre killer say their attendance at a Dieudonné show on night of attack does not mean they have issues with Jews

By JTA /Times of Israel
November 20, 2015,

The family of one of the Paris attackers said they are not antisemitic.

The mother and brother of Omar Ismaïl Mostefaï, one of the terrorists who shot up the Bataclan theatre, called his actions “inexcusable” and “monstrous” through tears on the widely watched French television channel Canal Plus on Wednesday night.

Mostefaï’s brother, whose face and name were not shown for security reasons, also said that on the night of the attacks, he and his wife attended a show by Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, the French comic who has multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred against Jews.

“We were at a Dieudonné show Friday night, but we are not antisemites,” Mostefaï’s brother said.

Mostefaï’s family had not heard from him in two to three years, his brother estimated.

Mostefaï, the son of an Algerian father and Portuguese mother, converted to Islam.

“He became a monster,” Mostefaï’s brother said. “He’s not my brother.”



The sign, hung on the Saint-Nicolas café in a French suburb just east of Liege July 2014. It states that dogs are permitted entry but not Zionists under any circumstances. It may be using Zionist as a euphemism for Jew, or may be using Zionist for aggressive Israeli land-control policy (it was hung up during the 2014 war on Gaza, and taken down on the mayor’s orders). Either way it was aggressively offensive (the link to dogs). The Belgian League Against Antisemitism has since filed a complaint against the parties responsible.

Belgian Café Posts “No Jews Allowed” Sign

By Peter Herriman & Daniel Koren, ShalomLife
July 23, 2014

All over the world, displays of antisemitism and hatred against Jews continue to segregate them from the community, from pro-Palestinians in France attempting to attack suburban synagogues, to a swastika being spray painted on a Thornhill, Ontario bus stop.

In Belgium, where just a few months ago in Brussels a gunman went on a shooting spree at a Jewish museum killing four, another illicit demonstration of hatred has taken place, as a café hung up a sign that read “No Jews Allowed.”

JTA reports that a Belgian watchdog, the Belgian League Against Antisemitism, or LBCA, has filed a complaint to the mayor after discovering the sign at the Saint-Nicolas café, located in a suburb just east of Liege, and to bring those parties responsible to justice.

The suspects reportedly hung a sign written in Turkish and French that reads “Dogs are allowed in this establishment but Jews are not under any circumstances.”



Members of the Union of French Jewish Students demonstrate in 2013 in Paris with a sign that reads, ‘Jews murdered, republic endangered.’ Photo courtesy of UEJF via JTA

Jews in Belgium and France Receive Antisemitic Threats

By JTA /Forward
May 29, 2015

A Jewish family from Belgium and a French university director received antisemitic threats, according to reports in French-language media.

The family from Rhode-Saint-Genese near Brussels received on Tuesday a letter with a swastika and the words “dirty Jews.” The mother, identified only as Anne in an article published by La Capitale, said she did not know who might have sent the letter.

One of the family’s children attends a Jewish school but the family describes itself as secular. The family filed a complaint with police and contacted Joel Rubinfeld, founder of the Belgian League Against Antisemitism.

The family received the letter two days after a commemoration held on the one-year anniversary of the murder of four people, allegedly by an Islamist who is on trial and is denying his involvement in the attack, at the Jewish Museum of Belgium.

The museum’s spokesperson, Chouna Lomponda, a Belgian woman of African descent, also received a threat on Tuesday on Facebook, she told La Capitale. “Stop showing and talking for Jews. It could be dangerous for you,” the text read.

Looming in the background is what many Jews here refer to simply as “Toulouse,” the 2012 slaying of three children and a rabbi by an Islamist at a Jewish school in the southeastern city. Many of France’s estimated 600,000 Jews, the third-largest Jewish community in the world, live in the shadow of the attack. From JTA, French emigration to Israel, December 2013

In France, the director of the Technical University Institution, or IUT, in Saint-Denis near Paris, who has received multiple death threats this year, is believed to have been targeted anew by unknown individuals who sent five of his colleagues text massages reading: “You too will fall. You work for Jews.”

In addition to the messages to the colleagues of Samuel Mayol, a star of David was painted on the door of an office of a teacher at the institution, the Le Figaro daily reported Thursday.

The National Bureau for Vigilance Against Antisemitism, or BNVCA, on Wednesday condemned the incident in a statement and praised France’s education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, for also condemning it and classifying it as anti-Semitic.

“The antisemitic climate at this university has been worsening for several years,” BNVCA founder Sammy Ghozlan wrote in a statement, which blamed “anti-Israel propaganda disseminated by student bodies that are supported by the French and foreign far-left groups.”

© Copyright JFJFP 2024