ORIGINAL FRENCH ARTICLE: L’outrage de Dieudonné à la déportation provoque l’indignation
by Jean-Paul Pierot
Translated Sunday 4 January 2009, by
The International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) calls for criminal prosecution. The Paris Communists call for City Hall to intervene.
Dieudonné’s negationist provocation last Friday evening at the Zenith in Paris no longer qualifies him as a humorist and continues to spark outrage among associations of former deportees, former Resistance members and the political Left. The desecration of their memory was perpetrated in front of some five thousand spectators.
Getting Faurisson, who was convicted for denying the extermination of Jews in the Hitler death camps, on stage, and attempting to ridicule the deportees by giving the negationist ex-university professor an "award" presented by a stage hand dressed in a deportee striped suit constitutes an outrage falling under the scope of the Gayssot Act, which penalizes the denial of the crimes of Nazism.
Strangely enough, Serge Klarsfeld, founder of the Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France association, while condemning "Dieudonné’s controlled slips" to win over an anti-Semitic public, doubts that there were negationist statements at the Zenith and thinks that no prosecution seems possible. This is not the opinion of LICRA president, Patrick Gaubert, who said that "the infraction of condoning negationism is constituted". LICRA therefore, formally requests that the prosecutor initiate legal action." The Paris Appellate Court has already confirmed on June 26, the comedian’s conviction for remarks made in 2005 when he compared the memory of the Holocaust to "memorial pornography." The Appellate Court had previously convicted him on November 15, 2007 for comparing "Jews" to "slave drivers" in 2004.
From Paris city hall, Bertrand Delanoë "deplores that Dieudonné is sinking ever further into hatred and anti-Semitic provocation. " "Arranging to have an award given to Robert Faurisson, who has been repeatedly condemned for his negationist writings, by a man dressed in the striped suit of deportees, is disgusting and despicable."
Ian Brossat, president of the communist group at the Paris city council, goes further and hopes that "the City Council will ask the owners of show rooms to be responsible," saying that "it is no longer entertainment but racist, negationist, antisemitic political meetings." "We do not want to view this sort of thing in Paris again," he said. The Communist deputy mayor denounces a "sordid mix." Dieudonné "is hiding behind his reputation as an artist to become the spokeperson for the extreme right, negationism and anti-semitism."