The comedian and professional anti-Semite Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala (left), who is currently performing at the Zénith Theatre in Paris, invited onto the stage to join him one Robert Faurisson, noted French Holocaust denier. This happened while Jean-Marie Le Pen was in the audience.
If this doesn't bring the Front National to an end, nothing will. I would almost venture to guess that Le Pen is doing this deliberately to sink his party so that no one, not even his daughter Marine, will ever take the reins of what he must consider his own private possession.
Such an event must be regarded in several different ways, simultaneously. First, Dieudonné derives intense pleasure from throwing the sh.. on the fan. He has learned that Jew-hatred is a thriving industry, that he attracts a public who calls him their hero, that he opens old wounds, and that, through the ruse of claiming he has been denied his right of freedom of speech, he wins support among people who are opposed to France's laws against Holocaust denial.
The trouble is: these laws are very much part of the problem. You cannot privilege one group by mandating that it is a crime punishable by fines and prison terms to deny the evil that was done to them.
Such laws are no different from affirmative action laws, and laws against all forms of discrimination such as those passed by the European Union. They create precisely the opposite of what they are supposed to do, i.e., they create hatred of the privileged party, they throw together into the same pot various social problems, ideas, and historical facts that should be kept separate and treated differently, because they are different. For example, anti-Semitism and hostility towards massive immigration not the same thing. They are not the same hostility. But the great equalizing machine that is Sarkozy's government must make ALL hostilities seem equally bad, because he is unable to make distinctions between them. To do so would be to admit that the huge population of people who are not white, Christian and European are not necessarily all equal. He must prove that they are, in fact, all equally, victims of the evil white Christian European.
Second, by having Le Pen in the audience, it is the ENTIRE patriotic movement, the entire effort to save France that is discredited. Le Pen is not discredited – he DOESN'T CARE!!! There is no need to concern ourselves with HIS image, but rather with the image and ultimate fate of the movement of which he claims to be a part, but of which he is not (and apparently never has been) anything but an impostor.
Third, this gives racist-hunters like Nicolas Sarkozy grist for their mill. Dedicated as he is to ridding French soil of all racism, he and his ministers will point to Dieudonné's provocation as a shameful, inadmissible, unacceptable, act of racism that has no place in France. This will serve his purpose very well and will furnish him with an infallible pretext for sending HALDE or MRAP or whatever anti-racist organizations he chooses to track down every measly Holocaust denier he can ferret out.
The media will have a field day pointing to the evils of the "extreme Right", due to Le Pen's presence, even though, according to the French blogger François Desouche anyway, Faurisson is a left-winger. (Note: The websites regard Faurisson as a right-winger. According to Wikipedia, he claims to be apolitical.)
The Jews of France will probably not understand the complexities of this situation, choosing to see only the anti-Semitism of the "extreme Right", blind to the insidious way their history is being manipulated and exploited for the purpose of intimidating, terrorizing, and mongrelizing the French people. Blind, too, to the dangers they will confront if they don't rethink their own instinctual reaction of identifying more closely with non-assimilable immigrants than with French patriots, of preferring to side with the Left or with Sarko's false Right than with authentic nationalists and traditionalists. This is a problem they have, but they are certainly not alone; and when one sees the ways in which the waters are muddied by celebrity policy-makers such as Dieudonné, and public opinion formed by relentless government propaganda, not to mention the inferior education being offered today, it is not surprising that things have reached this level of inextricability.
This incident itself hopefully will pass quickly into oblivion, its principal actors as well, but the processes described above will go on, until France gets a worthy leader, which will not be, as far as anyone can tell, in the near future.
François Desouche had to close comments for the post because of the legal considerations I alluded to. Some of his readers must have defended Dieudonné's right to express himself freely about the Holocaust. However to post such comments places Desouche in a vulnerable position where his website could be shut down for violating French laws. This is what I mean when I say these laws are not doing anybody, except the "thought police", any good.
The post includes a video of Dieudonné on stage. French readers may have an easier time than I did understanding it. There are various versions of the video all over the French blogosphere. This one is more audible and shows the arrival of Faurisson on the stage as Dieudonné energetically encourages the audience to applaud. An aura of weird ritual emanates from the entire scene as this old man justifies himself to an audience of primarily young people, most of whom (one assumes) have no idea who he is. It's all very creepy.