The French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala has caused controversy in France over the alleged anti-Semitism of his performances. Paul A. Silverstein writes on the wider issues related to anti-Semitism in French society, and why Dieudonné has proved so controversial. He argues that while Dieudonné’s supporters deny the accusations of anti-Semitism, they feed into a broader social and institutional context that can make Jewish citizens feel targeted. There is also a danger that in attacking Dieudonné, the French establishment risks demonising other French minority groups who make up many of his supporters

Silverstein, Paul A.

LSE Research Online

Dieudonné graffiti, Credit: Jack Rabbit Slim’s (CC-BY-SA-3.0)27/02/2014The response to the Dieudonné affair in France risksdemonising French minority groups in the name oftoleranceblogs.lse.ac.uk /europpblog/2014/02/27/the-response-to-the-dieudonne-affair-in-france-risks-demonising-french-minority-groups-in-the-name-of-tolerance/The French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala has caused controversy in France over the alleged anti-Semitism of his performances. Paul A. Silverstein writes on the wider issues related to anti-Semitism in French society, and why Dieudonné has proved so controversial. He argues that whileDieudonné’s supporters deny the accusations of anti-Semitism, they feed into a broader social andinstitutional context that can make Jewish citizens feel targeted. There is also a danger that inattacking Dieudonné, the French establishment risks demonising other French minority groups whomake up many of his supporters.On December 28, 2013, upon scoring his first goal for his new football club West Bromwich Albion,the veteran French striker Nicolas Anelka ran across the field with his right arm extended by his side and his lefthand touching his shoulder. Completely unremarkable by the flamboyant standards of goal celebrations inprofessional football, the gesture touched a raw nerve in France where the match was being televised live, withviewers immediately identifying it with the quenelle developed by controversial shock comic Dieudonné M’BalaM’Bala, who has repeatedly been accused (and on several occasions found guilty) of propagating racial hatred,particularly against Jews.For over the last decade, a moral panic has arisen inFrance over the rise of a “new anti-Semitism” feared topropagate among the under-employed multi-racial youthprecariat inhabiting council estates (les cités) along theFrench urban periphery where many of Dieudonné’smost ardent fans reside. The “new anti-Semitism” is alsoseen as being underwritten by far left anti-globalisationplatforms that are highly critical of American imperialismand decidedly sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle.Outside of his comic performances, Dieudonné hasbeen directly engaged in these latter causes, runningpolitical campaigns on first an anti-racist, then an anti-globalisation, and most recently an anti-Zionist platform.This has led to him ultimately collaborating with far rightactivists like Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen,Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, and polemicist AlainSoral — associations that have led a number ofDieudonné’s former political allies on the far left, andeven his former performance partner, the Jewish comedian Élie Semoun, to definitively break with him. Given such atrajectory, Dieudonné, like the quenelle itself, has had a polarising effect on an already tense French public debateover free speech and the limits of toleration.Anti-Semitism in FranceThe question of an evolving anti-Semitism in France has received increased attention over the past decade by1/5scholars, activists, human rights organisations, politicians, and the popular press. If the vast majority of thosesurveyed in opinion polls disavow any hatred of Jews, the Interior Ministry has reported periodic spikes of up tonearly 1,000 yearly threats or acts of anti-Semitic violence against persons and property across the last decade,generally followed by equally precipitous dips.To a certain extent, these statistics reflect new reporting guidelines that came into effect during this period, as wellas new laws increasing the criminal sanctions for those found guilty. Likewise, they parallel an even morepronounced and consistent increase in anti-Islamic attitudes and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim acts affectingmarginalised groups that do not benefit from the same juridical oversight and protections.Nonetheless, a number of high-profile cases — including the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Jewish cell phonesalesman Ilan Halimi by a multi-ethnic group of youths from the Paris cités led by Youssouf Fofana, and the 2012attack on a Toulouse Jewish day school by Mohamed Merah – have fostered for many French Jews a sense ofbeing embattled, have spurred waves of new emigration to Israel, and have even encouraged occasional vigilantereprisals by extremist Zionist groups like the Ligue de Défense Juive (Jewish Defense League).While scholars have pointed to the fragmented nature of anti-Semitism and the heterogeneity of perpetrators –including a still-active neo-Nazi movement – media pundits have linked it directly to the multi-racial, impoverishedurban periphery described by educator Emmanuel Brenner as “the lost territories of the Republic” and byphilosopher Alain Finkielkraut as “savage lands” ( lieux féroces), where an “ethnicization of social relations” (in thewords of sociologist Michel Wieviorka) coexists with anti-American and anti-Israel political commitments, particularlyamong young-Muslim French citizens with leftist leanings.Increasingly, as feminist philosopher Wendy Brown has maintained, anti-Semitism, alongside homophobic andpatriarchal ideologies, are taken to be unacceptable cultural attitudes which delegitimise foreigner (and especiallyMuslim) belonging in liberal polities. Such abject practices define the limits of Republican toleration, as policedthrough integration contracts for new immigrants, the ban on public veiling, and the criminalisation of Holocaustdenial.There is of course something deeply ironic about ideologically linking the fate of the French Republic to theelimination of anti-Semitism. As historian Esther Benbassa has underlined, Jewish citizenship in France came at theprice of disavowing religious community institutions and embarking on a fraught path of cultural and socialassimilation. The Dreyfus Affair  and the Vichy government’s complicity in the Holocaust only underlined theuncertainty of this incorporation and the tenuousness of French Jewish citizenship more generally.Given this history, many French Jews have aspirationally tethered their cultural belonging to a post-RevolutionaryRepublican ideology of civility, solidarity, and state secularism (laïcité). Jews, as a group, make a double ethicalclaim on France, both as moral censors to whom an unpayable debt is owed, and as potential victims of ongoingglobal hatred deserving of special protections. As Wendy Brown argues, “Jews emerge as the ultimate championsand foot-soldiers of tolerance by virtue of their need for it.”Hence contemporary anxieties around what some Jewish groups perceive to be the banalisation of the Shoah inpublic discourse, or around the global left’s instrumentalisation of Palestinians as the poster-child victims of Israeli-cum-imperialist aggression – both of which Jewish watchdog organisations decry as ultimately anti-Semitic. Jewishsuffering continues to be articulated as unique and incommensurable even as most French Jews presentthemselves as undifferentiated citizens of, and even spokespeople for, the Republic.The Dieudonné effectDieudonné’s linked comedic and political engagements play precisely on such ambivalences of belonging, traumasof toleration, and narcissisms of victimhood. In his long-term efforts to raise public awareness about France’s pastparticipation in the African slave trade and its contribution to contemporary white privilege, Dieudonné condemns2/5Dieudonné, Credit: Axis for Peace (CC-BY-SA-3.0)what he takes to be a double standard in the recognition and indemnification of past suffering, as well as thehypocrisy in the French state’s vigilance against anti-Semitism while allowing other forms of institutionalised racismto propagate.Moreover, he directly links Jewish privilege to black suffering, both in terms of his claims about the historical role ofJewish financiers in the slave economy, and with regards to what he decries as the contemporary racism of the“Jewish lobby” (iconised by one of his Jewish characters parodying a Nazi salute and shouting “Isra-heil!”). In theabsence of such state protections for other French minority groups, Dieudonné presents himself as what Wieviorkaterms a “moral entrepreneur,” calling forth popular resistance to the “békés and bankers” who he claims control thepolitical and economic “system.”In his comedy sketches, Dieudonné draws on the French comic legacy of Pierre Desproges and Coluche (andindeed the Americans Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor) who sparked controversy through their rejection ofrespectable discourse to call out ethnic and racial prejudices. Dieudonné arguably takes this strategy a step further,courting controversy with his public calls for the liberation of Youssouf Fofana or by sharing the stage withunapologetic Holocaust deniers, and then incorporating the resulting accusations of anti-Semitism directly into hissketches as a meta-critique of French hypocrisies of tolerance.By presenting the accusations as a selective regulation of free speech, he implicitly questions the privilege of thosewho determine the bounds of liberal toleration. Journalist Sylvain Cypel recently likened the quenelle to therepressed Nazi salute performed by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film Dr. Strangelove, and one mightindeed interpret Dieudonné’s gesture as a commentary on repression and mandatory self-regulation. Dieudonnéand most of his fans vehemently deny that the quenelle has anything whatsoever to do with a Nazi salute, but likehis comedic performances, the quenelle precisely plays on the slipperiness of meaning, the polysemy of signs, andthe ambiguous relations between verbal, facial, and gestural expression.Therein arguably lies the brilliance of Dieudonné’scomedy, where lines between performer and characterare multi-layered and blurred, and where the racialisedirreverence dares the spectator to take seriously thatwhich is presented in the frame of satire. Who are thereal racists, it seems to ask us: those who play withpopular stereotypes or those who can only see race andracism in the play?The uncomfortable frisson of having one’s liberal moralcommitments laid bare clearly drives part of the massappeal of Dieudonné’s performance art, as does theblatant populism of the comedian speaking directly tothose who feel “taken up the arse” by the political andeconomic establishment — a sentiment that thequenelle (translated colloquially as a “suppository”)graphically illustrates. For a comedian who has utterlypolarised the French public sphere, inciting either condemnations or defenses with little room (as Swiss-Muslimintellectual Tariq Ramadan has bemoaned) for nuanced critique, Dieudonné’s shows, gatherings, and onlineperformances gather together an incredibly heterogeneous audience from across the French racial, ethnic, class,and ideological spectrum – a veritable counter-public that arguably better represents contemporary, quotidianFrance than the public intellectuals who participate in television talk shows and parliamentary debates.While the Muslim-French cité residents, neo-Nazi punks, and even French soldiers who have all posted onlinequenelle performances may not agree on much, they share a general belief in the existence of a hopelessly sclerotic“system” in which they see little personal future, and thus find in Dieudonné’s comedy, and even his satirical3/5electoral campaigns, a welcome attempt to figuratively upend it. That such postcolonial populism, as anthropologistJean-Loup Amselle and other commentators have bemoaned, seems to instrumentalise anti-Semitic prejudice as arallying point is surely deplorable. It is also highly doubtful that the counter-public called forth by Dieudonné’s multi-media act equally upholds the broader anti-racist ethical critique the comedian avows to profess.Dieudonné and his fans may repeatedly insist that they are not “anti-Semites”, and that they do not harbour anyparticular hatred for Jews, but in doing so they misrecognise anti-Semitism as an individual mental state rather thanas a set of social effects, historical practices, and institutional forms that give it an undeniable reality even for thosewho in other regards benefit from relative political and economic privilege. Satire may provide plausible deniabilityfor those within its arena, but it does not eliminate the sting for those who understandably feel targeted by it.Lamentable as well is the instrumentalisation of the Dieudonné affair by the French political establishment who haveonce again sought to displace the burden of public civility on French minorities. In the wake of the Anelka quenellecelebration and responding to a public outcry particularly from French-Jewish advocacy groups, French InteriorMinister and presidential hopeful Manuel Valls moved to legally block Dieudonné from staging his show, Le Mur [TheWall], as a risk to “public order” and in which the representation of Jewish characters was adjudged by the Frenchhigh court to challenge “human dignity.”The appeal to humanitarian principles struck many as particularly ironic coming from a public figure who had gainednotoriety and bipartisan political capital for his support for immigration quotas, calling for the deportation of Roma,and being caught on tape deploring the lack of white residents in suburban Evry. The demonisation of Anelka andother French sporting figures — including fellow Muslim-French footballers Samir Nasri and Mamadou Sakho —who have posed with Dieudonné performing quenelles reiterates a long-standing demand that celebrities fromminority groups serve as representatives of multicultural quiescence.Much like the public debate following Zinedine Zidane’s infamous 2006 head-butt, the quenelle affair risks bolsteringan increasingly popular view that the French Republic is under threat from internal incivility, from an increasinglyfragmented population that refuses to sign an already-written contract of liberal toleration. And that is probably thelast lesson one might hope would be drawn from the comedian’s efforts, problematic as they may be, to insist on theinclusion of a broader population into national narratives of suffering and belonging.*The term ‘béké’ refers to French colonial settlers of the Antilles and their descendants, but Dieudonné deploys it asa general term for white privilege built on the back of ongoing black enslavement.Please read our comments policy before commenting .Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics.Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/1kaozGi _________________________________About the authorPaul A. Silverstein – Reed CollegePaul A. Silverstein is Professor of Anthropology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Hispublications include Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Indiana University Press,2004), and Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa  (Indiana University Press,2006 – edited with Ussama Makdisi).4/55/5

The response to the Dieudonné affair in France risks demonising French minority groups in the name of tolerance

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