July 4, 2006: Dieudonné Mbala Mbala's "Humour"

Reverting to Type
scaramouche.motime.com/post/587102

What started my quest for more information was Lysianne Gagnon's article (behind a $ firewall) in the Globe and Mail. I could not believe that Dieudonné and what she described was being feted in Canada ... perhaps fetid would be a more appropriate word.

[.... In] Quebec [... Dieudonné Mbala Mbala] managed to revive his flagging career.

Globe and Mail columnist Lysianne Gagnon comments on Dieudonné's new-found success in Quebec, and isn’t afraid to call it as she sees it:

…In one of his earlier sketches, he was dressed as an orthodox Jew who does the Nazi salute while shouting "Isra-Heil!" He says the Jews rule the world and doesn't exclude the possibility the AIDS virus was invented by Jews to decimate Africa. He says the slave trade was run by Jews -- who now "are recycled in the banking business." [....]

Last fall, he was treated as a star on Radio-Canada's flagship talk show, Tout le monde en parle. The host and the other guests in the studio commiserated with his plight at the hands of France's "Jewish lobby." They gullibly swallowed his explanation that all he does is criticize Israel. They rolled in laughter when Dieudonné described how he wanted to title a show that was supposed to be some sort of apology for his "Isra-Heil" remark: "My apologies, up your asses!" Radio-Canada liked Dieudonné's performance so much that they delayed the 11 o'clock news by 15 minutes so that the part with Dieudonné could be broadcast in its entirety. (Tout le monde en parle is recorded in advance and edited so that it can fit into a two-hour time slot.)

As a strong believer in freedom of speech, I don't think that Dieudonné should be prevented from airing his views, no more than I thought Ernst Zundel should have been prosecuted for denying the Holocaust. But such views should either be ignored or confronted. The scandal is that Radio-Canada offered Dieudonné a free ride, and that everybody in the studio wholeheartedly agreed with him. [....]