Comedian gives award to Holocaust denier

The black French comedian, Dieudonné, provoked outrage at the weekend by giving a “ heroism” award on stage before 5,000 people to a veteran Holocaust negationist.

Dieudonné, 42, who has a conviction for making anti-Semitic remarks, handed the spoof award for “social unacceptability and insolence” to Robert Faurisson, an octogenarian academic who has a string of convictions in France for denying the existence of Nazi death camps in World War II.

Amongst an eclectic audience at Le Zenith, the largest music and theatre auditorium in Paris, were the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, several figures on the French far-left and a popular, television quiz show host, Julien Lepers.

The award was handed to M. Faurisson - to enormous applause - by a stage-hand dressed as a Jewish deportee, with a yellow star on his chest.

Dieudonné - full name Dieudonné M'bala M'bala - was once a kind of French Lenny Henry. Born into a middle class family with Cameroonian and Breton parents, his stand-up comedy satirised racial prejudices, including those of both whites and blacks. In the last five years, his one-man shows have come to symbolise - and some say foment - a new strain of anti-Semitism in France amongst Arab and black youths and on the “white” far left.

From having once been a virulent critic of M. Le Pen, Dieudonné has veered closer and closer to the National Front leader in the last two years. At Le Zenith on Friday M. Le Pen, his wife, Jany, and eldest daughter, Marie-Caroline, were seated, bizarrely, a few rows away from the black radical leader, Kémi Saba, and a Troyskyist pro-Palestinian activist, Ginette Skandrani.

At the end of his new show, “J'ai fait le con” (I acted the fool), Dieudonne summoned M. Faurisson from the audience. The former professor of literature, aged 80, looked astonished as he was handed “a prize for social unacceptability and insolence”.

“I am not used to this kind of reception,” he told the cheering audience. “I am supposed to be a historical gangster.”

M. Faurission has several convictions in France for denying the existence of the Nazi death camps and any plan by Nazi Germany to destroy Jews, gypsies and other “subhumans” and undesirables. He has also minimised the guilt of white Europeans in the enslavement of Africans: something that Dieudonne has often cited as more wicked than the Holocaust.

Asked why he had honoured M. Faurisson at the weekend, the comedian attempted to resolve this apparent contradiction. “I don't agree with all his ideas,” he said. “He has, for example, denied that slaves were traded from the island of Gorée, off Dakar (in Senegal). But for me, what counts most of all is freedom of expression.”

Some French commentators accuse Dieudonne of using anti-Semitism as a way of gaining publicity for his shows. Others point out that the comedian's plunge into extremist politics has largely ruined what was a successful career as a stand-up comedian and film actor (in, amongst other movies, “Asterix and Cleopatra”).

When M. Faurisson appeared on stage at Le Zenith, Dieudonne told the audience: “Your applause is going to be heard a long way from here?(this) handshake is already a scandal in itself.”

In an interview with The Independent in 2006, Dieudonne rejected suggestions that he was anti-Semitic.

“I remain as profoundly anti-racist as I ever was,” he said. “The Holocaust was a terrible, appalling thing but there has been other suffering in history and there is other suffering today in a world cursed by the power of money. The Zionists have perverted the values of the (French) Republic so that only the suffering of the Jews is recognised officially, not, for instance, the suffering of blacks through the slave trade.”

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