Dieudonné "is part of something tragic for France" (Charles Moore)

L'affaire Dieudonné est une vraie tragédie du point de vue moral.  Voici une excellente réflexion du grand chroniqueur (en France on dirait intellectuel :) Charles Moore @ Daily Telegraph.  Il donne raison au gouvernement d'être enfin intervenu pour y mettre un terme.  Heureusement, à part la France, ni la "quenelle" ni Dieudonné ont fait des émules ailleurs.  Extraits:

Un jeune fait une quenelle/crématorium

"But perhaps even Hollande is realising that it is dangerous to try to appease the culture of self-denigration and insult. This week, his government finally got tough with Dieudonné, the half-Cameroonian, half-Breton activist and “comedian” (alleging that you are funny is one of the best tricks of the extremists because it makes the establishment smile weakly and feel shy about interfering with the joke).

His current tour has been banned for the good reason that he is being more than just “a little bit” critical of the Jews. His act, and his mass movement, which performs the “quenelle” – a sort of suppressed Nazi salute of his own invention – is a revival of anti-semitism, stitching together Right and Left, old-fashioned white French Jew-baiting and the newer, anti-American, anti-Western, Muslim immigrant version. It pulls off the amazing double of denying the Holocaust while suggesting that the Jews deserved their fate. Dieudonné’s “quenelliers” (as he calls them) pose for selfies beside Auschwitz and various Holocaust monuments, making their salutes.

Dieudonné pretends, as I say, to be comic, but he is part of something tragic for France. The Sixties and Seventies were a golden age of growth and tolerance for French Jews, and their numbers grew to more than 600,000. Today, they are probably below 500,000. Many feel frightened to travel publicly looking distinctively Jewish in dress. In 2013, applications by French Jews for immigration to Israel rose by 70 per cent over the previous year. Dieudonné himself is part of the changed mood. Early in his career, he was an anti-racist and did a popular comedy double-act with a Jewish comedian called Elie Semoun. Today, one of his children’s godparents is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the National Front. There was a time when “diversity” was more than a buzzword in France; now that is changing for the worse.

Back here in Britain, a bit of a row has been bubbling since the West Bromwich footballer, Nicolas Anelka, who is French, did a public “quenelle” after scoring a goal against West Ham at the end of last year. He says it was merely a sign of friendship for Dieudonné. The Football Association is investigating. Will it recognise that what Anelka was offering was the racist equivalent of a Masonic handshake?"

Un avocat.