Charlie Hebdo attackControversial French comedian Dieudonné investigated over “Charlie Coulibaly” post

The anti-Semitic French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is in hot water again. The Paris prosecutor’s office has said it has opened an investigation into the comedian’s Facebook post, in which he mocked Sunday’s mass rallies against Jihadist terrorism in France. Dieudonné derisively describes the people participating in the rallies as naive believers in “Magic moment equal to the Big Bang that created the universe,” before ending his post with, “Sachez que ce soir, en ce qui me concerne, Je me sens CharlieCoulibaly” (Know that tonight, for me, I feel CharlieCoulibaly) — merging the names of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical newspaper where two gunmen massacred twelve people, with that of Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four Jewish hostages at a kosher supermarket.

The investigation of Dieudonné for “defending terrorism” was opened on Monday, said Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor.

Dieudonné gained notoriety when he popularized the “quenelle,” a reverse Nazi salute that skirts the French legal ban on the traditional Nazi salute (in the quenelle, one touches the left shoulder with the right hand while the left arm stretches downward, an inversion of the Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute).

French prime minister Manuel Valls, last year – when he was France’s interior minister – described the quenelle thus: “This gesture is a gesture of hatred, it’s an anti-Semitic gesture and all those who perform it should know — they can’t deny knowledge — that they are performing an anti-Semitic gesture, an inverted Nazi gesture.”

The Atlantic notes that France has restrictive hate speech laws, and French courts have previously found Dieudonné guilty of defamation, libel, and incitement to hatred and racial discrimination (the quenelle has so far not been banned).

Dieudonné’s public appearances have been banned by the interior ministry and various local governments on grounds that they create public disorder, but the Washington Post correspondent Anthony Fiaola managed to attend one of Dieudonné’s performances last summer before they were banned, and he reviewed one performance in an article titled “A ‘new anti-Semitism’ rising in France”:

In front of a packed house, he apes Alain Jakubowicz, a French Jewish leader who calls the humor of Dieudonné tantamount to hate speech. While the comedian skewers Jakubowicz, Stars of David glow on screen and, as the audience guffaws, a soundtrack plays evoking the trains to Nazi death camps. In various other skits, he belittles the Holocaust, then mocks it as a gross exaggeration.