Controversial French comedian Dieudonné investigated over “Charlie Coulibaly” post

As we wrote last year (see “French anti-Semitic entertainer banned from U.K.,” HSNW, 4 February 2014), Dieudonné’s anti-Semitism has developed into a denial of the Holocaut. In 2006, he invited Robert Faurisson, a French historian who has repeatedly denied the existence of the Holocaust, on stage. In the same year, he began appearing in public with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front and the father of the Front’s current leader, Marine le Pen.

Le Pen and Dieudonné make for strange comrades. Le Pen’s is an unabashed racist and anti-Semite. His strident immigrant bashing and blatant racism were his political stock-in-trade. In 1998, when France hosted to Soccer World Cup (which it won in a 3:0 victory over Brazil), and in 2000, when France won the European Soccer Cup (defeating Italy 2:1), Le Pen refused to support the French national soccer team, declaring that too many of its players were black or Muslims, and thus not “true” French. France “cannot recognize itself in the national side,” Le Pen said, adding that “maybe the coach exaggerated the proportion of players of color and should have been a bit more careful.”

Last May, campaigning in Marseilles for National Front candidates running for seats in the European parliament, Le Pen suggested that the deadly Ebola virus could solve the global “population explosion” (of black-skinned people) and, by extension, France’s – and Europe’s — “immigration problem.”

At a cocktail party before an election rally in Marseille, Le Pen, speaking of the “demographic explosion” in the world, said: “Monseigneur Ebola peut régler ça en trois mois” (Monseigneur Ebola could sort that out in three months) (see “‘Monseigneur Ebola’: la solution de Jean-Marie Le Pen face à l’immigration,” Figaro, 21 May 2014).

Dieudonné is the son of an immigrant from Cameroon and a French mother. Still, antipathy toward Jews united the two, and Le Pen, who once referred to the Holocaust as “détail de l’histoire” (a detail of history), has been one of Dieudonné’s most vocal supporters.

Marine Le Pen, inheriting the leadership of the National Front from her father, has not deviated from her father’s anti-immigration positions, but has tried to move the National Front away from the open anti-Semitism of her father’s days, with some success.

Her father, however, is as vile and offensive as ever. In a TV interview last June he was asked for his views of different entertainers. One of the questions was about Patrick Bruel, a Jewish singer and actor. “On fera une fournée la prochaine fois” (we will do a batch next time), Le Pen responded.

The sheer ugliness of Le Pen’s response may not be immediately apparent to readers who do not speak French, so here is a brief explanation. “Four” is an “oven” in French, and “fournée” is a batch of objects (loaves of bread, croissants) put in the oven to be baked. Thus, “Le boulanger fait plusieurs fournées” means “The baker made several batches” (of, say, bread or croissants).

When the bodies of Jews who had been gassed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps were brought to the crematorium to be burned, the Nazis often crammed several bodies into the same burning chamber to increase the crematorium’s disposal “efficiency.” They called it “une fournée” (“ein Stapel” in German) — a “batch” or a “stack” to be put in the “oven” and “baked.”

This is what, in a TV interview in June 2014, Jean-Marie Le Pen — founder of the National Front; the runner-up for the French presidency in 2002; and an ardent supporter of Dieudonné — said should be done with Patrick Bruel, a Jewish citizen of France: “On fera une fournée la prochaine fois”: Next time we will put him (presumably along with a few other Jews, otherwise there would not be a “batch”) in the oven and burn them.