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France fines black comic for anti-Semitism
2009-10-27
PARIS (AFP) - French judges ordered a far-right black comedian to pay 20,000 euros (30,000 dollars) Tuesday over an anti-Semitic stunt during a stage show in which he invited a notorious Holocaust denier onto stage. The Paris court fined Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, a 43-year-old French stand up, 10,000 euros for his "public anti-Semitic insults" and told him to pay a further 10,000 in damages and legal fees to organisations that sued him. He was prosecuted after he invited Robert Faurisson, an academic who has been convicted of Holocaust denial, onto stage during a Paris comedy show to receive a satirical award from an actor dressed as a Jewish deportee. The comic admitted at the hearing that the show had been a "comedy bomb attack" but defended his right to free expression. Anti-racism and Jewish defence organisations welcomed the verdict. Dieudonne, a former anti-racism campaigner whose father was Cameroonian, often courts controversy and this year tried to enter politics by standing for the European parliament as head of an "anti-Zionist" party. In September 2007, Dieudonne was fined after he accused Jews of exploiting "memorial pornography" and attacked a "Zionist lobby which cultivates the idea of their unique suffering ... and has declared war on the black world." Two months later he was back in court and was fined 5,000 euros for having compared Jews to "slave-traders". He remains under investigation over a video circulating on the Internet in which he appears to attack a "yid Zionist lobby" led by "racist liars". For June's European election, Dieudonne and Alain Soral, a former member of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, formed a party to argue that the world's ills are caused by Zionist Jews and their Anglo-Saxon allies. Officials expressed fears that the comedian's campaign might stir communal tensions in France's notoriously combustible city suburbs, but the party won only 1.3 percent of votes in the Paris region and had little impact.
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