Posts Tagged ‘slave trade’
All kinds of Human trafficking: Forced child labor, sweatshop factories, immigrants, house helpers, sex slavery…
Posted on: December 4, 2020
All kinds of Human trafficking: Forced child labor, sweatshop factories, immigrants, house helpers, sex slavery…
Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud or coercion to compel another person’s labor.
By Noy Thrupkaew http://www.ted.com
About 10 years ago, I went through a little bit of a hard time. So I decided to go see a therapist.
I had been seeing her for a few months, and one day she asked: “Who actually raised you until you were three?” Seemed like a weird question.
I said, “My parents.” And she said, “I don’t think that’s actually the case; because if it were, we’d be dealing with things that are far more complicated than just this.”
It sounded like the setup to a joke, but I knew she was serious. When I first started seeing her, I was trying to be the funniest person in the room. And I would try and crack these jokes, but she caught on to me really quickly, and whenever I tried to make a joke, she would look at me and say, “That is actually really sad.”
I knew I had to be serious, and I asked my parents who had actually raised me until I was three? And to my surprise, they said my primary caregiver had been a distant relative of the family. I had called her my auntie.
I remember my auntie so clearly, it felt like she had been part of my life when I was much older.
I remember the thick, straight hair, and how it would come around me like a curtain when she bent to pick me up; her soft, southern Thai accent; the way I would cling to her, even if she just wanted to go to the bathroom or get something to eat.
I loved her, but [with] the ferocity that a child has sometimes before she understands that love also requires letting go.
But my clearest and sharpest memory of my auntie, is also one of my first memories of life at all. I remember her being beaten and slapped by another member of my family.
I remember screaming hysterically and wanting it to stop, as I did every single time it happened, for things as minor as wanting to go out with her friends, or being a little late. I became so hysterical over her treatment, that eventually, she was just beaten behind closed doors.
Things got so bad for her that eventually she ran away.
As an adult, I learned later that she had been just 19 when she was brought over from Thailand to the States to care for me, on a tourist visa. She wound up working in Illinois for a time, before eventually returning to Thailand, which is where I ran into her again, at a political rally in Bangkok.
I clung to her again, as I had when I was a child, and I let go, and then I promised that I would call. I never did, though: I was afraid if I said everything that she meant to me — that I owed perhaps the best parts of who I became to her care, and that the words “I’m sorry” were like a thimble to bail out all the guilt and shame and rage I felt over everything she had endured to care for me for as long as she had.
I thought if I said those words to her, I would never stop crying again. Because she had saved me. And I had not saved her.
I’m a journalist, and I’ve been writing and researching human trafficking for the past 8 years, and even so, I never put together this personal story with my professional life until pretty recently.
I think this profound disconnect actually symbolizes most of our understanding about human trafficking. Human trafficking is far more prevalent, complex and close to home than most of us realize.
I spent time in jails and brothels, interviewed hundreds of survivors and law enforcement, NGO workers. And when I think about what we’ve done about human trafficking, I am hugely disappointed. Partly because we don’t even talk about the problem right at all.
When I say “human trafficking,” most of you probably don’t think about someone like my auntie. You probably think about a young girl or woman, who’s been brutally forced into prostitution by a violent pimp. That is real suffering, and that is a real story. That story makes me angry for far more than just the reality of that situation, though.
As a journalist, I really care about how we relate to each other through language, and the way we tell that story, with all the gory, violent detail, the salacious aspects — I call that “look at her scars” journalism.
We use that story to convince ourselves that human trafficking is a bad man doing a bad thing to an innocent girl. That story lets us off the hook: “I am Not a bad person. It shouldn’t be my problem”…
It takes away all the societal context that we might be indicted for, for the structural inequality, or the poverty, or the barriers to migration.
We let ourselves think that human trafficking is only about forced prostitution, when in reality, human trafficking is embedded in our everyday lives.
Forced prostitution accounts for 22% of human trafficking. 10% is in “state- imposed forced labor” and 68 % is for the purpose of creating the goods and delivering the services that most of us rely on every day, in sectors like agricultural work, domestic work and construction.
That is food and care and shelter. And somehow, these most essential workers are also among the world’s most underpaid and exploited today. Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud or coercion to compel another person’s labor.
And it’s found in cotton fields, and coltan mines, and even car washes in Norway and England. It’s found in U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s found in Thailand’s fishing industry. That country has become the largest exporter of shrimp in the world. But what are the circumstances behind all that cheap and plentiful shrimp?
Thai military were caught selling Burmese and Cambodian migrants onto fishing boats. Those fishing boats were taken out, the men put to work, and they were thrown overboard if they made the mistake of falling sick, or trying to resist their treatment.
Those fish were then used to feed shrimp, The shrimp were then sold to 4 major global retailers: Costco, Tesco, Walmart and Carrefour.
Human trafficking is found in places you would never even imagine.
Traffickers have forced young people to drive ice cream trucks, or to sing in touring boys’ choirs. Trafficking has even been found in a hair braiding salon in New Jersey.
The scheme in that case was incredible. The traffickers found young families who were from Ghana and Togo, and they told these families that “your daughters are going to get a fine education in the United States.”
They then located winners of the green card lottery, and they told them, “We’ll help you out. We’ll get you a plane ticket. We’ll pay your fees. All you have to do is take this young girl with you, say that she’s your sister or your spouse. Once everyone arrived in New Jersey, the young girls were taken away, and put to work for 14-hour days, 7 days a week, for five years. They made their traffickers nearly 4 million dollars.
What have we done about it? We’ve mostly turned to the criminal justice system. But keep in mind, most victims of human trafficking are poor and marginalized. They’re migrants, people of color. Sometimes they’re in the sex trade.
And for populations like these, the criminal justice system is too often part of the problem, rather than the solution.
In study after study, in countries ranging from Bangladesh to the United States, between 20 and 60% of the people in the sex trade who were surveyed said that they had been raped or assaulted by the police in the past year alone.
People in prostitution, including people who have been trafficked into it, regularly receive multiple convictions for prostitution. Having that criminal record makes it so much more difficult to leave poverty, leave abuse, or leave prostitution, if that person so desires.
Workers outside of the sex sector — if they try and resist their treatment, they risk deportation.
In case after case I’ve studied, employers have no problem calling on law enforcement to try and threaten or deport their striking trafficked workers.
If those workers run away, they risk becoming part of the great mass of undocumented workers who are also subject to the whims of law enforcement if they’re caught.
Law enforcement is supposed to identify victims and prosecute traffickers. But out of an estimated 21 million victims of human trafficking in the world, they have helped and identified fewer than 50,000 people.
That’s like comparing the population of the world to the population of Los Angeles, proportionally speaking. As for convictions, out of an estimated 5,700 convictions in 2013, fewer than 500 were for labor trafficking.
Keep in mind that labor trafficking accounts for 68 percent of all trafficking, but fewer than 10 percent of the convictions.
I’ve heard one expert say that trafficking happens where need meets greed.
I’d like to add one more element to that. Trafficking happens in sectors where workers are excluded from protections, and denied the right to organize.
Trafficking doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in systematically degraded work environments.
You might be thinking she’s talking about failed states, or war-torn states, or — I’m actually talking about the United States. Let me tell you what that looks like.
I spent many months researching a trafficking case called Global Horizons, involving hundreds of Thai farm workers. They were sent all over the States, to work in Hawaii pineapple plantations, and Washington apple orchards, and anywhere the work was needed.
They were promised three years of solid agricultural work. So they made a calculated risk. They sold their land, they sold their wives’ jewelry, to make thousands in recruitment fees for this company, Global Horizons.
But once they were brought over, their passports were confiscated. Some of the men were beaten and held at gunpoint. They worked so hard they fainted in the fields. This case hit me so hard.
After I came back home, I was wandering through the grocery store, and I froze in the produce department. I was remembering the over-the-top meals the Global Horizons survivors would make for me every time I showed up to interview them.
They finished one meal with this plate of perfect, long-stemmed strawberries, and as they handed them to me, they said, “Aren’t these the kind of strawberries you eat with somebody special in the States? And don’t they taste so much better when you know the people whose hands picked them for you?”
As I stood in that grocery store weeks later, I realized I had no idea of who to thank for this plenty, and no idea of how they were being treated.
I started digging into the agricultural sector. And I found there are too many fields, and too few labor inspectors.
Mind you, none of what I am describing about this agricultural sector or the guest worker program is actually human trafficking. It is merely what we find legally tolerable. And I would argue this is fertile ground for exploitation. And all of this had been hidden to me, before I had tried to understand it.
I found multiple layers of plausible deniability between grower and distributor and processor…
The Global Horizons survivors had been brought to the States on a temporary guest worker program. That guest worker program ties a person’s legal status to his or her employer, and denies that worker the right to organize. (No different of what’s happening in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates, under the Kafalat law)
I wasn’t the only person grappling with these issues. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is one of the biggest anti-trafficking philanthropists in the world. And even he wound up accidentally investing nearly 10 million dollars in the pineapple plantation cited as having the worst working conditions in that Global Horizons case.
When Omidyar found out, he and his wife were shocked and horrified, and they wound up writing an op-ed for a newspaper, saying that it was up to all of us to learn everything we can about the labor and supply chains of the products that we support.
What would happen if each one of us decided that we are No longer going to support companies if they don’t eliminate exploitation from their labor and supply chains?
If we demanded laws calling for the same? If all the CEOs out there decided that they were going to go through their businesses and say, “No more”?
If we ended recruitment fees for migrant workers?
If we decided that guest workers should have the right to organize without fear of retaliation?
These would be decisions heard around the world. This isn’t a matter of buying a fair-trade peach and calling it a day, buying a guilt-free zone with your money. That’s not how it works.
This is the decision to change a system that is broken, and that we have unwittingly but willingly allowed ourselves to profit from and benefit from for too long.
We often dwell on human trafficking survivors’ victimization. But that is not my experience of them.
Over all the years that I’ve been talking to them, they have taught me that we are more than our worst days.
Each one of us is more than what we have lived through. Especially trafficking survivors.
These people were the most resourceful and resilient and responsible in their communities. They were the people that you would take a gamble on.
You’d say, I’m gong to sell my rings, because I have the chance to send you off to a better future. They were the emissaries of hope.
These survivors don’t need saving. They need solidarity, because they’re behind some of the most exciting social justice movements out there today.
The nannies and housekeepers who marched with their families and their employers’ families — their activism got us an international treaty on domestic workers’ rights.
The Nepali women who were trafficked into the sex trade — they came together, and they decided that they were going to make the world’s first anti-trafficking organization actually headed and run by trafficking survivors themselves.
These Indian shipyard workers were trafficked to do post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction. They were threatened with deportation, but they broke out of their work compound and they marched from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., to protest labor exploitation.
They co-founded an organization called the National Guest Worker Alliance, and through this organization, they have wound up helping other workers bring to light exploitation and abuses in supply chains in Walmart and Hershey’s factories.
And although the Department of Justice declined to take their case, a team of civil rights lawyers won the first of a dozen civil suits this February, and got their clients 14 million dollars.
These survivors are fighting for people they don’t even know yet, other workers, and for the possibility of a just world for all of us. This is our chance to do the same.
This is our chance to make the decision that tells us who we are, as a people and as a society.
That our prosperity is no longer prosperity, as long as it is pinned to other people’s pain.
That our lives are inextricably woven together; and that we have the power to make a different choice.
17:25 I was so reluctant to share my story of my auntie with you. Before I started this TED process and climbed up on this stage, I had told literally a handful of people about it, because, like many a journalist, I am far more interested in learning about your stories than sharing much, if anything, about my own.
I also haven’t done my journalistic due diligence on this. I haven’t issued my mountains of document requests, and interviewed everyone and their mother, and I haven’t found my auntie yet. I don’t know her story of what happened, and of her life now.
The story as I’ve told it to you is messy and unfinished. But I think it mirrors the messy and unfinished situation we’re all in, when it comes to human trafficking.
We are all implicated in this problem. But that means we are all also part of its solution.
Figuring out how to build a more just world is our work to do, and our story to tell. So let us tell it the way we should have done, from the very beginning.
Let us tell this story together.
Romy Assouad shared this link from Shahd AlShehail
“This is our chance to make the decision that tells us who we are, as a people and as a society; that our prosperity is no longer prosperity, as long as it is pinned to other people’s pain; that our lives are inextricably woven together; and that we have the power to make a different choice.”
A powerful dose of reality
Human trafficking is all around you. This is how it works
Behind the everyday bargains we all love — the $10 manicure, the unlimited shrimp buffet — is a hidden world of forced labor to keep those prices at rock bottom. Noy…http://www.ted.com|By Noy Thrupkaew
Quenelle de Dieudonné M’bala M’bala? (Nazi reverse salute?) Who is he? And Zemmour position…
Posted on: January 16, 2014
Quenelle de Dieudonné? (signature gesture of downward Nazi reverse salute?) and Zemmour’s stand…
Note: Dieudonne admitted to be an Israeli agent since 2002, on account of discovering that he is an Ethiopian Falasha Jews.. Make your mind when reading this controversy of freedom of expression and opinion.
France has been grappling in the last 3 weeks with an issue of freedom of expression.
The comedian, humorist and political activist Dieudonne (a black colored from a Cameroon father to boot) is pretty consistent in matter of racism: Lately, he has been lambasting Israel and Zionism as apartheid and racist State in his pack-full performances.
White, Black, and Brown French people are attracted to Dieudonne frank performances and are very upset that the French government is denying their rights to attend what they want to listen to.
This French government, squarely pro-Israel with strong Zionist leaning, has decided to ban all Dieudonne performances in the provinces and all his public gathering, on account of becoming public safety risk, spreading racist rhetoric against Jews or what the western nations label “Anti-antisemitism” positions.
One staunch Islamophobe author called Eric Zemmour (probably a Jew) is siding with Dieudonne’s freedom for clarifying his stands.
“It is this anti-racist left that rendered the Shoat (shoah, or those Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany) the supreme religion of our Republic. The current French leftist parties are in disarray by trashing the traditional public right for freedom of opinion…” (Read the French text in note 2)
Note 1: Who is Deudonne? Extracted from Wikipedia and the edited additions
| Dieudonné M’bala M’bala | |
|---|---|
Dieudonné in 2009
|
|
| Born | 11 February 1966 (age 47) Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine, France |
| Occupation | Comedian, politician. |
Dieudonné M’bala M’bala (born 11 February 1966), generally known by his stage name Dieudonné (French: [djø.dɔ.ne]), is a controversial French comedian, actor, and political activist. His father is from Cameroon and his mother is French.
Dieudonné initially achieved success with a Jewish comedian, Élie Semoun, humorously exploiting racial stereotypes. At that time, he campaigned against racism and unsuccessfully presented himself in the 1997 and 2001 legislative elections in Dreux against the National Front, the French far right wing party which he perceived as racist.[1][2]
On 1 December 2003, Dieudonné performed a sketch on a TV show about an Israeli settler whom he depicted as a Nazi. Some critics argued that he had “crossed the limits of antisemitism” and several organizations sued him for incitement to racial hatred.
Dieudonné refused to apologize and denounced “zionism” and the Jewish lobby, arguing that he had “mocked a Mullah in [his] previous show and that [he] should be allowed to make fun of zionist extremists in the same manner”.[3]
Dieudonné subsequently found himself with increasing frequency banned from mainstream media, and many of his shows were cancelled by local authorities. Active on the internet and in his Paris theater, Dieudonné has continued to have a wide following.[4]
Dieudonné approached Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front political party that he had fought earlier in his life, and the men became political allies and friends, with Le Pen even becoming the godfather of one of Dieudonné’s daughters.[5]
Dieudonné became a close friend of Alain Soral, a controversial writer with whom he shares many anti-establishment and anti-zionist views. He ran for President of France in the 2007 elections under the “anti-zionist party”.
Dieudonné’s provocations culminated in the appearance of holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in one of his shows in 2008.[6][7]
He described Holocaust remembrance as “memorial pornography“.[8] He was convicted in court 8 times on antisemitism charges.[9][10] His quenelle signature gesture went viral in 2013 particularly after footballer Nicolas Anelka made a quenelle during a match in December 2013.
After Dieudonné was recorded during a performance mocking a Jewish journalist, suggesting it’s a pity he was not sent to the gas chambers,[11] French Interior Minister Manuel Valls stated that Dieudonné was “no longer a comedian” but was rather an “anti-Semite and racist” and that he would seek to ban all Dieudonné’s public gatherings as they amounted to a public safety risk.[12] The ban on his shows has been confirmed by the courts.[13]
Personal life[edit]
Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine, the son of a white French painter and retired sociologist from Brittany who exhibits as a painter under the name Josiane Grué, and a black accountant from Ekoudendi, Cameroon.[8][14]
His parents divorced when he was one year old, and he was brought up by his mother. He attended Catholic school, though his mother was a New Age Buddhist.[15] Dieudonné lives with Noémie Montagne, who works as his producer,[16] and he has five children with her.[17]
Performing career[edit]
After getting his baccalaureate in computer science, Dieudonné began writing and practicing routines with his childhood friend, Jewish comedian and actor Élie Semoun.
They formed a comedic duo, Élie et Dieudonné, and performed in local cafés and bars while Dieudonné worked as a salesman, selling cars, telephones, and photocopy machines.
In 1992, a Paris comedian spotted them and helped them stage their first professional show.[15] In the 1990s, they appeared on stage and on television together as “Élie et Dieudonné”.
In 1997 they split and each went onto a solo theater career. In 1998, they reunited in a screen comedy, Le Clone,[18] which was a failure critically and financially. From the mid-1990s Dieudonné appeared in several French film comedies, primarily in supporting roles.
His most successful screen appearance to date was in Alain Chabat‘s box-office hit Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra in 2002. In 2004, he appeared in Maurice Barthélémy‘s box office bomb Casablanca Driver.
Dieudonné’s successful one-man shows include Pardon Judas (2000), Le divorce de Patrick (2003), and 1905 (2005). Other one-man shows were Mes Excuses (2004), Dépôt de bilan (2006) and J’ai fait l’con (2008), all understood as attacks on political and social opponents and defences of his own positions.
Anti-Semitic statements made within and around these productions led to intense controversy and numerous lawsuits.[19] Following the 2005 civil unrest in France, Dieudonné also penned a play called Émeutes en banlieue (Riots in the Suburbs, February 2006).
In 2009, surrounded by scandals (see below, “Political activities”), Dieudonné launched two one-man shows: Liberté d’expression and Sandrine. While the latter was a follow-up to Le divorce de Patrick (Sandrine is Patrick’s ex-wife), the former was conceived as a series of itinerant “conferences” on “free speech“.[20]
Started on 18 June 2010 in his theater, Dieudonné’s most recent show to date, Mahmoud (standing for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) has an openly antisemitic tone,[21]caricaturing Jews, slavery and “official” versions of history.[22]
Dieudonné’s production company first acted under the name Bonnie Productions and now under the name Les productions de la Plume.
In 2012 Dieudonné made his directorial debut in a film called L’Antisémite (The Anti-Semite),[23] which stars him as a violent and alcoholic character who dresses as a Nazi officer at a party, and also features the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, as well as imagery that mocks Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners.[24]
The movie, which was produced by the Iranian Documentary and Experimental Film Center, is also known by the title “Yahod Setiz“. Its scheduled screening at the Cannes Film Festival‘s Marché du Film (the parallel film market event) was canceled.[25] The film is to be commercialized on the internet and sold to subscribers of Dieudonné’s activities.[26]
Théâtre de la Main d’Or[edit]
Dieudonné is the lessee of the Théâtre de la Main d’Or in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, which is used for both stand-up comedy and political events by himself and friends.
Political activities and Views[edit]
Beginnings[edit]
Dieudonné was initially active on the anti-racist left. In the 1997 French legislative election, he worked with his party, “Les Utopistes”, in Dreux against National Front candidate Marie-France Stirbois and received 8% of the vote.[27] Verbally and in demonstrations, he also supported migrants without a residence permit (the so-called “sans papiers”) and the Palestinians.
2002–2006[edit]
Dieudonné in 2006
Since 2002, Dieudonné has attracted attention by making increasingly polemical statements.
In an interview for the magazine Lyon Capitale in January 2002, he described “the Jews” as “a sect, a fraud, which is the worst of all, because it was the first” and said he preferred “the charisma of bin Laden to that of Bush“.[28] He subsequently ran for president in the 2002 presidential election, but later dropped out of the race.[29]
On 1 December 2003, he appeared live on a television show disguised as a parody of an Israeli settler wearing military fatigues and a Haredi (Orthodox) Jewish hat. The sketch climaxed with a Hitler salute, after which Dieudonné shouts out a word.
According to Dieudonné, he shouted “Israël”, in the persona of the settler. In the following days, some news agencies stated that he shouted “Isra – Heil” or “Heil Israel“.[30][31]
He was cleared of charges of antisemitism in a Paris court after the judge said this was not an attack against Jews in general but against a type of person “distinguished by their political views”.[32]
At the European Parliament election, 2004, Dieudonné was candidate for the extreme left-wing party “Euro-Palestine”, but left a few months after the election because of disagreements with its leaders.[33]
Dieudonné is the director of the Les Ogres website, where he makes plain his denial of the official version of the 9/11 events.
Following this television appearance, a Dieudonné show in Lyon (at La Bourse du Travail) on 5 February 2004 was picketed and a bottle containing a corrosive product was thrown in the venue, injuring a spectator.[34][35]
On 11 November, Dieudonné organized a debate with 4 rabbis of Naturei Karta in the Théâtre de la Main d’Or in Paris.[36]
On 16 February 2005, he declared during a press conference in Algiers that the Central Council of French Jews CRIF (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France) was a “mafia” that had “total control over French policy exercise”, called the commemoration of the Holocaust “memorial pornography”[8] (“pornographie mémorielle“), and claimed that the “Zionists of the Centre National de la Cinématographie” which “control French cinema” prevented him from making a film about the slave trade.[37][38]
Dieudonné was also trying to appear as a spokesman for French blacks, but, after some initial sympathy, notably from the novelist Calixthe Beyala, the journalists Antoine Garnier and Claudy Siar, as well as the founding members of the Conseil représentatif des associations noires (CRAN), he increasingly met with their rejection.[39]
Throughout 2005 and 2006, Dieudonné was often in the company of senior National Frong members Bruno Gollnisch,[40] Frédéric Châtillon,[41] and Marc George (also known as Marc Robert), the man who went on to conduct his electoral campaigns in 2007 and 2009.[42]
Dieudonné also frequently appeared together with the conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan and the former Marxist and current right-wing radical Alain Soral, a confidant of Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen.[43]
Under the influence of Soral’s writings and polemics, Dieudonné was acquainted with his militant antisemitism of French nationalist inspiration.[44] In May 2006, he gave a lengthy interview to the far-right monthly Le Choc du mois.
[45]Demonstrating shoulder to shoulder with Islamists, he also traveled at the end of August 2006 with Châtillon, Meyssan and Soral in Lebanon, to meet MPs and fighters of the Hezbollah.[41]
Some Jews reacted angrily to his comments on this tour. In April 2005, Dieudonné went to Auschwitz.[46] In May 2006 he was involved in a fight with two teenage Jews in Paris, one of whom he sprayed with tear gas. Dieudonné claimed that the teenagers attacked him first; both parties pressed charges,[47] but the lawsuits were not pursued.
In France and abroad, Dieudonné became increasingly perceived as an extremist of a type until then uncommon in Europe: in the introduction to a March 2006 interview, The Independent called him a “French Louis Farrakhan… obsessed with Jews”.[48]
2007–2009[edit]
Dieudonné wanted to finally represent politically these ever-radicalized positions in the 2007 presidential election, but for logistical reasons he could not maintain his candidacy, which was organized by Marc Robert (a.k.a. Marc George).[49]
The convicted Holocaust denier Serge Thion wrote for his campaign web site under the pseudonym “Serge Noith”, as did also the longtime secretary of the Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, Maria Poumier. After the end of his candidacy, Dieudonné appeared several times publicly in the company of Jean-Marie Le Pen and traveled to Cameroon with Le Pen’s wife Jany.[50] However, officially, Dieudonné called for the election of anti-globalization militant José Bové, despite Bové’s asking Dieudonné not to do so.[51]
In July 2008, Jean-Marie Le Pen became godfather to Dieudonné’s third child. Philippe Laguérie, a traditionalist Catholic priest, officiated at the baptism, which was held in the Saint-Éloi congregation in Bordeaux.[52]
On 26 December 2008, at an event at the Parc de la Villette in Paris, Dieudonné awarded the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson an “insolent outcast” prize [prix de l’infréquentabilité et de l’insolence]. The award was presented by one of Dieudonné’s assistants, Jacky, dressed in a concentration camp uniform with a yellow badge. This caused a scandal[53] and earned him his sixth court conviction to date. On 29 January 2009, he celebrated the 80th birthday of Faurisson in his theater, in the midst of a representative gathering of Holocaust deniers, right-wing radicals, and radical Shiites.[54] Dieudonné and Faurisson further appeared together in a video making fun of the Holocaust and its commemoration.[55]
On Saturday 21 March 2009, Dieudonné announced that he would run for the 2009 European Parliament election in the Île-de-France at the head of an “anti-communitarist and anti-Zionist” party. Other candidates on his party’s electoral list are Alain Soral and the Holocaust denier and former member of Les Verts (the French Green Party) Ginette Skandrani(also known as Ginette Hess),[56] while Thierry Meyssan and Afrocentrist Kémi Seba, founder of the “Tribu Ka” are members of the party[57] but do not run.
The campaign would be conducted again by Marc George.[58] In spite of the association of Dieudonné’s party with the Shiite Centre Zahra,[59] whose president Yahia Gouasmi also runs on his list,[60] his candidacy was supported by Fernand Le Rachinel, a former high ranking executive of the National Front and official printer of the party.[61]
In early May 2009, the French government studied the possibility of banning the party,[62][63] but on 24 May, Justice minister Rachida Dati acknowledged that, in spite of moral objections, there was no legal ground to do so.[64] On 28 May, it became known that Carlos “the Jackal” also expressed his hope Dieudonné would make it to Strasbourg.[65] The Parti antisioniste finally scored 1.30% of the votes.[66]
2010–2012[edit]
On 9 May 2012, Police in Brussels, Belgium, stopped Dieudonné mid-performance after determining that his performance contravened local laws, and forced the cancellation of two more shows, but in Nov 2013, a Brussels Justice found that the comedian was not using anti-Semitic slurs or inciting racial hatred during the show that was interrupted in May 2012.[67]
On 21 June, Dieudonné complained against the Brussels police.[68] On 12 May 2012, event producer Evenko forced the cancellation of Dieudonné’s shows in Montreal, Canada, on 14, 15, 16, and 17 May, citing “contractual conflicts”.[69] In late May 2012, a screening of Dieudonné’s directorial debut, “L’Antisémite” (“The Anti-Semite”), was canceled at the Marché du Film, the market held at the Cannes Film Festival.[8]
2013[edit]
Dieudonné released a song and dance called “Shoananas”, performed to the tune of the 1985 children’s video and song by Annie Cordy, “Cho Ka Ka O” (Chaud Cacao or Hot Chocolate in English),[70] which itself by today’s standards might be considered antisemitic.[71] The term “Shoananas” is a portmanteau of Shoah, the Hebrew word used to refer to the Holocaust, and ananas, the French word for pineapple.[72]
Dieudonné started a trend among his supporters of getting photographed making a unique gesture he invented and dubbed the “quenelle“. For some it is just a vulgar gesture of opposition to French institutions, for extremists it is an antisemitic gesture and was dubbed a “reverse Nazi salute” or even “sodomization of shoah’s victims” (Alain Jakubowicz) because while a Nazi salute involves an upraised straight arm, the quenelle involves a straight arm pointed at the ground.
In December, while performing onstage, Dieudonné was recorded saying about prominent French Jewish radio journalist Patrick Cohen: “Me, you see, when I hear Patrick Cohen speak, I think to myself: ‘Gas chambers… too bad.”’”[73]
Radio France, Cohen’s employer, announced on 20 December that it had alerted authorities that Dieudonné had engaged in “openly anti-Semitic speech”, and various French anti-racism watchdog groups filed complaints.[73]
French Interior Minister Manuel Valls announced he would try to legally ban public performances by Dieudonné. Valls stated that Dieudonne was “no longer a comedian” but was rather an “anti-Semite and racist” who has run afoul of France’s laws against incitement to racial hatred.
“Despite a conviction for public defamation, hate speech and racial discrimination, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala no longer seems to recognize any limits,” Valls wrote.
“Consequently, the interior minister has decided to thoroughly examine all legal options that would allow a ban on Dieudonné’s public gatherings, which no longer belong to the artistic domain, but rather amount to a public safety risk.”[10]
On 31 December, Dieudonné released a 15 minute video proposing that “2014 will be the year of the quenelle!”.[74] In it, Dieudonné attacks “bankers” and “slavers”, so as not to say “Jews”[75] and end up in a lawsuit, and calls upon his followers, “quenelleurs”—those who listen and follow him—towards a hatred of Jews.[75]
“Antisemite? I’m not of that opinion,” he says in the video. “I’m not saying I’d never be one… I leave myself open to that possibility, but for the moment, no.” Later, he added, “I don’t have to choose between the Jews and the Nazis.”[74][75]
2014[edit]
On 6 January, France’s interior minister Manuel Valls said that performances considered anti-Semitic may be banned by local officials. In support of this, Valls sent a 3-page memo to all prefects of Police in France on 6 January entitled, “The Struggle Against Racism and Antisemitism—demonstrations and public reaction—performances by Mr. Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala “.
With respect to freedom of speech in France and banning scheduled performances ahead of time, Valls wrote: “The struggle against racism and antisemitism is an essential concern of government and demands vigorous action.” He takes note of the liberty of expression in France, but goes on to say that in exceptional circumstances, the police are invested with the power to prohibit an event if its intent is to prevent “a grave disturbance of public order” and cites the 1933 law supporting this.[76]
Within hours, Bordeaux became the first French city to ban Dieudonné when mayor Alain Juppé canceled a local appearance planned as part of a scheduled national tour, [77]followed closely by Nantes,[78] Tours, Orleans, Toulouse, Limoges, and Biarritz. The show in Switzerland will go on as scheduled, while other cities are still studying the situation.[79] The Paris Prefect of Police on 10 January prohibited Dieudonné from staging his next three upcoming shows at his Paris theatre.[80]
Some officials from both sides of the political spectrum have reservations about the legal validity of the Valls circular, and believe that cancellations could leave their cities liable for judgments of millions of euros in damages to Dieudonné if he sues and wins, as actually occurred in La Rochelle in 2012.[81]
According to a poll by IFOP for Metronews taken on 8–9 January 2014, 71% of the French population had a negative image of Dieudonné while 16% held a positive view. The voters of the National Front were the least negative, with 54% seeing him negatively and 32% positively.[82]
On 11 January 2014, he announced he would not perform his show Le Mur but will replace it with another one, Asu Zoa, that he wrote in three nights and that would talk about “dance and music inspired by ancestral myths”.[83]
The quenelle gesture[edit]
The quenelle, invented by Dieudonné, is a gesture consisting of a downward straight arm touched at the shoulder by the opposite hand.
The gesture has also been described as a reverse Nazi salute.[84] In French, quenelle normally refers to a type of dumpling. Images of the quenelle became viral in 2013, with many individuals posing while performing the quenelle in photos posted to the internet.[85]
Dieudonné claims that the gesture is an anti-establishment protest. Officially, French authorities have said the gesture is too vague to take any action against Dieudonné.[86] In December 2013, the French Minister for Sport Valérie Fourneyron publicly criticised the footballer Nicholas Anelka for using the gesture as a goal celebration in an English Premier League match.[87] French international and NBA basketball player Tony Parker also came under fire during the same time period for his use of the gesture.[88]
On 30 December 2013, Parker apologized for making the gesture, saying that the photograph had been taken three years earlier and that he had been unaware at the time that it had any anti-Semitic connotation.[89]
An official January 2014 circular issued by Interior Minister Manuel Valls besides laying out a legal justification for banning antisemitic performances by Dieudonné also specifically linked the quenelle gesture to antisemitism and extremism.[76]
Court actions[edit]
- On 14 June 2006, Dieudonné was sentenced to a penalty of €4,500 for defamation after having called a prominent Jewish television presenter a “secret donor of the child-murdering Israeli army”.[90]
- On 15 November 2007, an appellate court sentenced him to a €5,000 fine because he had characterized “the Jews” as “slave traders” after being attacked in le Théâtre de la Main d’Or.[91]
- On 26 June 2008, he was sentenced in the highest judicial instance to a €7,000 fine for his characterization of Holocaust commemorations as “memorial pornography”.[37]
- On 27 February 2009, he was ordered to pay 75,000 Canadian dollars in Montreal to singer and actor Patrick Bruel for defamatory statements. He had called Bruel a “liar” and an “Israeli soldier”.[92]
- On 26 March 2009, Dieudonné was fined €1,000 and ordered to pay €2,000 in damages for having defamed Elisabeth Schemla, a Jewish journalist who ran the now-defunct Proche-Orient.info website. He declared on 31 May 2005 that the website wanted to “eradicate Dieudonné from the audiovisual landscape” and had said of him that “he’s an anti-Semite, he’s the son of Hitler, he will exterminate everyone”.[93]
- On 27 October 2009, he was sentenced to a fine of €10,000 for “public insult of people of Jewish faith or origin” related to his show with Robert Faurisson.[94]
- On 8 June 2010, he was sentenced to a fine of €10,000 for defamation towards the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, which he had called “a mafia-like association that organizes censorship”.[95]
- On 10 October 2012, he was fined €887,135 for tax evasion. According to the French revenue service, Dieudonné failed to pay part of his taxes from 1997 to 2009.[citation needed].
Publications[edit]
- Lettres d’insulte, illustrations by Tignous, Le Cherche-midi, 2002, (ISBN 2862747971)
- Peut-on tout dire?, Interviews conducted by Philippe Gavi and Robert Ménard, in parallel with Bruno Gaccio, Editions Mordicus, 2010, (ISBN 978-2-918414-00-1)
Bibliography[edit]
- Books
- Anne-Sophie Mercier, La vérité sur Dieudonné, Plon, 2005; reissued in 2009 as Dieudonné démasqué, Seuil.
- Olivier Mukuna, Dieudonné. Entretien à cœur ouvert, Éditions EPO, 2004
Note 2: The French text on Zemmour’s position and quotations.
Zemmour monte au créneau pour défendre Dieudonné, un discours incroyable !
POSTÉ LE 11 JANVIER 2014
Depuis 3 semaines, la Quenelle de Dieudonné est partout ! Hier, Eric Zemmour faisait la une d’un quotidien en tant que “défenseur” de l’humoriste, il a donc pris la parole pour clarifier ses positions et il n’y est pas allé de main morte.
Zemmour, un islamophobe acharné, a choisi le camp de Dieudonné et de la France “Black, Blanc, Beur” qui le soutient rigoureusement. Durant toute sa chronique, on assiste à un déferlement de vérités qui ne sont généralement pas prises au sérieux lorsqu’on ne fait pas partie de la communauté juive :
« Elie Semoun peut aller se rhabiller, Dieudonné a trouvé un meilleur compère et devrait attribuer une Quenelle d’or au ministre de l’intérieur »
« Ce mélange explosif d’amateurisme, d’obsession de communicants, de partenariats communautaristes avec le CRIF sans oublier le conseil d’Etat sommé de renier dans l’urgence toute la tradition libérale du droit publique français révèle le désarroi de la gauche… »
« C’est la gauche antiraciste qui a fait de la Shoah la religion suprême de la république »
Tout au long de son discours, Eric Z. place Dieudonné en “victime” et bouc émissaire de la gauche… Une vidéo à partager massivement !
Adonis Diaries 