Controversial French comic Dieudonne should serve six months in jail for
alleged racist and antisemitic comments he made during a show in Belgium, a
prosecutor said Wednesday.
“His show is filled with
defamatory and insulting comments which would make anyone want to throw
up,” the Belga news agency quoted prosecutor Damien Leboutte as telling a
court in the eastern city of Liege.
Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, whose father is from Cameroon, was not in
court.
In March, a French court handed him a two months suspended sentence and
fined him heavily for antisemitic remarks after he caused uproar by suggesting
he sympathised with the attacks against satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a
Jewish supermarket in Paris.
“I feel like Charlie
Coulibaly,” he wrote on Facebook, a play on the slogan “Je suis
Charlie” that became a global rallying cry against extremism and Amedy
Coulibaly, one of the attackers.
The performer, who made his name in a double act with Jewish comedian
Elie Semoun, is infamous for his trademark “quenelle” hand gesture
that looks like an inverted Nazi salute but which he insists is merely
anti-establishment.
French courts have hauled him up over a string of comments which
opponents say are bluntly racist while supporters champion his right to free
speech, even if it makes for uncomfortable listening.
He was due to appear in a French court Wednesday on charges of inciting
racial hatred but that case was adjourned to February at the request of his
lawyer.
The Liege case relates to a Dieudonne show there in 2012, and will be
heard again on November 25.
