Drip, drip, drip...
A flare-up of racial tension has been sparked off in France after a black stand-up comic, Dieudonné, was reported to have said that the 60th anniversary commemorations of the Holocaust were "remembrance pornography".Now get this:
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Dieudonné's comment was made at a press conference in the Algerian capital, Algiers, last week and picked up by a website covering Middle Eastern affairs as "offensive to the memory of the Holocaust". Dieudonné held a press conference in Paris at the weekend in which he attempted to explain his views.
"I criticised the hype of Holocaust commemoration," he told the press conference. However, he stopped far short of his comments in Algeria last week: "The Zionists have a kind of impunity. For them, if a child at school is called a dirty Jew, they are up in arms. To me, Zionism is the Aids of Judaism. For people like me, it is different. We feel the Zionist lobby has claimed a monopoly of suffering."Every week; practically every day. All that fuss, hey, about a few million dead; and more than fifty years ago; and the 'AIDS of Judaism'. Still, what the hell, there are all those voices of careful, eminently reasonable, people who think that worries about anti-Semitism are just a bit exaggerated.Despite his attempts to calm spirits, Dieudonné met with widespread condemnation. The Socialist party's first secretary, François Hollande, and a former anti-racism campaigner, Harlem Désir, described the comedian as "the biggest anti-Semite in France'' and called for a boycott of his shows.
Never again. Yeah, except next time. And indeed always, because one of the things that has to be learned, and constantly re-learned, is that there will ever be such voices: of those unwilling to stand up, to speak out.