French alleged comedian Dieudonné messes with PC heads

The BBC, the world’s largest PC (politically correct) echo chamber, has a problem. It has to cover a phenomenon it clearly does not understand: someone from an “ethnic minority’ who makes rather ghastly anti-Semitic jokes. Name’s Dieudonné, he’s from France. The jokes are mediocre at best. Regretting that a Jewish journalist had missed the gas chambers? Oh dear. It’s like Feyenoord fans from Rotterdam, The Netherlands, imitating the sound of gas when playing against Ajax, a team from Amsterdam that has since forever been nicknamed “The Jews”. In poor taste? Absolutely. Dumb? Hey, we’re talking about football fans. Ban it? The height of stupidity. But that is what France’s embattled government of embattled president François Hollande has just done with Dieudonné’s routines.

So the BBC sent a reporter to France to make politically correct sense of it all. The reporter sounded like someone who has spent life mostly in England’s progressive middle class bubble where there exists an unwritten hierarchy of victims. Women first, of course – but they were never discussed as a group during the broadcast. That would have made things dead easy, most especially with a female reporter. Broadcasting House would have spent half an hour going bad bad bad misogyny bad bad bad and that would have been it. Now she just said that the broadcast would contain uncomfortable language. Translation: she was leaving a well-established ideological comfort zone.

And so we share her amazement to find black people – Number Two in the progressive victim hierarchy – who like Dieudonné and are planing to vote for the party he supports, the National Front. She manages to slip in the word “detoxify” when mentioning Front leader Marine Le Pen’s efforts to sanitize the party but she clearly is struggling here. Had it been local whites, Broadcasting House would have spent half an our going bad bad bad racists bad bad bad and that would have been it.

Instead we heard the sound of exploding heads. Blacks voting Le Pen? How the hell was that possible? Blacks calling the Socialist Party a bunch of hypocrites? How the hell could they, we have always been such nice progressive people! Here’s a hint: Labour Parties in much of Europe have squandered a century of social democratic achievement and ditched it in favour of a rancid combination of unfettered free market politics with a political patronage system based on identity politics. They left a massive hole where they should have been, defending their ideological legacy when fascism resurfaced – which happened not, as our BBC reporter dutifully parrots, as a result of the economic crisis. Fascism started gaining ground when the economy was ticking along very nicely and most of Europe was spoiled rotten, a decade ago.

Of course, our reporter made her job a little easier by omission, a classic BBC hallmark. For Dieudonné’s anti-Semitism does not stand in a vacuum; it has a long proud tradition among two of the world’s largest PC echo chamber’s favorite victim groups: black minorities with icons like US community leaders Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan; and North Africans who have been misguided into believing that Islam propels them towards hating Jews. The reporter solved these issues…by not mentioning them, nor indeed the selfsame groups’ highly problematic attitudes towards gays and lesbians; way too frightening. So it was with palpable relief that she found herself back on familiar territory by homing in on anti-Semitism. You see, taken in isolation, anti-Semitism is of course a classic no-no and you don’t even have to mention Israel, a state with which the world’s largest PC echo chamber has a very troubled co-existence.

Further, Dieudonné’s anti-Semitism does not stand in a vacuum but in yet another tradition, equally proud and older than the ones I just mentioned: French. Together with the Netherlands, France was among the most diligent European nations in handing Jews to the Nazis and their gas chambers. It is one of the demons the country has never addressed, like its own bloody colonial past in places like Cameroon (where Dieudonné’s father is from) or its vicious war in Algeria, where Marine Le Pen’s father tortured anti-colonial fighters (who then went on to terrorize their own people in similar fashion). These are among the things that have made Dieudonné possible – but how can you explain all that when you are working with such pitiful, pathetic tools: identity politics instead of history and political correctness instead of a political education?

Finally, and as a matter of course, nowhere in the report was quoted that famous line (French, was it not?): ‘I disagree with everything you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ In that sense, the BBC was dead on-message.

Tags: BBC, Dieudonné, France, identity politics, Islam