Spouting allegations about Jewish power and influence, the French mixed-race comedian known, as “Dieudonne” likes to test the limits of free speech. Without setting foot on British soil, this professional firebrand has tested those limits in the UK to destruction. He has been banned.
The British government’s exclusion order on Dieudonne follows media uproar over the peculiar salute given by the comedian’s friend, the UK-based French footballer Nicolas Anelka, after he scored a goal in December for his club West Bromwich Albion. Popularized by Dieudonne and known as the quenelle, the salute, which involves reaching downwards with the right arm and crossing the chest with the left, has gained currency in France as a crypto-Nazi salute. Throughout France, Dieudonne has fans who thrill to his jibes that the French political establishment is controlled by a Jewish conspiracy. A significant proportion but by no means all of them are French Muslims of North African background.
Anthony Clavane, a British Jewish football reporter, wrote in the left-wing British magazine, the New Statesman, that Britain was also at risk of falling prey to anti-Semitic conspiracism. It concerns him that the progressive left in Britain did not condemn Anelka’s gesture outright. He seems to feel that it was because the quenelle speaks to the inner anti-Semite in left-leaning persons who unthinkingly embrace anti-Zionism as part of a fashionable package of radical attitudes.
Yet the quenelle is barely understood in the UK and some may wonder if Clavane is not pursuing a hidden agenda of his own, seizing the chance to endorse Zionist efforts to intimidate critics of Israel. However that may be, there is scant evidence of a British disposition to believe that the political establishment is a Jewish conspiracy.
The “conspiracy” against which much anger in Britain is directed is a London political elite widely felt to be beholden to the European Union and neither willing nor able to stop the UK from being overrun by immigrants. But if anything equals the public outrage generated by the influx into Britain of cheap foreign labor, it is that provoked by Islam and the increasing number of British mosques. Certainly, it is Muslims who loom larger in British popular demonology than any other group, including Jews.
Last week, the immigration spokesman for the United Kingdom Independence Party, Gerard Batten, who deplores the “explosion of mosques” across Europe, told the Guardian newspaper that he stood by his previously declared belief that British Muslims should be obliged to sign a charter rejecting violence. For all that the leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage, has sought to distance himself from his colleague’s astonishing outburst, it is shocking that Batten, a UKIP Member of the European Parliament, is able to make such inflammatory remarks in an “official” capacity. Indeed, it seems more than a little bizarre that a French comedian can be kept out of Britain as a potentially pernicious influence while a native politician is at liberty to smear Muslims in a manner eminently calculated to fuel ill-feeling and conflict.
There may be much worse to come. The fact is that UKIP, with its hard-right, anti-European Union, white nationalistic ethos, has become a magnet for disillusioned Conservative voters who abhor the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister David Cameron, scorning him for failing to win an outright Conservative majority in the last British General Election and for having had to form a coalition government with the pro-Europe Liberal Democratic Party. Now a grotesque bidding war is raging between UKIP and the Conservative Party, with each seeking to trump the other in their proclaimed determination to crack down on immigrants and asylum seekers and be “tough on terror.”
Anthony Clavane fails to acknowledge that this is a moment in the UK, as elsewhere, when, against a background of endemic insecurity, the center of political gravity is lurching ever further to the right, with minorities of every description in danger of being targeted as the “enemy within.”
It is not the “new anti-Semitism” that is compromising Britain’s vaunted liberal values but an altogether wider upsurge of vindictiveness and intolerance.
