I feel like i'm losing my time saying this but i'll say it anyways. I know almost everything there is to know about Dieudonné and the whole " quenelle " (the gesture he invented) controversy. You can believe me or not but that gesture has NOTHING to do with a nazi salute.
Now let me be clear, Dieudonné is an antisemite of the worst kind. There is ZERO doubt about that. He has close ties with one of the most fanatic french antisemite, Alain Soral, and he's obsessed with Jews. But doesn't change the fact that the gesture isn't a hitlerian salute. It originates from a very VERY old show of his, where he mimicked penetrating a mamal's ass with his hand. Saying " This is a quenelle in your ass " And gradually using his other hand to show how far he pushed his hand inside the animal's arse.
It's a very vulgar gesture, he started making it for about everything. When talking about a politician he hates he would do it, when talking about a journalist or an intellectual or a singer. And THEN some of his fans started posting pictures of themselves doing it and some of them did it in Auschwitz. Young thugs thinking it was funny to do it there and post those photos on the internet. That's when people started saying that it was a hitlerian salute. But it never was. The thugs who did it in Auschwitz were Antisemites who were basically saying " fuck jews ", but had no nazi affiliation or whatever. but that doesn't change the fact that the quenelle wasn't and never was a nazi salute.
Again, i couldn't care less about Dieudonné, he's always trying to provoke and victimize himself and has no respect for the families of dead people, jewish and non-jewish. But this is absolutely wrong for the government to use him as a scapegoat. My friend is a lawyer and he just posted on facebook that there is absolutely ZERO chance that he gets condemned for saying " Today i feel like i'm Charlie Coulibaly " ( Coulibaly was the name of one of the terrorists). Dieudonné later said that it was show how much he felt like the government was treating him like a terrorist when he was just a comedian. Censoring his shows already was a terrible mistake and it was a first since the second world war. It opened a pandora box. True justice is to wait for a comedian to make his show and then AFTER that you can take him to court if he says racist and antisemitic jokes. But what happened is that his show was banned BEFORE he performed it on the basis of some stolen footage, which was a first, This isn't how we do things in a democracy. At the end, he took out 3 jokes from his show and was allowed to perform it again, and he toured for many months.
Dieudonné is a piece of shit but what the government is doing is completely wrong. And anyone supporting this decision is blind.