French Comedian Held on Suspicion of Sympathy for Gunman Who Killed 5

[Star Wars]

Dieudonné: Comedian Arrested For Showing Sympathy for Gunman

French police on Wednesday arrested the country’s most incendiary comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, for having posted a message on Facebook last week which appeared to show sympathy for the man who killed four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris last week.

“Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly,” wrote Dieudonné in a reference to the gunman Amedy Coulibaly who also fatally shot a policewoman last Thursday.

The arrest of the comedian was “totally exaggerated and disportionate” according to his lawyer Jacques Verdier. He told TIME on Wednesday that his client remained in custody nine hours after his arrest. Verdier said he thought the government had “lost its composure.”

The arrest is already being seen as a sign of double standards in France, coming three days after President François Hollande attended a march through the streets of Paris to proclaim freedom of speech. The paroxysm of violence in Paris began on January 7, when Said and Cherif Kouachi massacred eight journalists at the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo and four others. The Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed on Wednesday it had planned and ordered the attack on the publication.

On Wednesday, Dieudonné was being investigated for “defending terrorism.” His arrest came a day after Prime Minister Manuel Valls — who last year ordered theaters to cancel Dieudonné’s show — made an impassioned speech to parliament about “these preachers of hatred,” without mentioning the comedian by name. The comedian’s in-your-face act, with its jokes about the Holocaust, has made Dieudonné a household name in France, and tickets to his shows sell out weeks in advance. In a long interview with TIME last year, Dieudonné said, “there is some paranoia among Jews. If I have deeply hurt anyone, I apologize.”

Dieudonné, who comes from a Cameroonian immigrant family, has built his fame around the ability to push buttons and cause offence. That, says, Verdier, is similar to Charlie Hebdo, whose humor regularly insults people. “Dieudonné is also controversial, he is also against religion,” he says. The comedian has irked the government for years, and instilled deep anxieties in French Jews, who see his brand of humor as giving voice to rising anti-Semitism in the country.

While the Charlie Hebdo attack brought huge global sympathy, it has also provoked a strong debate in France about the limits of free speech, something that does not have blanket legal protection as it does in the U.S.. Judges can deem remarks, for example, to further terrorism or racial violence, and denying the Holocaust is banned under law. French officials have ordered 54 investigations into hate speech since the Charlie Hebdo attack.

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He was arrested for Suspicion of Sympathy for the gunmen ?? Suspicion of Sympathy ???? and yeah apparently there may be a lawsuit against him too. and btw One cartoonist, Siné, was kicked out of charlie hebdo under "suspicions of anti-semitism" while the magazine was openly islamophobic and even racist.

Siné - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Gufi]

Watch as we somehow debate this as the fault of Muslims or how this was not the good freedom of speech but the bad kind. And how we are always wrong in some way.

 

[ptltejas]

The Double Standard of So Called Civilised, Human Right Supporter. I dont know why it seems that White country are always seems with politics only. the thoughts of them is never be out of politics, and its added in each and everything, which spoil their thoughts and expression.

Yasir Qadhi
14 hrs · Edited ·
Seriously, sometimes I wonder how people can be so blind as to not see things staring at them in the face.

France has ARRESTED a comedian for making a joke about the killings, and charged him with abetting terrorism. Note that this person is a known comedian with a history of such 'satire' (which, apparently, is a type of satire not acceptable to the people who claim that any and all satire offensive to Muslims must be made acceptable).

'Free speech' indeed.

"Forty-eight hours after hosting a massive march under the banner of free expression, France opened a criminal investigation of a controversial French comedian for a Facebook post he wrote about the Charlie Hebdo attack, and then this morning, arrested him for that post on charges of “defending terrorism.” The comedian, Dieudonné,... has had his show banned by numerous government officials in cities throughout France, and has been criminally prosecuted several times before for expressing ideas banned in that country.

The apparently criminal viewpoint he posted on Facebook declared: “Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly.” Investigators concluded that this was intended to mock the “Je Suis Charlie” slogan and express support for the perpetrator of the Paris supermarket killings (whose last name was “Coulibaly”). Expressing that opinion is evidently a crime in the Republic of Liberté, which prides itself on a line of 20th Century intellectuals – from Sartre and Genet to Foucault and Derrida – whose hallmark was leaving no orthodoxy or convention unmolested, no matter how sacred."

As usual, first rate report from the indefatigable Glenn Greenwald:

Some one Rightly said, I had read and forget from where Westerns are said more on Human Rights and etc. but their actions shows something else. Need some more mature laws from them.