Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS, JANUARY–JUNE 2012 19
Antisemitic Comedy
Paris, April 12: French comedian Dieudonné is a well-established provocateur—a
Jew-baiter whose most recent show was called Mahmoud, after Iran’s Holocaustdenying
president. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the performer’s next
movie is titled L’Antisémite (The Antisemite) and features dialogue such as “It’s
clear the Jews control everything—the media, finance, politics. We no longer have
a choice. We must”—here’s the ostensible punch line—“exterminate them.” New
Yorker movie critic Richard Brody reports that Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson
appears for several minutes in the movie, which Le Monde says was co-produced
by Iran. The film is in the news because France’s League Against Racism and Anti-
Semitism is fighting to get it banned for being antisemitic and denying the Nazi
genocide. Denying the Holocaust is a crime in France. A lawyer for Dieudonné
argues that his client is just kidding around.
Carrickfergus, North Ireland, April 25: A Northern Irish schoolboy has suffered
antisemitic abuse and a physical attack after a chance remark during a Holocaust
history lesson, his family has claimed. The mother of Matthew Lough, 14, says he
has had to take time off from Carrickfergus College on the East Antrim coast after
being taunted as a “Jew boy,” having swastikas daubed on his schoolbooks and
finally undergoing a physical assault. The Police Service of Northern Ireland confirmed
that it was investigating the Lough family’s allegations of antisemitism. The
family said that after a lesson on the Shoah and Matthew’s revelation that his
maternal great-great-grandmother was Jewish, bullies started a campaign against
him. “It started last year with the swastikas drawn on his books, he was called ‘Jew
boy’; and one fellow pupil even told Matthew: ‘It’s a pity that the gas chambers
were not still open, so we could deal with you.’ This was before the physical
assault,” Sharon Lough told the Guardian.
New York, April 27: Detroit Tigers left fielder Delmon Young has been arrested on
a hate crime assault charge after police say he attacked a group of men and yelled
antisemitic epithets. According to the police, Young was standing outside of the
Hilton New York, not far from Times Square. A group of about four Chicago tourists
staying there were approached by a panhandler wearing a yarmulke. As the