Did a French Comedian Inspire the Killings at the Jewish Museum in Brussels?

Links between Dieudonné, the Belgian anti-Semite Laurent Louis, and Iran show how anti-Semitism is spreading in Europe

By Marc Weitzmann for Tablet Magazine

Immediately after an unknown killer walked into the Jewish museum in Brussels and gunned down four people, the president of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism, Joël Rubinfeld, made the following statement: “What just happened was foreseeable. It was bound to happen. For the past few years, we witnessed a liberation of anti-Semitic words. It grows up again, most notably through the speeches of both the comedian Dieudonné and the representative Laurent Louis.”

Three hours later, Laurent Louis answered with a very long statement whose rhetoric calls to mind the Nazi answer after the Reichstag burning. He said in substance that blaming him or Dieudonné for the massacre was “too easy.” He had nothing to do with this “fool deed”—“fool” as in not anti-Semitically motivated—and implied that those responsible were to be found among his fiercest enemies, secret organizations who were trying to weaken his party “Stand up Belges!” on the eve of the European elections—the implication, obvious to those familiar with Louis’ national crusade against Israel, being that the Jewish state itself was behind the museum massacre. (Despite the length of his declaration, Louis had not a word for the victims.)

Bu then what was Rubinfeld alluding to? What is the connection between Louis and Dieudonné M’Bala M’bala, the notorious anti-Semitic French comedian? in 2013, Louis briefly enrolled in Parti Islam, a small organization with apparent links to Iran. Dieudonné, on the other hand, is involved in the “anti Zionist party,” which is led by Yahia Gouasmi, a French Shiite imam of Algerian background who claims to have met Khomeini in 1978 during his exile in France. The author Alain Soral has publicly admitted that the “anti-Zionist party,” of which he is a member, had received 3 million euros from Tehran, in order to finance the party’s electoral campaign in the 2009 European parliamentary elections; although the number shrank to 300,000 euros in a second statement that Soral was forced to make, he has never denied receiving large sums of money from Iran.

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