French mainstream media and politicians are starting off the New Year with a shared resolution for 2014: permanently muzzle a Franco-African comedian who is getting to be too popular among young people.
In between Christmas and New Year's Eve, no less than the President of the Republic, François Hollande, while visiting Saudi Arabia on (very big) business, said his government must find a way to ban performances by the comedian Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala, as called for by French Interior Minister, Manuel Valls.
The leader of the conservative opposition party, UMP, Jean-François Copé, immediately chimed in with his "total support" for silencing the unmanageable entertainer.
In the unanimous media chorus, the weekly Nouvel Observateur editorialized that Dieudonné is "already dead", washed up, finished. Editors publicly disputed whether it was a better tactic to try to jail him for "incitement to racial hatred", close his shows on grounds of a potential "threat to public order", or put pressure on municipalities by threatening cultural subsidies with cuts if they allow him to perform.
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