French riot police surrounded the theater where a controversial comic was supposed to put on a show in the city of Nantes.  This, after the country’s highest court decided that local officials were correct to ban the performance of Dieudonne M’bala M’bala because of alleged anti-Semitism.

Police came to the Zenith hall with shields and body-armor, however the worst they had to face was a fraction of the 6,000 ticket holders berating them for enforcing the law.  The audience might have thought the show was on because earlier in the day, a judge in Nantes had supported Dieudonne’s appeal to overturn local officials’ ban.  But as soon as that happened, France’s interior minister Manuel Valls went to the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative court to pull the plug on the show.

Dieudonne seems to have cobbled together an audience of anti-Semites on the Far Right and Islamist radicals in the high-rise housing projects ringing the capital.  Without using the obvious epithets and hate speech, he associates with holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists.

Dieudonne is also the originator of the “quenelle”, which he claims is an anti-establishment gesture but which critics say is an inverted nazi salute.  His followers use it to mock Jews and Jewish suffering at places from Jewish-owned businesses to Holocaust memorials.