Antisemitic French comedian Dieudonné Mbala Mbala’s channel on YouTube was abruptly closed down on Tuesday morning as part of the online video platform’s effort to remove racist content.
A spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, told the news agency AFP that Dieudonné’s channel had been deleted due to his “repeated violations of our YouTube community policies.”
The comedian’s channel was one of “more than 25,000 channels violating hate speech rules” shut down by the platform over the last 24 hours.
Banned from the UK, Canada and Belgium among other countries, Dieudonné has been convicted numerous times in France for violating laws against hate speech and Holocaust denial.
In 2013, he suggested that a prominent Jewish journalist belonged in a “gas chamber,” which brought him a fine of $24,000.
Two years later, Dieudonné was hit with a seven-year suspended prison sentence and a $106,000 fine for a Facebook post in which he expressed sympathy with the Islamist terrorist who murdered four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015.
In July 2019, he was fined 200,000 Euros and handed a two-year suspended sentence for tax evasion.
One of Dieudonné songs, titled “Shoananas” — a word that combines “Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “Holocaust,” with “ananas,” the French word for “pineapple” — pokes fun at the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis. The comedian is arguably best known for inventing the “quenelle” — an inverted Nazi salute that went viral in 2013.
The French Union of Jewish Students (UEJF) — which has campaigned vigorously against Dieudonné — welcomed YouTube’s decision and called on other social media platforms to follow suit by booting the comedian.
“This closure follows the action of the UEJF and its anti-racist partners who have been fighting for years, day by day, the spread of racist ideas, antisemitism and Holocaust denial of this pseudo-comedian,” the UEJF stated on its Facebook page.
In an interview with the news outlet Le Point, UEJF president Noémie Madar observed that antisemitic agitation had been a hallmark of the most recent videos released by Dieudonné during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The videos…betray the antisemitic obsessions of their creator,” Madar said.
With the closure of his YouTube channel, Dieudonné had lost 400,000 followers.
“The other internet players, Twitter and Facebook, now have no excuse,” Madar said, referring to two platforms where Dieudonné has collected 150,000 and 1.2 million followers respectively.
Dieudonné denounced YouTube’s decision as the result of “Israeli pressure,” hailing his personal website as “the last bastion of freedom on the internet.”