(JTA) — British police received a criminal complaint for incitement against a musician who performed the quasi-Nazi quenelle salute to spite Zionists and suggested that Nazi gas chambers did not really exist.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism group reported on Wednesday that an unnamed party filed a complaint this week against Alison Chabloz, a performer at the Edinburgh Festival — one of the Scottish city’s main cultural events — after she posted to Twitter a photo of herself performing the quenelle.
She also published on her blog an essay by Robert Faurisson disputing the use of gas chambers by the Nazis and another paper entitled “Did six million really die?”
As blogs and local publications reported on the actions of Chabloz — a singer-songwriter who has lived in Egypt, among other countries — she published another blog post, explaining that her gesture was a “massive up yours” as a reaction to being “hounded online by a small group of hardline Zionists.”
Chabloz has been criticized in recent months for suggesting on Twitter that “it would appear that Anne Frank’s diary was mostly fabricated,” and that British organizations teaching about the Holocaust were “indoctrinating children.”
In her defense, Chabloz wrote that “nobody denies that the Jews and other groups suffered horrendous atrocities,” but added that, “if people dug a little deeper into the issue they may discover some interesting facts regards the presumed existence of homicidal Nazi gas chambers.”
As for the quenelle, which French Prime Minister Manuel Valls in 2014 termed “an anti-Semitic gesture of hate,” Chabloz wrote that Roger Cukierman, president of France’s Jewish CRIF group, considers it “an anti-establishment gesture unless it is performed outside a place of worship or memorial to Holocaust victims.”
Cukierman said last year that even though many quenelle performers don’t understand its Nazi connotations, it is nonetheless a hateful gesture that should be punishable by law.
“All publicity is good, and it’s time more people started standing up to Zionist bullies,” Chabloz concluded, adding the hashtag #FreePalestine.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
