ABSTRACT
When the Premier League footballer Nicolas Anelka celebrated a goal by performing a quenelle salute in 2014 he touched off a storm of protest. Dave Rich examines the phenomenon of the quenelle and why it is now so easy for raw, old-fashioned antisemitism, as well as Holocaust denial, to be inserted into contemporary, and often inchoate, ‘radical’ politics. He discusses the political project of the French antisemite most associated with the gesture, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who has travelled from the political left via the FN to form the Parti Anti Sioniste (Anti-Zionist Party – PAS). Dieudonné is assessed as emblematic of a post-Cold War, post-9/11 radical politics that seeks to erase traditional political divisions to build new kinds of coalitions uniting neo-Fascism, anti-capitalism and revolutionary Islamism against ‘Global Zionism’. The quenelle functions as both a cultural meme and political identifier for Dieudonné’s politics and the movement it has spawned.
