Brussels Jewish Museum Shooter’s Lawyers Shown Making ‘Quenelle’
Attorneys representing the suspected killer of four people in Belgium’s Jewish museum posed for a picture while performing the quenelle gesture, which many believe is an anti-Semitic salute.
A photo showing Sebastien Courtoy and Henri Laquay, the two lawyers representing Mehdi Nemmouche in Brussels, performing the quenelle surfaced this week, the Belgian Het Belang van Limburg local daily reported.
Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French national who is believed to have fought with jihadists in Syria, was extradited this week from France to Belgium to face trial for the May 24 murders at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. He was arrested on May 30 in the French port city of Marseille during a routine customs inspection, in which he was found to be carrying weapons similar to the ones used in the attack on the museum. He has denied any involvement in the murders.
The undated photo of the lawyers shows them performing the quenelle with the gesture’s inventor, the French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, who has several conviction for inciting racial hatred against Jews and has written, directed, produced and starred in the 2012 film called “The Antisemite.”
Earlier this year, Manuel Valls, France’s former interior minister, said the quenelle — the act of folding one’s arm over one’s chest while pointing downward with the other arm — was “ an anti-Semitic gesture, an inverted Nazi gesture” which may violate France’s laws against incitement.
Valls, who is now France’s prime minister, made the assertion based on hundreds of photos online of people performing the quenelle at sites connected to the Holocaust or Jews, or while holding a pineapple in an allusion to a joke created by Dieudonne to suggest the Holocaust never happened or to mock it without breaking laws forbidding Holocaust denial. Dieudonne coined the phrase “shoananas” — a mashup of the Hebrew world for the genocide and the French word for pineapple.
Dieudonne — who has often mocked the Holocaust and other murders of Jews — and several of his supporters have argued the quenelle is merely an expression of objection to the establishment, not to Jews.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
