French rap video calling for ‘whites to be hanged’ causes furore

Alittle-known French rapper has caused outrage by calling for whites to be killed in a video depicting a white man being tortured, shot and hanged from a tree. The video by Nick Conrad-which controversial black comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala , a convicted anti-Semite, linked to on his Facebook page on Saturday-was viewed thousands of times on YouTube before being taken down yesterday. In one scene from ‘PLB’ (short for ‘Pendez Les Blancs’, or ‘Hang Whites’) the rapper and an associate drag their white victim along the pavement and kick him in the head, in an apparent reference to a scene from the film American History X, about the abuse of blacks by American neo-Nazis.

The lyrics evoke the killing of adults and children with the rapper singing: “I walk into creches, I kill white babies, catch them quick and hang their parents.” Government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux condemned the “hateful, nauseating lyrics in the strongest possible terms” as did Interior Minister Gerard Collomb, who slammed the video’s “abject remarks and ignominious attacks”. The Paris prosecutors office opened an inquiry, with the rapper likely to face charges of incitement to hatred under France’s strict hate speech laws. Anti-racism organization LICRA, which filed a formal police complaint, also hit out at the rapper, saying his artistic freedom “is not the freedom to call for whites to be hanged because of the color of their skin.”—AFP