New episode in the controversy around the French rapper Médine. The Belgian festival Les Solidarités said in a press release on Wednesday August 23 that it had decided to deprogram the artist. The organizers of the festival in Namur explain “to give up the arrival” of the rapper, “with some consternation but for the sake of appeasement”.
“Today, following a tweet – the content of which we do not share – and despite the artist’s apologies and explanations, a wave of reactions, sometimes hateful, sometimes more balanced, swept the web and were covered by the press. Despite us, the festival is now a victim of this, ”add the organizers.
Médine is a controversial rapper in France, already accused in the past of “homophobic” positions or accused of “Islamist”. In a post two weeks ago on social network X (formerly Twitter), he called essayist Rachel Khan, Jewish and granddaughter of deportees, “resKHANpée”. An expression that he later regretted, denying himself of being anti-Semitic. He renewed his apologies in two interviews with the French press on Wednesday, on the eve of his participation in a political debate at the summer days of the EELV (ecologists) party in his hometown of Le Havre.
“Anti-Semitism is a poison, I have been fighting it for a long time,” the 40-year-old singer told Le Parisien newspaper on Wednesday. About the controversial tweet, he adds: “It’s a mistake, I admit it”. He says he “didn’t have his family history in mind” when he posted the “awkward tweet” in response to a message from Ms Khan calling it “garbage”.
Several figures of the Belgian political class seized on Tuesday the controversy which is swelling in France, a centrist deputy seeing in the fact of tolerating the words of Medina a way of “trivializing evil”. Georges-Louis Bouchez, the president of the French-speaking liberals, one of the parties of the coalition in power, had implicitly asked for the deprogramming of Medina in Namur. “Can we ask for a little decency in not having this person come?” “, wrote Mr. Bouchez on the X network, also accusing the French rapper of being “openly anti-police”.
