Bob Dylan Photo: Fred Tanneau/AFP
AFP Reports: Bob Dylan has been charged with insulting behaviour and incitement to hatred in France after a Croat group filed a complaint about an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, a judicial source says.
It follows a legal complaint lodged by a Croat association in France over a 2012 interview Dylan gave to Rolling Stone magazine.
The American singer was questioned and charged in mid-November after the group complained about the interview, in which he allegedly compared the relationship between Jews and Nazis to that of Serbs and Croats.
The Council of Croats in France (CRICCF) had filed the complaint a year ago over an analogy he made in the 2012 interview while discussing race relations in the United States.
Back in September 2012 I wrote a post on Bob Dylan’s atrocious, vilifying and hateful statement regarding Croats and Serbs and KKK and Americans in his Rolling Stone interview.
Reuters has just released this news item:
“The American singer Bob Dylan is being investigated in France after a Croatian community organisation alleged that comments he made to Rolling Stone magazine last year amounted to incitement to racial hatred, Paris prosecutors said on Monday.
In the interview, published in the magazine’s September 27, 2012 edition, the singer said racism was holding America back.
‘If you got a slave master or (Ku Klux) Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.’
The formal investigation followed a legal complaint from the organisation, CRICCF (the Council of Croats) , which is based in France, alleging that the comments as carried in the French version of the magazine violated French racial hatred laws.
In France, racism complaints automatically trigger formal investigations, irrespective of the merits of the case.”
Great going Council of Croats in France – you have done what I hoped my article on this blog would spark: defend the Croatian truth and pride by pursuing anyone who tramples on them without regard to the truth or whom they vilify and insult. Bit by bit, with perseverance, Croatian truth will show, hateful propaganda will fall.
Whatever comes out of this, and I trust Dylan will be called upon to answer, one thing is for sure: Dylan and hopefully other celebrities who often appear reckless in commenting about a nation of people will think twice before doing it again and, if they have a tendency to spill out offensive and hateful or scandalous blurts then they will be advised to get their facts right first and then open their mouth!
Hopefully Dylan will be forced into a situation where he will be faced with what utter devastation, genocide, rape, torture, concentration camps…were committed by Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during 1990’s, learn a bit about history before speaking in ways that so deeply offend today’s generation. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)