Médine private concert at the Belgian neighbor. The French rapper, at the heart of a controversy in France after a tweet deemed anti-Semitic which he later regretted, was deprogrammed from a festival where he was to perform on Friday in Namur. In a press release, the festival Les Solidarités explains “to give up the arrival” of the rapper, “with a certain 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. In spite of ourselves, 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 message two weeks ago on the social network X (formerly Twitter), he called the essayist Rachel Khan, Jewish and granddaughter of deportees, “resKHANpée”.
“Anti-Semitism is a poison that I have been fighting for a long time”
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 the newspaper on Wednesday. The Parisian. About the controversial tweet, he adds: “It’s a mistake, I recognize it”.
He says he “didn’t have his family’s history in mind” when he posted the “awkward tweet” in response to a message from Rachel Khan calling it “rubbish”. Several figures from the Belgian political class seized on Tuesday the controversy that swells in France, a centrist deputy seeing in the fact of tolerating the words of Medina a way of “trivializing evil”.