Outside, workers are completing the construction of the twisted Alta tower, symbol of the renewal of Le Havre. On August 21, Médine made an appointment with La Grande Ecole, a former school in the city center, renovated into a training center and vast hotel-restaurant in the pure boho chic style of Brooklyn or eastern Paris. As if the 40-year-old rapper, who wrapped his broad build in an immaculate white overshirt, also wanted to convince of his own metamorphosis.
The apostle of “conscious rap”, renowned for his lyrics as chiseled as they are committed, walks on a tight wire above the void. The announcement of his coming to the Summer Days of Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV), on August 24, in “his” city, fuels the controversy. The EELV mayors of Bordeaux and Strasbourg, Pierre Hurmic and Jeanne Barseghian, decided to boycott the event because of his presence. The Minister of Industry, Roland Lescure, also returned his invitation card, as did the mayor of Le Havre, Edouard Philippe. In question: the anti-Semitic nature of a tweet from Medina against the essayist Rachel Khan, Jewish and granddaughter of deportees, described as “resKHANpee”.
Despite the protests, the national secretary of EELV, Marine Tondelier, maintained the planned dialogue with Le Havrais, arguing on France Inter that it would be an opportunity to “talking about anti-Semitism” to do it better ” to move back “. The rapper defends himself: “There is nothing anti-Semitic in this tweet”, for which he apologized. Just from ” clumsiness “ and ignorance, he says, as to “family history” by Rachel Khan. “I am one of those who place on the same line the fight against anti-Semitism and that against anti-Muslim racismassures Medina. For me, the same mechanisms apply to these populations, and I fight them. » In the title RER D (2008), he launched that anti-Semitism “is a cancer, just like Islamophobia”.
Wanderings and mistakes
The clarity of this statement does not preclude ambiguity or wanderings or mistakes. For a long time, Médine showed unequivocal support for Dieudonné, joining on several occasions, in the early 2010s, the gesture to the word by performing a quenelle, this inverted Nazi salute invented by the anti-Semitic polemicist. In 2013, the artist raps in Oracle : “We know it will end with a golden quenelle / Wrongly the one who is right too soon, from the Théâtre de la Main-d’Or to social networks” – in reference to the Parisian venue where Dieudonné was performing at the time.
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