Efforts at censoring the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala heighten his appeal.

This is happening in France, which follows the kind of anti-hate-speech approach that's pushed by some Americans who lack sufficient respect for our free-speech tradition.

[T]he attempts to silence Mr. M’bala M’bala seem to have fueled support for him among his core audience: a social and racial cross section of French people who feel shortchanged by a ruling elite....

Mr. M’bala M’bala... has... denied that he is an anti-Semite... In [one] of his popular routines he performs a song called “Shoahnanas” — a pun that in French sounds like the words “hot pineapple.” The word Shoah refers to the Holocaust, and Nana is a slang term for a woman akin to the English chick. The video features a thin, bedraggled man in the kind of uniform that was worn by prisoners in concentration camps, with an oversize yellow Star of David on it; the man jumps around the stage — a puppet on a string to Mr. M’bala M’bala’s satirical commentary....