Rapper Médine deprogrammed from a festival in Belgium

French rapper Médine, at the heart of a controversy in France after a tweet deemed anti-Semitic which he later regretted, was canceled from a festival where he was to perform on Friday August 23 in Namur, Belgium, announced Wednesday the organizers.

In a press release, the festival Les Solidarités explains "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. 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”.

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," said the 40-year-old singer on Wednesday in the newspaper Le Parisien. About the controversial tweet, he adds: "It's a mistake, I admit it". He says he had 'his family history not in mind' when he posted the 'awkward tweet' in response to a message from Ms Khan calling it 'rubbish'.

Several figures of the Belgian political class seized on Tuesday the controversy which swells 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 by not bringing this person?", wrote Mr. Bouchez on the X network, also accusing the French rapper of being "openly anti-police".