Update: Dieudonne’s film, L’Antisémite, has been banned from the Cannes film fes­ti­val for vio­lat­ing the festival’s pol­icy of not “threat­en­ing pub­lic order or insult­ing reli­gious beliefs.”

Four sched­uled shows in Mon­treal by French come­dian Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, whose act rou­tinely includes Holo­caust denial, praise for Adolf Hitler, Nazi salutes, slurs against the Tal­mud and other anti-Semitic lan­guage, were can­celled last week by Quebec’s largest con­cert promoter.

The can­celled shows were part of Dieudonne’s first attempt to seri­ously pro­mote his first fea­ture film L’Antisémite, released ear­lier this year, in North Amer­ica. The film, report­edly funded in part by the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment, makes no attempt to con­ceal its mes­sage. The film’s trailer shows Dieudonne declar­ing, “It’s clear the Jews con­trol every­thing — media, finance, pol­i­tics. We no longer have a choice,” before arriv­ing to the appar­ent punch line, “we must exter­mi­nate them.” Another short clip from the film mocks the dis­cov­ery of the gas cham­bers at Auschwitz, sug­gest­ing that they were a fabrication.

Dieudonne has been the sub­ject of much con­tro­versy in Europe where he has been con­victed of incit­ing hatred in France and is under inves­ti­ga­tion in Bel­gium for “incit­ing racial hatred and xeno­pho­bia” dur­ing a per­for­mance ear­lier this year. Addi­tion­ally, Bel­gian author­i­ties recently forced Dieudonne to can­cel two shows in Brus­sels, and French police stopped Dieudonne mid-performance on May 9 for break­ing local defama­tion laws.

In addi­tion to his per­for­mances, Dieudonne makes his views known out­side the con­text of his sup­posed com­edy, includ­ing run­ning for the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment in 2009 with the Parti Anti Sion­iste (the Anti-Zionist Party), which received 1.3% of the vote. Accord­ing to the party’s web­site, its pri­mary goals are to remove the “Zion­ist inter­ven­tion” from the pub­lic affairs of France, denounce all politi­cians who advo­cate for Zion­ism, and to erad­i­cate all forms of Zion­ism from France.

In April 2010, Dieudonne was inter­viewed on Iran’s English-language pro­pa­ganda tele­vi­sion sta­tion Press TV, where he claimed that Zion­ism has orga­nized “all the wars and dis­or­ders on the planet.” He also argued that the stock mar­ket and the unem­ploy­ment that resulted from its crash are part of the “Zion­ist project” and that Zion­ists manip­u­late the film indus­try using movies as Jew­ish propaganda.

Dieudonne, the son of a French mother and a Cameroon­ian father, is also noto­ri­ous for a grotesque provo­ca­tion in 2008 in which he had his assis­tant, dressed as a Jew in a con­cen­tra­tion camp, present an award to Robert Fau­ris­son, a seri­ally con­victed Holo­caust denier, at a show at the Zenith The­ater in Paris. Dieudonne was fined €10,000 for the inci­dent, which was con­sid­ered a “pub­lic insult of peo­ple of Jew­ish faith or origin.”