Earlier this month French Interior Minister Manuel Valls advised city mayors to ban the satirist’s shows and some have already done so. Valls insists that Dieudonné is "no longer a comedian" but is instead an "anti-Semite and a racist". The satirist is said to have contacts to right-wing extremists and Holocaust deniers. He's also credited with inventing the quenelle, a gesture that's been called a reverse Nazi salute. Dieudonné, however, claims that the quenelle is simply a form of anti-establishment protest.