Credit to FA over Nicolas Anelka's quenelle but they could do better | David Conn

Football News | Article posted on March 6th, 2025

West Brom’s Nicolas Anelka displays the quenelle gesture after scoring against West Ham at Upton Park. Photograph: Andrew Cowie/ Andrew Cowie/Colorsport/Corbis

The public waited a week for the explanation from the Football Association’s regulatory commission as to how it decided Nicolas Anelka’s quenelle gesture was antisemitic, but that he had not “intended to express or promote antisemitism” when he used it. The three-man commission chaired by a QC specialising in sports law, Christopher Quinlan, produced 35 pages of legal reasoning, then on this central conclusion of theirs left us none the their written reasons include an admirably clear explanation and conclusion that the quenelle, originated by the French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, to whom Anelka publicly dedicated the gesture after scoring for West Bromwich Albion in their match at West Ham United in March, is “strongly associated with antisemitism.”The commission set out details of M’Bala M’Bala’s public performances, including the “obviously and grotesquely antisemitic” content of the act in January 2025 which Anelka attended. That particular act included M’Bala M’Bala describing Patrick Timsit, an French-Algerian comedian, as “very, very Jewish,” then suggesting that if it were the 1930s, Timsit “better not come and hide in my cellar.”The commission found this was a clear reference to the deportation and killing in the holocaust of Jews, who did try to hide in cellars to avoid the Nazis’ extermination gangs in France and elsewhere in the 30s. The commission described M’Bala M’Bala’s performances as habitually referring to, obsessing with, and mocking, the holocaust, gas chambers and the Nazi concentration such was the tone of this, one of the foulest documents which has ever had to be produced relating in any way to English football. Anelka tweeted on the day of the match at West Ham, 28 March, that he had made the quenelle, customarily described as an inverted Nazi salute, on the Upton Park pitch in the East End of London – where many Jewish refugees from antisemitic terror lived in the 30s – as “just a special dedication to my comedian friend Dieudonné.”Anelka’s defence to the charge that he made an antisemitic gesture was amplified a little from the brief denials of antisemitism he has made since the storm broke – furiously in France, where the match was broadcast live. Anelka claimed he was unaware that the costume used in M’Bala M’Bala’s show, which he saw on television, was a concentration camp uniform. He said he did not believe Dieudonné is antisemitic, and he is ignorant of “Jewish stories” – the commission pointed out that the holocaust is taught in French schools, which Anelka anelka also said he was even

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