Bob Dylan has been charged with a hate crime in France. According to The Associated Press, the Council of Croats in France took offense to comments made in a 2012 interview in which Dylan compared Croatians to Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. The council filed a complaint with the French government, which led authorities to charge Dylan with “public insult and inciting hate.”
Speaking about race relations in the United States, Dylan told Rolling Stone: “If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.”
France, where 30,000 Croatians call home, has very strict laws punishing hate speech and racist remarks, according to The AP. Croatia and Serbia were involved in a lengthy war in the mid-1990s, which left 20,000 people dead. During World War 2, hundreds of thousands of Serbians were killed in Croatian concentration camps.
Incidentally, Dylan traveled to France last month to receive an award from the Culture Ministry when he was questioned by French authorities, Yahoo! reports. The charges weren’t publicly disclosed until today.
