the venue, injuring a spectator. On 11 November, Dieudonné organized a debate with four rabbis of Naturei Karta in the Théâtre de la Main d'Or in Paris. On 16 February 2005, he declared during a press conference in Algiers that the Central Council of French Jews CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France) was a "mafia" that had "total control over French policy exercise", called the commemoration of the Holocaust "memorial pornography" ("pornographie mémorielle"), and claimed that the "Zionists of the Centre national de la cinématographie," which "control French cinema" prevented him from making a film about the slave trade. Dieudonné was also trying to appear as a spokesman for French blacks, but, after some initial sympathy, from the novelist Calixthe Beyala, the journalists Antoine Garnier and Claudy Siar, as well as the founding members of the Conseil représentatif des associations noires (CRAN), he increasingly met with their rejection. Throughout 2005 and 2006, Dieudonné was often in the company of senior National Front members Bruno Gollnisch, Frédéric Chatillon, and Marc George (also known as Marc Robert), the man who went on to conduct his electoral campaigns in 2007 and 2009. Dieudonné also frequently appeared together with the conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan and the former Marxist and current right-wing radical Alain Soral, a confidant of Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Under the influence of Soral's writings and polemics, Dieudonné was acquainted with his militant antisemitism of French nationalist inspiration. In May 2006, he gave a lengthy interview to the far-right monthly Le Choc du mois. Demonstrating shoulder to shoulder with Islamists, he also traveled at the end of August 2006 with Châtillon, Meyssan and Soral in Lebanon, to meet MPs and fighters of the Hezbollah. Some Jews reacted angrily to his comments on this tour. In April 2005, Dieudonné went to Auschwitz. In May 2006 he was involved in a fight with two teenage Jews in Paris, one of whom he sprayed with tear gas. Dieudonné claimed that the teenagers attacked him first; both parties pressed charges, but the lawsuits were not pursued. In France and abroad, Dieudonné became increasingly perceived as an extremist of a type until then uncommon in Europe: in the introduction to a March 2006 interview, The Sunday Independent of South Africa called him a "French Louis Farrakhan... obsessed with Jews". 2007–2009 Dieudonné wanted to finally represent politically these ever-radicalized positions in the 2007 presidential election,