Bob Dylan is in legal trouble in France because of a year-old interview he gave to Rolling Stone in which he compared Croatians to Nazis.

Dylan, 72, has been charged with incitement to hatred for statements that appeared in the magazine's Sept. 27, 2012 issue, according to AFP. The news service says the singer was charged while he was in Paris last month to accept France's Legion d'Honneur for his distinguished music career.

"Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery — that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that," Dylan was quoted as saying in the Rolling Stone interview. "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."

In the 1990s, Croatians and Serbs were involved in bloody ethnic warfare in the Balkans that killed thousands, including many civilians.

During World War II, the Independent State of Croatia was a Nazi puppet regime responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs and other ethnic groups.

The legal complaint against Dylan was filed by a Croatian group based in France, according to The Guardian.

French law bars speech that might invite "discrimination, hatred or violence with regard to a person or group of people on the grounds of their origin or of their membership or non-membership of an ethnic group, a nation, a race, or a religion," according to AFP.

Fashion designer John Galliano was found guilty of a related crime in France in 2011 for an anti-Semitic rant that was captured on video. He was fined about $8,400.

"Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery — that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that," Dylan was quoted as saying in the Rolling Stone interview. "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."

I'm only bothered by the remark that he puts Croatians in the same bucket as slavers and Nazi's apparently.

Also that sentence about Croatia being a Nazi puppet state in WWII is highly stupid, newspapers should really check some sources before they publish stuff like that as it gives off impression Croatia was part of Nazi/fascist forces when in reality things weren't clear cut like that. The government was indeed installed by Germans/Italians after their invasion in 1941., but people started to group almost immediately in an anti-fascist movement and started a guerrilla war against the imposed government and the movement was officially acknowledged as allies of Allied Forces in 1943.

And as far as the early 90s war goes, they also fail to mention Muslim forces that together with Serbs and Croats played a huge part in the war, and also fail to mention reasons for the war just to play into Dylan's remarkably dumb statement.