French authorities are investigating Djamel Boumaaz, a local councilor at the city of Montpellier for posting anti-Semitic messages on social media.
Prosecutors in the southern French city were notified on Monday that Djamel Boumaaz, a Muslim and former member of France’s far-right National Front party, had marked his Twitter account as being “forbidden to dogs and Jews” and had posted tweets that mocked or denied the Holocaust.
Boumaaz, who quit the National Front last year over what he termed anti-Muslim sentiments by party leader Marine Le Pen, claimed someone had hacked his account and posted the tweets, according to the French Infos H24.
A tweet posted in Boumaaz’s account on Sunday features a black-and-white picture of corpses along with the text “OK, let’s make up besides I have a heap of Jewish friends.”
Another message read “My son has nightmares from your Holocaust. I told him not to be afraid of imaginary things.”
Boumaaz is known to be an associate of Holocaust denier Alain Soral and the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. He was second on the National Front list for the municipal elections in Montpellier in 2014.
Last week, he caused a stir when he removed a Rainbow Flag that was flying at City Hall, and symbolically buried it to express his opposition to the LGBT movement.
Gilles Clavreul, France’s special envoy for combating racism and anti-Semitism, tweeted that he had contacted Twitter demanding the closure of Boumaaz’s account for hate speech, which is illegal in France.
Meanwhile, France’s Union of Jewish Students (UEJF) and the anti-racist organization SOS Racisme have sued Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for failing to remove anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic content. The groups said they had found more than 500 examples of such content, and only four percent of it had been deleted by Twitter, seven percent by YouTube and 34 percent by Facebook.
By: United with Israel Staff