French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is facing a police investigation after tweeting pictures of the decapitated body of Islamic State victim James Foley, in a move his parents have said “deeply disturbed” them.
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The beheading picture had vanished from Le Pen’s Twitter account on Thursday, but two others – one showing a prisoner being burned alive and the other a tank driving over another man in an orange tracksuit – were still there.
Despite this, Mr Bourdin dismissed Ms Le Pen’s reaction as “hysterical”, insisting: “At no point did I say the FN was like Daesh”.
Foley’s parents John and Diane want Le Pen to remove the “shamefully uncensored” image of their son, and for her to stop using his image for political gain.
According to reports, Le Pen’s tweets were addressed to local BFM TV journalist Jean-Jacques Bourdin, whom she accused of likening her party Front National (FN) to ISIS.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls described the tweeting of the images as “monstrous” and accused Le Pen of “inflaming public debate”. However, two other tweets with images of IS killings remained visible on her Twitter account, and Le Pen defended her decision to post the images.
Ms Le Pen has strived for years to make her anti-Europe, anti-immigrant party more mainstream.
Foley was captured in 2012 & beheaded in 2014.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the authorities would look into the publication of the images.
Le Pen tweeted the images with #Daesh – an acronym for ISIS.
He said that the photos were “Daesh propaganda and a disgrace, an abomination and an absolute insult to all victims of…”
Bourdin, who is known for his combative one-on-one interviews, raised the issue by asking Kepel about his latest book, in which the author suggests there were “links” between the National Front (FN) and the jihadist organisation.
Bourdin said both the FN and IS wanted to push their supporters to withdraw into their cultural identity.
Her party failed to win a single region in France’s elections on Sunday.
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In the wake of the November 13 attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead, Le Pen warned that “Islamist totalitarianism will take power in our country” if the IS group wasn’t defeated.
