The family of American reporter James Foley is urging French far-right leader Marine Le Pen to take down tweets of gruesome photos of him and others executed by Islamic State extremists.
Advertisement
A French court on Tuesday acquitted French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen of incitement to hatred after she compared Muslim street prayers to the Nazi occupation in World War Two.
Le Pen posted the image, plus two other graphic photos, in response to a journalist whom she accused of likening her party to the jihadist group.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, asked about the tweets in parliament, told lawmakers he has taken the case to a section of the judicial police that deals with illicit content on the Internet so it can look into the matter “as it does each time these photos are diffused”.
Le Pen used the trial, held just six weeks before the first round of the elections, as a platform to defend those positions, describing her 2010 comments as an “exhortation to respect the law” on behalf of “those who have been abandoned, the forgotten ones”.
Despite this, Mr Bourdin dismissed Ms Le Pen’s reaction as “hysterical”, insisting: “At no point did I say the FN was like Daesh”.
Last August, IS released a video of the killing of James Foley, who went missing in Syria in 2012.
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. She was responding to a radio presenter who drew a parallel between the National Front and the jihadist movement. Le Pen was making an attempt to show the distinction between the 2 still the effort backfired, drawing widespread condemnation, & the inside minister accused her of fomenting ISIS propaganda.
Bourdin, during his morning show known for combative one-on-one interviews, suggested there were “links” between Front National (FN) and ISIS.
Bourdin said both the FN and IS wanted to push their supporters to withdraw into their cultural identity.
“We are only showing the hate-filled ignominy of those who (compare) us with killers”, he is reported as saying.
Advertisement
In the wake of the November 13 attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead, Le Pen warned that if IS was not conquered “Islamist totalitarianism will take power in our country”.
