French far-right author sent to prison for anti-Semitic incitement
Alain Soral, a well-known Holocaust denier with multiple convictions for incitement, gets unusual one-year term for charges including insulting a female magistrate
A French court on Thursday sentenced far-right Holocaust denier Alain Soral to one year in prison for insulting a magistrate and making anti-Semitic comments on his website.
On the site, which is called “Equality and Reconciliation,” Soral wrote that Jews “are manipulative, domineering and hateful.”
Soral, 60, has been convicted multiple times of incitement to hatred over a constant stream of anti-Semitic comments over the years. His last conviction was in December in a defamation case. The Paris Court of Appeal fined him 4,000 euros ($4,500) for producing and selling on his website a poster targeting Jews.
“We will continue to prosecute Mr. Soral as long as he makes anti-Jewish remarks,” said attorney Ilana Soskin, representing the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, which brought the latest complaint against Soral.
Soral was also sentenced for insulting a female magistrate, saying he had “never heard so many lies and dishonesty out of the mouth of a woman, and I have known prostitutes.”
The sentence marks the first serious punishment for the far-right provocateur, according to Richard Malka, an attorney representing the magistrate.
The French Union of Jewish Students tweeted praise for the court’s decision Thursday against “this little propagandist of hatred.”
In 2016, a French court slapped Soral with a $13,000 fine and a suspended prison sentence of six months for saying the Nazis should have finished killing the Jews of Europe.
The sentence was over Soral’s Facebook post a year earlier about Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, two anti-racism activists who helped track down dozens of Nazi war criminals.
“This is what happens when you don’t finish the job,” Soral wrote about an article on a state honor conferred on the Klarsfelds by Germany.
A judge found Soral, who has long been a well-known writer on the French far-right and an ally of the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, guilty of “justifying war crimes and crimes against humanity.” It marked only one of Soral’s multiple convictions for minimizing or mocking the Holocaust.
The judge also ordered Soral to pay 5,000 euros, or about $5,600, to each of the Klarsfelds and 2,000 euros, or $2,250, to the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, which then too filed the complaint against Soral.
JTA contributed to this report.