In France, a local councilor is being investigated for allegedly posting anti-Semitic messages on social media.
Prosecutors in the southern French city of Montpellier were notified on Monday that Djamel Boumaaz, a former member of France’s far-right National Front party, had marked his Twitter account as being "forbidden to dogs and Jews" and had featured tweets there which 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, said someone had hacked his account and posted the tweets, according to the news site 'Infos H24'.
In a tweet posted on Sunday, a black-and-white picture of corpses along with the text: “OK, let’s make up besides I have a heap of Jewish friends" could be seen. Another message read: "My son has nightmares from your Holocaust. I told him not to be afraid of imaginary things."
In the past, Boumaaz could be seen together with 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 removing a Rainbow Flag, which was flying on City Hall, from the mast and symbolically burying it in the ground 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 4 percent of it had been deleted by Twitter, 7 percent by YouTube and 34 percent by Facebook.