Category: Europe

‘Anti-Semitism and far-right correlate’

Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky warned last week that “we are seeing the beginning of the end of Jewish history in Europe,” in an op-ed published in the U.K.’s Jewish Chronicle last week.

Sharansky joins a number of European figures, including French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, to warn about the alarming rise of anti-Semitism on the continent since the beginning of Israel’s military operation in Gaza on July 8.

In Britain alone, the number of anti-Jewish incidents has more than doubled in the past month. According to a report in the Daily Mail, more than 100 events have been recorded since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge, the second-highest total since Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense in 2008.

Newsweek’s upcoming cover story on rising European anti-Semitism highlights the rise in far-right political parties as directly correlated to rising numbers of anti-Semitism throughout European countries.

Sharansky himself estimated in June that between 5,000 and 6,000 Jews were expected to leave France for Israel this year because of anti-Semitism.

“Never in the history of the State of Israel has there been a Jewish community in the free world that has sent such a large proportion of its Jews to Israel,” Sharansky said at the time.

Sharansky has been an outspoken critic of European anti-Semitism since the early 1970s, when he became the symbol of Soviet Jewry’s struggle for human rights.

EU funds terror through ransom payments

European governments are funding Al-Qaeda by paying ransoms for hostage releases, New York Times investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Rukmini Callimachi claims.

“Kidnapping Europeans for ransom has become a global business for Al-Qaeda, bankrolling its operations across the globe,” the newspaper’s report says.

According to unnamed senior diplomats questioned by the newspaper, the now well-rehearsed ritual started as early as 2003, when the German Government handed funds budgeted as humanitarian aid for the poor of Mali to a group of Islamic extremists holding 32 European hostages.

The kidnapping revenues that Al-Qaeda received from European governments and state-controlled companies since 2008 are estimated by the newspaper at no less than $125 million, with half of the sum coming during the last year.

“The more these organizations believe they can benefit from taking hostages in, and getting paid off, the worse it is over the long run for everybody,” the Washington Post quoted US Treasury Under Secretary David Cohen as saying.

The current ransom investigations follow last week’s unconfirmed reports that a £140,000 ($237,000) ransom was paid for British teacher Mike Harvey held hostage in Yemen for five months.

The number seems relatively low when compared to the $33.5 million that the French government is believed to have paid in October 2013 for the release of four French hostages after three years in captivity in Niger.

In 2012, Cohen addressed the problem of Western countries paying ransoms to terrorist organizations in a widely cited report. According to the data compiled, the average ransom payment per hostage to groups like Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has increased from $4.5 million to $5.4 million in just one year.

Source: RIA Novosti

Gaza protest in Paris draws thousands despite ban

Several thousand gathered in Place de la République in Paris, France to protest the Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, defying a state ban on the demonstration.

Protesters chanted “Israel is an assassin, Holland is an accomplice” and “we are all Palestinians,” and some were seen gesturing the quenelle, a reverse Nazi-salute, AFP reported.

Palestinian supporters decided to defy the ban and hold the protest as planned.

Earlier, France’s interior minister called on the protest’s organizers to observe the order, fearing anti-Semitic violence.

Bernard Cazeneuve made his public appeal shortly before Saturday’s demonstration in Paris was to start. Hours earlier, the Council of State, France’s top administrative body, ruled the protest ban was legal.

A court had ruled likewise, but organizers said they still planned to hold the protest.

France has Western Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim populations.

Source: Haaretz

Berlin fingers NATO for ATC blackouts

The German government has indicated that NATO electronic warfare (EW) training exercises were responsible for civilian ATC radar display blackouts in central Europe on 5 June and 10 June 2014.

IHS Jane’s has obtained the government’s answer to a parliamentary question on 17 July, in which it noted that: “In the relevant time period two separate exercises by NATO forces with EW assets were conducted, in the first case by the Hungarian Air Force and in the second by the Italian Army and [undisclosed] partners.”

Both exercises involved ground-based air defence radar assets and were held under the NATO Electronic Warfare Integration Period programme. The German government statement said this is “especially dedicated to test and train EW in the airspace. Further details at the moment cannot be given, as investigations by EASA and NATO are ongoing”.

Informed by IHS Jane’s about the German information, an Austrian Air Force official would not disclose if Austria was informed about NATO EW activities in its airspace. The official emphasised that during the June incidents, the Air Force retained full coverage of Austrian airspace with its Kreidfeuer situational awareness picture, which is provided by three fixed Selex ES RAT-31L primary radars.

Source: IHS Jane’s

Merkel orders surveillance of US and UK

Chancellor Angela Merkel has ordered her counter-espionage services to begin surveillance of British and American intelligence gathering in Germany for the first time since 1945 in response to a series of US spy scandals which have badly soured relations between Berlin and Washington.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung and two-state funded German TV channels, WDR and NDR, quoted an unnamed Berlin government source who said Ms Merkel’s Chancellery and her interior and foreign ministries had agreed to launch counter-espionage measures against Britain and the US for the first time.

“Right now we need to send a strong signal,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted the source as saying. The extraordinary measures are a direct response to a series of embarrassing US and British spying scandals in Germany which began last year with revelations that the US National Security Agency had bugged Ms Merkel’s mobile phone.

The Chancellor protested on several occasions that she was “not amused” by the disclosures

The Independent subsequently revealed that like the Americans, Britain was operating a secret GCHQ listening post from the top of its Berlin embassy. A similar listening post on the roof of the US embassy in Berlin was almost certainly used to eavesdrop on Ms Merkel’s phone.

Source: The Independent

Ukranian parliament collapses

Ukrainian parliament-appointed Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk announced his resignation on Thursday.

He said his announcement would have “very complicated, if not dramatic, consequences for the country”.

The premier’s resignation automatically means the resignation of the entire government. But the cabinet members will continue fulfilling their duties until a new coalition is formed in the Rada.

Earlier Thursday, the parliament did not support the government’s bill on 2014 budget sequestration, as well as a draft law on reforming the country’s gas transportation system.

Violent anti-government protests, which started in November 2013 when Ukraine suspended the signing of an association agreement with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia, resulted in a coup in February 2014.

Then-President Viktor Yanukovych had to leave Ukraine citing security concerns the same month. New people were then brought to power amid riots in Ukraine.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or Yats, the leader of the parliamentary faction of the Batkivshchina party was also the choice of Victoria Nuland, the US assistant-secretary of State.

Crimea seceded from Ukraine and reunified with Russia in mid-March 2014. The move was not recognized by the international community despite being legal.

Crimea’s example apparently inspired residents of Ukraine’s southeastern regions who did not recognize the coup-imposed authorities, formed militias and started fighting for their rights. Kiev has been conducting a punitive operation against the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk regions to regain control over them.

Western-leaning billionaire businessman and politician Petro Poroshenko won the May 25 early presidential election in Ukraine set by the provisional Kiev authorities propelled to power during the February coup. He was sworn in and took office June 7.

Poroshenko signed the economic part of the association deal with the EU on June 27, on the sidelines of an EU summit in Brussels. The political part of the deal had been signed in Brussels on March 21.

Poroshenko, dubbed “the chocolate king” was rewarded with the appointment after he had funded anti-government protests that led to February’s coup.

Joe Biden’s son, oligarch fingered in MH17 crash

NATO held an exercise code named «BREEZE 2014» that ended in Black Sea. The exercise, which included the use of electronic warfare and electronic intelligence aircraft such as the Boeing EA-18G Growler and the Boeing E3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), coincided with the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, some 40 miles from the Russian border.

NATO ships and aircraft had the Donetsk and Lugansk regions under total radar and electronic surveillance.

MH-17 was shot down over a region where Russian-speaking separatist forces have been battling against the alliance of the Ukrainian armed forces and a private mercenary force answerable to a Ukrainian-Israeli billionaire oligarch.

About 200 U.S. Army personnel normally assigned to bases in Germany were in Ukraine during the time of the MH-17 fly-over. They were participating in NATO exercise RAPID TRIDENT II. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense led the exercise.

BREEZE included the AEGIS-class guided missile cruiser USS Vela Gulf. AEGIS cruisers’ AN/SPY 1 radar has the ability to track all aircraft over a large region.

The USS Vela Gulf was able to track Malaysian Airlines 17 over the Black Sea and any missiles fired at the plane. U.S. AWACS electronic intelligence (ELINT) aircraft were also flying over the Black Sea region at the time of the MH-17 flyover of Ukraine. Growler aircraft have the capability to jam radar systems in all surface-to-air threats.

The announcement of U.S. BREEZE and RAPID TRIDENT II military maneuvers came on May 21, 2014, and were announced on the website operated by Vice President Joe Biden’s office. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is a newly-named director of the Ukrainian natural gas and oil company Burisma Holdings, Ltd., owned by Kolomoisky, an Ukrainian-Israeli.

Kolomoisky has raised his own private mercenary army, and some say they even own the BUK missiles allegedly used in the shootdown of MH-17. Kolomoisky is the Governor of Dnipropetrovsk oblast in eastern Ukraine.

Burisma is part of Kolomoisky’s large umbrella corporation called Privat Group. He is estimated to be the second-richest person in Ukraine, also has strong connections inside Kiev’s Borispol International Airport, where it has been reported that Ukrainian Interior Ministry troops stormed the air traffic control tower shortly before MH-17 was shot down.

A Spanish air traffic controller, who possessed knowledge of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s involvement in the shootdown of MH-17, has reportedly had his life threatened. The Spanish controller, identified only as «Carlos,» understood that the shootdown of MH-17 was carried out by supporters of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. Kolomoisky is a political ally of both Tymoshenko and Avakov.

Kolomoisky’s forces are armed with advanced weaponry, obtained both from Ukrainian weapons inventories and from purchases on the black market. Kolomoisky’s forces, comprising Ukrainian regular military personnel; neo-Nazi units from west Ukraine, and foreign mercenaries, including Georgians, Romanians, and mercenaries from Sweden and Germany.

His troops were also responsible for the deadly May 1 fire-bombing of the trade union building in Odessa and burning people alive inside the Mariupol Police Station on May 9.

Georgians who serve in Kolomoisky’s Army have reportedly been trained in the use of BUK missile systems previously sold by Ukraine to Georgia under the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili. Kolomoisky has utilized ex-President Saakashvili’s «consulting services» in Dnipropetrovsk in the military and political campaign against the breakaway people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Kolomoisky chooses to «command» his army from the safety of Switzerland.

Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Kolomoyskyi will bear responsibility for their crimes, Russian Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin said Thursday.

“Avakov and Kolomoyskyi aren’t going anywhere. Sooner or later they will be held accountable for their criminal responsibility according to the norms of international law,” Bastrykin said.

As events in Ukraine continue to unravel, Russia is launching criminal cases against both individuals. The Russian Investigative Committee identified 2,700 victims in the criminal cases in the Ukrainian crisis, accusing Avakov and Kolomoyskyi of organizing unlawful massacres.

The testimonies came shortly after Russia issued arrest warrants for Avakov and Kolomoyskyi on charges of organizing murders and abductions, using banned means and methods of warfare, and preventing journalists from entering in the country.

Russian courts sentenced both Avakov and Kolomoyskyi in absentia in early July with the decision driven by the threat the two pose to regional security.

The shooting down of MH-17 drew the attention of the world’s media away from a ground invasion of Gaza.

Su-25s downed by Russian missile is nonsense says Russian Defense Ministry

Fantasies of Kiev’s authorities, trying to divert public attention from the Malaysian Boeing 777 crash, were “worthy of being included in a Red Book of military aphorisms”, a Russian Defense Ministry official said on Thursday, commenting on the statement of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council’s spokesman Andrei Lysenko that two Ukrainian Su-25 planes, which fell near the village of Dmitrovka in the Donetsk region, were shot down by a missile fired from Russia’s territory.

“According to Lysenko, it turns out that the planes were not only shot down from Russia’s territory, which is nonsense, but even by one missile fired from an anti-aircraft rocket system of a powerful operation type earlier unknown to science.”

“With such progress, the next sensation from the military professional, the famous colonel Lysenko will be development of the theme of hitting of two planes by one antiaircraft missile, one in the morning and the second in the evening,” the Russian Defense Ministry official said.

MH17 black boxes to Britain

Malaysian officials passed the black boxes from MH17 flight over to Dutch investigators five days after the Boeing 777 crash in eastern Ukraine, Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday citing the government of the Netherlands.

«The black boxes from flight MH17 have been handed over by Malaysian experts to the Dutch Safety Board (OVV) that is leading the international investigation,” the Dutch foreign ministry said in a statement, according to AFP.

Earlier media reports suggested the flight recorders would be taken to a British laboratory in Farnborough for local experts’ examination.

British Prime Minister David Cameron later wrote in his Twitter that the United Kingdom “agreed Dutch request for air accident investigators at Farnborough to retrieve data from MH17 black boxes for international analysis.”

On Monday, the authorities of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic handed over two flight data recorders recovered from the site of the plane crash to Malaysian representatives under the agreement that the UN International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) would have access to the black boxes.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17 near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, including 193 Dutch citizens.

Ukrainian authorities place the blame the independence supporters in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic for shooting down the plane with a missile, while the militia forces say they did not have the missiles to shoot a target flying at 33,000 feet.

Source: Itar-Tass

Ukranian tape fingering rebels a fake

A tape posted by Ukrainian security services in the Internet and allegedly recording a talk between self-defense fighters about the destruction of a Malaysian airliner is a fake, experts said on Sunday.

A group of experts studied the tape and came to the conclusion that it was made up of numerous unrelated recordings.

The tape’s second fragment consists of three pieces but was presented as a single audio recording. However, a spectral and time analysis has showed that the dialog was cut into pieces and then assembled. Short pauses in the tape are very indicative: the audio file has preserved time marks which show that the dialog was assembled from various episodes, the expert said.

The tape’s linguistic analysis also shows that those who made the faked tape clearly didn’t have enough material and time, the expert told Itar-Tass.

That is why, speech fragments hardly correlate with each other in terms of their sense and the spectral picture of audio materials also differs, the expert said.

But the most indicative moment is that the audio tape clearly shows that it was created almost a day before the airliner crash, the expert said.

The intercepted phone conversations released by Ukraine’s security service of pro-Russian rebels discussing how they shot down Malaysian airliner MH17 are “genuine”, the US embassy in Kiev had said on Sunday.

The recordings that Ukraine’s SBU security agency released on Thursday of what it claimed were phone talks involving rebels and a Russian military intelligence officer admitting that they had hit the passenger jet after mistaking it for a military aircraft.

The recordings were presented as key evidence to back up Kiev’s claims that rebels downed the jet while the separatists accused Ukraine’s army of being responsible, AFP reported.

“Audio data provided to the press by the Ukrainian security service was evaluated by Intelligence Community analysts who confirmed these were authentic conversations between known separatist leaders,” the US embassy in Ukraine said in a statement.

In one of the recordings a rebel commander nicknamed the “Major” says rebels shot down the plane and tells a disbelieving comrade that the jet is “100 percent a civilian aircraft.”

Gaza: France experiencing ‘torrent of internet hate’

Given the many threats of violence and murder they have to deal with, moderators struggle to cope psychologically.

The deadly Israeli offensive in Gaza has unleashed a torrent of hate on media websites and social networks in France that moderators find increasingly difficult to contain.

The bombardment by land, sea and air that has killed at least 425 Palestinians has enflamed tensions far afield from the Middle East, especially in France with its large Muslim and Jewish communities.

Paris protests in support of Gaza residents have degenerated into violence on several occasions.

“As soon as you talk about Israel, it crystallises all passions, with up to 20 000 or 30 000 comments sometimes after an article, of which we will only let five to 10 percent through,” said David Corchia, head of Concileo, a firm of moderators that counts the dailies Le Figaro and Liberation as clients.

Helped by software that automatically reports suspect keywords, online moderators can filter comments in accordance with special legal requirements in France as well as client requests. Those laws ban racist, anti-Semitic or discriminatory messages among others, as well calls for violence.

The moderators have little time to decide whether to let a remark through, and generally block 25 to 40 percent of comments.

But on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rejection rate can reach 95 percent.

“There are three times as many comments than normal, all linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Jeremie Mani, head of Netino, which looks after the websites of the Le Monde daily, Europe 1 radio and major French television channels.

Netino’s 250 moderators, most of them based in Madagascar, deal with tens of millions of comments every month.

“We see racist or anti-Semitic messages, very violent, that also take aim at politicians and the media, sometimes by giving journalists’ contact details,” Mani said.

“This sickening content is peculiar to this conflict. The war in Syria does not trigger these kinds of comments.

“On the pro-Palestinian side, identical messages are posted on dozens of sites. On the pro-Israeli side, there are fewer messages but they are better organised,” he said.

The vitriolic messages about the conflict come up not only after content about the conflict itself — but can be found under any subject.

“On an article about the Tour de France, after four comments it’s about Gaza,” said Mani.

“On one story about salmon fishing, I saw a comment saying: ‘Stop talking about this, the problem is there are too many Jews’.

“Without any moderation, these hate messages would invade everything, particularly as they quickly breed followers.”

Media sites are not the only platforms that fall victim to violent messages. Public spaces on social networks such as the Facebook pages of famous people are targeted, and those comments are first published before they can be removed.

And while the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict may generate a large amount of vitriol, other issues with a racial or ethnic element do too.

Corchia said that when a teacher was stabbed to death by a student’s mother in front of her young pupils earlier this month, racist messages began pouring in as soon as the foreign-sounding name of the assailant was revealed.

And when a former local election candidate for the Front National was given a nine-month jail sentence this week for comparing France’s black justice minister, Christiane Taubira, to a monkey, Corchia said that on one story, moderators were only able to publish 500 comments out of 10,000.

“We watch for word associations. For example, any allusion to World War II is eliminated,” he said.

Pierre Duhau-Laurent, marketing director for Atchik Services, which moderates the websites of the French presidency and the Le Parisien daily, said “organised propaganda” was currently sweeping social networks at night.

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has bought sponsored tweets for his messages. And Hamas’s response is just as organised,” he said.

Given the many threats of violence and murder they have to deal with, moderators struggle to cope psychologically.

International experts have still not arrived at MH17 crash scene

The international community has been accusing the anti-Kiev forces on the ground of mishandling bodies and evidence at the crash site.

A day earlier a spokesperson from the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) Aleksandr Borodai, accused the international community of lacking enthusiasm to investigate the plane crash.

The Dutch foreign minister said his country was “furious” to hear bodies were being “dragged around.” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott described the crash site in the territory controlled by anti-Kiev forces as “absolutely chaotic.”

Borodai explained all of the actions undertaken at the site of the crash were dictated by urgent humanitarian need to take care of the decomposing bodies.

The bodies of 196 MH17 crash victims have been placed inside refrigerated train carriages, according to the leadership of DPR, with international experts still not at the crash scene.

The DPR once again said it was waiting for the international experts to come and said it guaranteed their security, but wanted the Kiev authorities to agree to a ceasefire in turn, according to statement by DPR’s deputy PM, Andrey Purgin.

“We declare that we guarantee security of international experts at the site of the tragedy if Kiev agrees to a ceasefire,” the statement reads as cited by RIA Novosti. “We call on Kiev to immediately sign this agreement with DPR at least for the period of time while experts are going to work at the site of the plane crash.”

Meanwhile, foreign journalists got to a station where a train with the dead bodies stood. Their tweets from the site made many internet users wonder why journalists were able to make it to the crash scene, but experts could not.

The carriages at the Torez station were reportedly examined by the OSCE observers, who said there were 196 bodies inside.

That has not been confirmed by Alexander Hug, deputy chief monitor of the OSCE special monitoring mission to Ukraine, who said his team had actually seen body bags in the train carriages but were unable to count them, Reuters reports.

Representatives of the special mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Ukraine do have access to the crash site of a Malaysian Boeing-777 in eastern Ukraine, a representative of the mission, Michael Bochurkiv, told Itar-Tass on Sunday.

Earlier, the U.S. Department of State spokeswoman Jen Psaki expressed concern over the alleged failure of OSCE observers to reach the crash site.

“This is an element of information war against us,” Borodai said in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio station, noting that “Fourteen OSCE observers have been working at the airliner’s crash site already for three days. In fact, on the first day they faced some restrictions in their movement. But we explained this by a very simple fact: we are responsible for their security.

“The air disaster area is very big and exceeds more than ten square metres,” Borodai added, noting that “When they entered the zone, which is precisely in sight of Ukrainian machine guns, patrolmen stopped them [OSCE observers]. They proposed to them [OSCE observers] not to go there for one simple reason that if they had come under Ukrainian machine gun fire, responsibility would be shouldered on us.”

Source: RT/Itar-Tass

Black box will show who redirected MH17

As reported earlier by RIA, the Russian Defense Ministry says it had intercepted the activity of a Ukrainian radar system on the day the Malaysian plane went down in eastern Ukraine, the ministry’s press service said Friday.

“Throughout the day on July 17, Russian means of radar surveillance intercepted the operation of the Buk-M1 battery’s Kupol radar station located in the region of the populated area of Styla [30 kilometers south of Donetsk],” the press service said in a statement.

“The technical capabilities of the Buk-M1 allow the exchange of data on air targets between batteries of one battalion. Thus, the launch of rockets could have also occurred from any of the batteries deployed in the populated area of Avdeevka [8 kilometers north of Donetsk] or from Gruzsko-Zoryanskoe [25 kilometers east of Donetsk],” the ministry said.

Then we go to Itar-Tass which reported that civil flights in the air space of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions cannot be performed as the relevant communications infrastructure was destroyed there, a source from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) told ITAR-TASS on Thursday.

“Kiev operates all air traffic control services and it is unclear how this plane (the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 that crashed in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border Thursday night. — ITAR-TASS) could appear in the area,” he said.

“During the combat actions in Donetsk’s airport the communication tower, a part of the united air control service was blown up,” he said adding that “planes cannot fly there.”

On July 8, Ukraine’s State Aviation Service banned all flights over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions aiming to provide “adequate safety and security for all flights of civil aircraft in favor of state aviation.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council took a decision to close the airspace over the area of the so-called anti-terror operation to commercial flights three days ago, Rosaviatsia reported.

It is not clear why flight MH-17 diverted from its usual trajectory to fly over what was effectively restricted airspace.

Qantas hasn’t used the route for a few months, said Andrew McGinnes, a spokesman for the Australian carrier, while Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific said it has been detouring for “quite some time.” Korean Air Lines Co. and Asiana Airlines Inc. said in statements they have been avoiding the area since March 3.

Questions about the flight path, and where the instructions to change it came from, will be answered when the contents of the flight black box are released.

French municipal candidate gets prison sentence for ‘monkey’ racism

A former candidate in France’s recent municipal elections who likened the nation’s justice minister, who identifies as black, to a monkey was sentenced to nine months in jail for hate speech.

The National Front, a party that has often come under fire for its leaders’ comments about the nation’s immigrant populations, was fined almost $68,000 and the candidate, Anne-Sophie Leclere, was fined more than $40,000 on top of her prison sentence.

In October 2013, Leclere, the National Front’s candidate for the northern municipality of Rethel in March’s elections, posted a photo of Socialist Justice Minister Christiane Taubira — originally from French Guiana, a French overseas department in northern South America — next to a photo of a monkey. Laws in France bar communication intended to incite hatred, harm or discrimination against anyone because of ethnic, national or sexual identity or handicap.

“I prefer to see her swinging in a tree than to see her in government,” Leclere told TV channel France-2 in an interview, echoed across French media.

In a more recent, similarly explosive remark, the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of the party’s current leader, Marine Le Pen, said in May the Ebola virus could solve the world’s “demographic explosion” and Europe’s “immigration problem.” Many of France’s immigrants are from its former colonies in Africa, the only continent where Ebola has been reported.

National Front spokeswoman Huguette Fatna, originally from Martinique and the party’s former political consultant on its few remaining colonial-era territories, called the ruling an attack on free expression.

“We have no freedom of speech here. We call ourselves democratic — we should have freedom of speech,” Fatna said.

She added that the National Front will appeal the ruling. The party ousted Leclere immediately after a scandal erupted over her comments, apologizing on her behalf, but Fatna said Leclere’s prison sentence was “excessive.”

The case has in recent months sparked debate over France’s laws against racist speech. Despite Leclere’s comments, in April the National Front received its largest share of municipal votes ever.

Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that when racist views are silenced by law, they sometimes grow in strength.

“There is a concern that unless the speech is legitimately incitement [to violence], when the government shuts them down, it gives them more credence to what they are saying. And it forces that stuff underground, where it can turn violent,” Rottman said.

Houria Bouteldja, spokeswoman for the anti-racist political movement Les Indigenes de la Republique — The Indigenous of the Republic — and a leading voice on the rights of France’s people of color, also said the law does not work to effectively combat racism in a country where, for some, it has become a political platform.

“There are people that are against the expression of the extreme right,” Bouteldja said. “But we also have the racism of the left.”

Charlie Hebdo, a weekly leftist publication, has on numerous occasions printed cartoons that French Muslims like Bouteldja have decried as Islamophobic. No formal legal battle was launched against the publication, though, and the nation’s Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius, although he decried the publication as imprudent for stirring unrest in the Muslim world, qualified the cartoons as being protected by “freedom of speech.”

“I say, allow free speech or censor racism on both sides,” Bouteldja said.

Rottman said the United States does not have laws against racist speech precisely because they are often arbitrarily enforced.

“One of the reasons we don’t have inciting-hatred laws like we see in other countries is these laws leave it up to government as to what constitutes hate speech — they are subject to arbitrary use and potential misuse.”

Although Bouteldja’s organization applauds the ruling that punishes Leclere’s racist remarks, she emphasized that Taubira’s government has upheld laws barring women from wearing Muslim head coverings in schools and women from wearing facial veils in public venues.

“This xenophobia — it’s a production of the French state, not just the extreme right. This Islamophobia — the laws against Islamic dress, they are upheld by the government of Ms. Taubira.”

Bouteldja said that combating racism will take more than laws, that it will take a “mobilization of society against the racism of the state.”

“There needs to be a political consciousness of identifying the victims of racism and forbidding it. In the ’30s, it was the Jews. Now it’s the blacks, the Muslims and the Roma.” – Al Jazeera