French president’s Holocaust day speech presages crackdown on Palestine supporters | The Electronic Intifada
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French President François Hollande used an International Holocaust Memorial Day speech to confirm that his government plans to tighten its control over what people are allowed to say online.
The planned crackdown raises concern that French authorities will use their powers to further censor speech critical of Israel under the guise of combating anti-Semitism.
“Anti-Semitism has changed its face, but has not lost its age-old roots,” Hollande said at a Paris commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet Army’s liberation of Auschwitz.
Today, he said, “it is also nourished by hatred of Israel” and “imports the conflicts of the Middle East.”
This conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel presages even harsher efforts in France to suppress the Palestine solidarity movement.
Hollande’s speech comes in the wake of a broad crackdown in France that has seen dozens of people sentenced to prison for things they have said or written since three French gunmen murdered 17 people earlier this month in attacks on the offices of the racist magazine Charlie Hebdo, on a Jewish supermarket and on police.
#France #Israel #Palestine #liberté_d'expression #Charlie_Hebdo #internet #contrôle
