French Court Jails Neo-Nazi Apologist for Antisemitic Messages

A French court jailed an unrepentant antisemitic activist for two postings on the internet that defamed Jews and a third that denied the Holocaust.

Hervé Lalin — who also goes by the name Hervé Ryssen — has now begun a 17-month jail term at the Fleury-Mérogis prison near Paris for the three offenses, committed between 2017 and 2020.

The court convicted Lalin for a series of antisemitic postings on Facebook and Twitter, as well as for a video he published on YouTube in 2018 — called “The Jews, Incest and Hysteria” — in which he attacked Jews as a “people of incest.”

A book-length screed by Lalin — published in 2018 and titled “Antisemitism Without Complexity or Taboo” — was condemned for denying the truth of the Nazi Holocaust, a criminal offense in France.

In a recent analysis of the French far right, the newspaper Liberation identified Lalin as an integral member of a network of propagandists who were dedicated to the denial and distortion of the Holocaust.

As well as Lalin, the group includes Jerome Bourbon Rivarol, Alain Soral, Yvan Benedetti and Vincent Reynouard — all of whom engage “in systematic denial of the crimes of the Third Reich and the rehabilitation of the murderous [Nazi] regime,” the paper noted.

 

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