A French far-left politician cracked a Holocaust joke online about burning Jews.
Taha Bouhafs, an activist and former candidate for Jean-Luc Melenchon’s far-left France Unbowed party, made the joke on Twitter, the LICRA watchdog on human rights wrote.
Commenting on a condemnation of antisemitism by the Socialist Party’s leader, Benoit Hamon, Bouhafs wrote: “Saintly Benoit, it’s the CRIF dinner soon and you don’t want to lose your petits fours.”
CRIF is the umbrella group of French Jewish communities and the country’s EJC affiliate. Petits fours are sweet pastries whose name means “little ovens.” The Nazis burned bodies of Jews they killed in gas chambers in oven-like crematoria.
LICRA called Bouhafs’ tweet from February “nauseating,” adding it was commonly used by far-right extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen. “Now we hear it from a ‘France Unbowed’ former candidate in the parliamentary elections,” LICRA said.
Bouhafs’ tweet was a reply to Hamon’s condemnation of antisemitic verbal assaults on Alain Finkielkraut, a French-Jewish philosopher, by protesters from the Yellow Vests anti-austerity movement in Paris. They called Finkielkraut “dirty Zionist” but “wanted to say ‘dirty Jew,’” Hamon wrote.
