Far-right French candidate called unaccompanied foreign minors “murderers and rapists”
Éric Zemmour, far-right candidate for the French presidential elections in April, was sentenced on Monday by a Paris court to pay a fine of 10,000 euros for “incitement to racial hatred” due to statements he made in 2020 about foreign minors unaccompanied. Zemmour announced that he will appeal the decision.
“They have nothing to do here. They’re thieves. They are killers. They are rapists. That’s all they are. They need to be sent back (to their country) and they don’t even have to come,” Zemmour said about unaccompanied foreign minors in September 2020 on CNEWS, the television network considered French Fox News for its conservative editorial line. The ultra-conservative politician, who was not present in court when the sentence was read or at the trial, does not understand why the judge has sentenced him for inciting racial hatred, since “these migrants do not constitute an ethnic group in any way not a race. It is therefore impossible to be ‘racist’ towards them.”
According to Zemmour, “the truth” about unaccompanied foreign minors is that “often they are neither minors nor unaccompanied.” “They are characterized by their irregular presence in our territory and their strong propensity for crime, or even criminality,” said the ultra candidate, adding that they are “responsible for 96% of mobile thefts in France.”
“I am once again the object and the victim of political justice,” Zemmour insisted yesterday after his conviction. «I have a loaded judicial agenda because they want to demonize me. They want to make me shut up through justice,” added the candidate, who considered that it is “urgent to expel the ideology from the courts.”
The far-right candidate, who has already been convicted on two other occasions for inciting racial hatred, will be tried again this Thursday on appeal in another case for denying crimes against humanity after being acquitted in the first instance. In October 2019, he created controversy in France by saying that General Philippe Pétain and the Vichy regime “saved” French Jews during World War II. And, in May 2023, he will sit in the dock again for defamation for statements he made in 2019 about the feminist movement and the LGBT movement.
After skyrocketing in the polls, Zemmour has plateaued. He is currently in fourth place in voting intention polls, behind President Emmanuel Macron, the far-right Marine Le Pen and the moderate conservative Valérie Pécresse. This past week he again unleashed a strong controversy in France by demanding a “segregated education” in the case of disabled children so that they study in “special centers.” “The obsession with inclusion is a bad way for children and teachers,” he said, while defending an “iron discipline” in teaching. Several political leaders have demanded a “public apology” from him for his “miserable vision.”
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