IS victim Foley’s family protests French far right tweets

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen was under investigation Wednesday after tweeting graphic images of Islamic State atrocities, including a beheading, in response to a journalist whom she accused of likening her party to the jihadist group.

“Madame Le Pen: inflaming public debate, political and moral failing, non-respect for victims”, he wrote on his Twitter account. Another showed a Jordanian pilot being set on fire in a cage while the third showed a Syrian soldier being crushed to death by a tank.

Le Pen, the daughter of the National Front’s founder-who was himself expelled from the party in August-was facing a fine of about $50,000 and a sentence of up to a year in prison.

Foley’s parents John and Diane said Le Pen had used the photograph of their son “shamefully” and they were “deeply disturbed”.

Prosecutors in Nanterre, the Paris suburb, confirmed that 47-year-old Le Pen faced prosecution for “the dissemination of obscene images”.

A week ago, the FN seemed to have arrived, emerging as France’s first party in the first round of voting, winning six of the 13 regions, with both Le Pen and her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen finishing at the top in their constituencies.

Kepel’s comments about ISIL pushing France toward civil war echoed similar statements by Prime Minister Manuel Valls last week, which referred to the National Front.

Like fascist leaders throughout history that Le Pen is drawn to, she is using graphic violence for her own propaganda purposes, dehumanizing individual victims of its violence and making a banality out of evil.

It was Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve who went to the police, saying they should be investigated “as they do every time these kind of photos are published”. But if the exit polling results are confirmed, it would be a stinging defeat for Le Pen, who had hoped a victory would serve as a springboard to launch a 2017 presidential bid against Sarkozy and the country’s socialist president, Francois Hollande.

I read that the images had been masked with warning notices, and turned to Le Pen’s Twitter feed, only to be confronted by them against my will. And now I feel sick, like an unwilling participant in the misery inflicted on this man and his family.

“At no point did I say the FN was like Daesh”, Bourdin said. “But we consider that comparing the German occupation with Muslims who are compelled to pray in the road incites panic, incites hate”.