Hundreds of organized Jewish demonstrators clashed last Thursday with several dozen neo-Nazis and police on the steps of the city criminal court where French neo-Nazi leader Marc Fredriksen went on trial. Over a dozen people, including three policemen and two Jews, were injured in the violent streetfight which lasted for close to two hours.
Fredriksen, a 46-year-old bank teller and leader of the now outlawed Federation for European and National Action (FANE), is charged with incitement to racial hatred, justification of Nazi crimes and spreading Nazi theories and propaganda.
Fredriksen, who entered the court accompanied by what looked like half a dozen bodyguards, said “I am here as the representative of the National Socialists who have been persecuted for the last 35 years.” He told the court, “I demand for our organization the same freedom of expression enjoyed by other movements, including the Marxists and the Communists.”
ANTI-ISRAEL, ANTI-SEMITIC TIRADE
Without any promptings, the self-styled “fuhrer” said, “I accuse Israel of having built itself on lies and corpses, Israel is an artificial state which be ignominiously behaved toward another people. It is only legitimate to destroy this state.”
He added: “As for the Jews, I consider them neither as a religion nor as a race but as a people and a pressure group. I do not believe that the Germans carried out a holocaust nor that they wanted to exterminate the Jews. This is all postwar propaganda invented by the Jews to obtain a land and from the Germans, money.”
CLASHES WITH POLICE, NEO-NAZIS
While Fredriksen, dressed in an army-type trenchcoot spoke, Jewish demonstrators clashed with the handful of neo-Nazi supporters, first in the court’s corridors and basement, and then, after they were expelled by police guards and ushers, on the building’s steps and in the adjacent streets.
Most of the Jewish demonstrators wore leather tackets for protection and carried bats or golf clubs. In the streets close to the court, Jewish demonstrators chased Fredriksen’s supporters into shops, restaurants and even private stairways. The clashes with police occurred when riot police intervened to try and evacuate some of the wounded, often badly bleeding FANE members: At one point, the police had to use tear gas to try and clear a pathway for the ambulances.
Most of the Jewish activists reportedly belong to the Jewish Defense Organization led by a young French Jewish member of Parliament Jean Pierre-Bloch. Several witnesses said that Pierre-Bloch personally directed the operation but this correspondent did not see him.
PRIEST EXPRESSES DISGUST
While the street nattle went on, the court continued to sit, hearing witnesses and experts. A Catholic priest and writer, Father Riquet said: “I personally saw the gas chambers and the ovens in which the bodies were burned. I am disgusted and revolted by those who speak with nostalgia about the good old days of the Nazis.” Riquet was, himself, deported for resistance activities. The prosecution has asked for a suspended prison sentence.
FANE was outlawed by the French government Sept. 4 after Justice Minister Christian Bonnet reported that Jews in the south of France had received threats and that the organization had carried out a number of violent attacks.
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