A group calling itself the “Jewish Organization of Combat” took credit Wednesday for ransacking two Paris bookshops, one specializing in “revisionist” texts that deny the Holocaust occurred and the other in right-wing extremist literature.
The group said it hit the shops to protest the scheduled appearance of Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far right-wing National Front Party, on a major political program to be broadcast on French television Wednesday night, the 43rd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Many Jewish groups and organizations of former deportees and resistance fighters have protested Le Pen’s appearance on the program, particularly on this anniversary.
Le Pen, in a Radio Luxembourg interview last October, dismissed the Holocaust as a mere “historic detail,” but he denies he is anti-Semitic. He recently announced he will be a candidate in April’s French presidential elections.
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