A 27-year-old man was sentenced to eight months in prison on Monday by the Criminal Court of Draguignan (Var) for having called a Marseille judge a "dirty Jew" during an appearance in January, we learned on Tuesday from judicial sources.
The conviction for “contempt by speech at the magistrate's hearing in the exercise of his functions” and “public insults due to (…) religion” exceeds the requisitions of the prosecution, which had requested six months in prison.
Incarcerated for other offenses in Draguignan, the man was the subject of an appearance for willful violence on January 22 before the Marseille criminal court, remotely from the prison.
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Refusing to speak about the facts, he denounced his placement in solitary confinement and when the president of the chamber tried to reason with him, he replied: "Go fuck your dead, dirty Jew."
An investigation was then opened into these comments and when he was finally taken out of the prison to be questioned, he made similar comments to the police officers who were escorting him.
“A threatening attitude”
Tried on Monday in Draguignan, accompanied by seven police officers, “he looked down on everyone, with a threatening attitude”, according to Me Samuel Chicha, who represented the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France for the Paca region.
“He assured that he had never treated the judge as
a dirty Jew
”, before going into a long tirade on the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, added the lawyer, regretting having found himself alone on the benches. civil parties.
Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, the number of anti-Semitic acts has increased tenfold according to a Crif report published in January 2024. In detail, more than half of these facts concerned attacks against people whose physical violence and threatening remarks.
On March 6, a sixty-year-old wearing a kippah was attacked leaving a synagogue in Paris.
A suspect was arrested.