ALAIN SORAL: OUSTED TROLL OF THE MONTH – DECEMBER

The Ousted Troll of the Month is an episode we choose every month to show positive outcomes in the fight against antisemitism in Europe.

Alain Soral, French extreme-right author of polemical essays, has been sentenced by the Court of Appeal of Paris to a €5,000 fine for antisemitic insults against the Jewish journalist Frédéric Haziza. 

The International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, Licra, Get the Trolls Out partner in France, was among the NGOs that sued the author. The antisemitic comments were published on Soral’s website in November 2012 after Frédéric Haziza, as the grandson of a deported person during the Holocaust, refused to invite him to his TV show. 

In December 2015 the Paris Court of Appeal stated the words of Soral fall within “the most stereotyped antisemitism, by referring to a community plot which aimed to suppress the freedom of speech”.

Alain Soral is well-known as one of the main actors of the French “fascist-sphere”, together with his acolyte Dieudonné - our November’s Ousted Troll of the Month sentenced by a Belgian court to jail for antisemitic comments. Soral is also close to other the conspiracy and extreme-right groups, including the members of “Manif pour tous”, groups that strongly oppose to the same-sex marriage. 

Created in 2007, his website “Egalité et Reconciliation” (“Equality and Reconciliation”), a heap of nationalism, homophobia, sexism and antisemitism, became an NGO under “Egalité & Réconciliation” and is currently a political party,” Réconciliation nationale” (“National Reconciliation”). In 2014, Soral declared: “I am not from the extreme-right, I am a National Socialist”. 

Using provocative opinions based on antisemitism, Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories, Soral has created what is considered by many to be a “fascist business”. On his website, an online shop sells books, t-shirts, mugs and lighters. Furthermore, each of his trials has been strategically used by Soral himself to build up a new media buzz.

In 2013, Soral’s publishing house, Kontre Kulture, republished some XIX century French books including “La France Juive” (“The Jewish France”) by Edouard Drumont, an antisemitic pamphlet about the Jewish lobby controlling over capital and state policy. On the same year, a French court has banned a book edited by Kontre Kulture and censored four others. The court said the books insulted people for being of a certain religion, denied crimes against humanity and incited to racial hatred.

Soral is currently on trial for doing, behind the Holocaust Memorial of Berlin the quenelle gesture, an inverted Nazi salute. Soral took a photo of himself doing the quenelle and published it on his website. On the 18th of February, the Court of Appeal of Paris will deliver a decision on the trial.

As Dieudonné last month, Alain Soral cannot be completely considered as definitely “ousted” but the recurrence of sentences against him show how freedom of speech can be used to spread antisemitic ideas and incite violence.