Posts
In
today’s France it is taken as a sign of insanity to post real
picture of ISIS atrocities!
France’s
Marine Le Pen ordered to undergo psychiatric tests over IS group
tweets
20
September, 2018
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen expressed outrage Thursday after being ordered to undergo psychiatric tests for tweeting pictures of atrocities committed by the Islamic State group.
Le
Pen shared the gruesome images in December 2015, a few weeks
after IS jihadists killed 130 people in attacks
in Paris, sparking widespread condemnation in France.
The
50-year-old leader of the National Rally (formerly the National
Front), who lost to Emmanuel
Macron in last year's presidential vote, was stripped of her
parliamentary immunity over the pictures and charged with circulating
violent messages that can be viewed by minors.
On
Thursday, she tweeted copies of a court order requiring her to
undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Dated
September 11, it calls for the tests to be carried out "as soon
as possible" to establish whether Le Pen "is capable of
understanding remarks and answering questions".
"It's
crazy," fumed Le Pen, herself a trained lawyer.
"I
thought I had been through it all: well, no! For having condemned
Daesh (IS) horrors in tweets, the 'justice system' is putting me
through psychiatric tests! Just how far will they go?" she
asked, repeating her view that it was part of a government plot to
discredit her.
Speaking
to reporters in the halls of the National Assembly, Le Pen said she
felt "persecuted" by the state and would defy the order.
'I
won't go!'
"Of
course I won't go and submit myself to this psychiatric evaluation,"
she declared, daring the investigating magistrate to "force"
her.
Under
French law there is no legal mechanism for forcing a person to comply
with such an order.
The
prosecutor's office in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the court
is located, said such tests were routine in cases involving the
dissemination of violent messages.
But
there were howls of indignation from Le Pen's supporters and allies
nonetheless.
Italy's
powerful far-right Interior Minister Matteo
Salvini tweeted
his sympathy for Le Pen, along with a photograph of himself and the
Frenchwoman greeting each other, their arms outstretched and faces
wreathed in smiles.
"A
prosecutor has ordered psychiatric tests on Marine Le Pen. There are
no words. Solidarity with her and those French people who love
liberty," wrote Salvini, whose League party is in an alliance
with Le Pen's faction.
Rightwing
eurosceptic Nicolas Dupont-Aignan wondered whether the French justice
system was inspired by the Soviet Union, where political opponents
were thrown in psychiatric hospitals.
"Next
step the gulag?" he asked in a tweet.
Even
some of Le Pen's opponents expressed misgivings about the tests.
Her
leftist nemesis Jean-Luc Melenchon, the France Unbowed leader who
once called Le Pen "half-demented", tweeted his "total
disagreement" with the court order.
"It's
not these kind of methods that will drive back the far right,"
wrote Melenchon, a fierce critic of Macron, who denounced the court
order as a "political decision".
Party
'risks death'
Le
Pen shared the IS images in response to a French journalist who drew
a comparison between the jihadist group and her party.
One
of the pictures showed the body of James Foley, an American
journalist beheaded by the Sunni extremists.
Another
showed a man in an orange jumpsuit being run over by a tank and the
third showed a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage.
"Daesh
is this!" Le Pen wrote in a caption, using an Arabic acronym for
IS.
She
later deleted the picture of Foley after a request from his family,
saying she had been unaware of his identity, but she has denounced
the case against her as a violation of her freedom of expression.
If
convicted, she faces up to three years in prison and a fine of 75,000
euros ($87,000).
Another
National Rally lawmaker, lawyer Gilbert Collard, has also been
charged for tweeting pictures of IS atrocities.
The
furore over the psychiatric tests comes as Le Pen attempts to rally
support for her cash-strapped party ahead of European elections next
spring, in which she is hoping to rebound from her presidential
defeat.
Last
week, she repeated warnings that her party's existence was at stake
if it didn't manage to win back two million euros in subsidies seized
as part of an inquiry into claims it misused millions worth of
European Parliament funds.
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