Paris (AFP)

Right-wing essayist Alain Bonnet, known as Soral, was again sentenced to prison on Wednesday in Paris, this time to a year for qualifying the Pantheon as a "kosher waste" in a video posted last year on its website.

Alain Soral, 60, who was not present at the hearing in June, was found guilty of public anti-Semitic insult and provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence against Jews.

The criminal court followed the prosecution's pleadings, denouncing its "persistent obsessive hatred" and "without the slightest inhibition" towards the Jews.

Alain Soral does not recoil "in front of the fact of dirtying and pursuing beyond death" the victims of Nazism, "by the choice of his words which are the prolongation of acts of death and which are in themselves acts of hatred and provocation, "said the court in its decision, consulted by AFP.

The judges also denounced the fact that it targets a young audience through its site "Equality and reconciliation", seeking "to impose on the basis of a culture veneer allegedly + serious +, and to recruit for his pharmacy Equality and reconciliation ".

"We have all the family Veil who has just returned, and then there they may want to almost put us Lanzmann" (former resistance and director of documentary Shoah), "it's a real kosher waste," said Soral in a video posted after the burial of Simone Veil and her husband Antoine at the Pantheon, July 1, 2018.

The term "waste" or "dump" refers in the context to the dehumanization suffered by the Jews as described by the survivors and witnesses of the camps, especially the death camps like the one experienced by Simone Veil " said the judges.

The court also ordered the withdrawal of the video when the conviction will be final. Alain Soral will also have to pay 1,000 euros in damages to the League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra) and one symbolic euro to three other anti-racist civil parties.

At the hearing, his lawyer Damien Viguier said that "the words of Soral are provocation, not acts calling for violence".

Soral, already condemned multiple times, was sentenced to one year in January in Bobigny for insulting a magistrate and making anti-Semitic remarks on his website, then in April in Paris for denial. In September, he was sentenced to 18 months in Bobigny for an anti-Semitic rap clip.

The April conviction was accompanied by an arrest warrant that the prosecution had refused to execute, ruling it without a legal basis since the Code of Criminal Procedure provides for the issuance of such a warrant only for the offenses of common law or military law while Soral was convicted under the Freedom of the Press Act. The appeal will be held in January.

In the absence of arrest or arrest warrant, Soral's appeals suspend the execution of his prison sentences. In the event that these sentences are confirmed on appeal and his cassation appeals dismissed, he could theoretically go to prison.

© 2019 AFP