France orders crackdown on hate speech

France has ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism as it announced that 54 people had been arrested for those offences since the Paris terror attacks.

The order came as Charlie Hebdo’s defiant new issue sold out before dawn around Paris, with scuffles at kiosks over dwindling copies of the satirical newspaper depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Like many European countries, France has strong laws against hate speech and especially anti-Semitism in the wake of the Holocaust.

In a message distributed to all French prosecutors and judges, the justice ministry laid out the legal basis for rounding up those who defend the Paris terror attacks as well as those responsible for racist or anti-Semitic words or acts.

Among those detained was Dieudonne, a controversial popular comedian with repeated convictions for racism and anti-Semitism.

The attacks that left 17 people dead are prompting France to tighten security measures but none of the 54 people detained have been linked by authorities to the attacks. That is raising questions about whether the government is impinging on the freedom of speech that Charlie Hebdo so vigorously defends.

The core of the irreverent newspaper’s staff perished a week ago when gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people. It was the opening salvo of three days of terror and bloodshed in the Paris region, ending when security forces killed all three gunmen on Friday. Charlie Hebdo had received repeated threats for posting caricatures of Mohammed and was firebombed in 2011.

The justice ministry said 54 people, including four minors, have been detained for defending or verbally threatening terrorism since the Charlie Hebdo attack. Several have already been convicted under special measures for immediate sentencing.

The government is working on new phone-tapping and other intelligence efforts against terrorism that it wants nailed down by next week, government spokesman Stephane Le Foll said.

The government is also launching a deeper project to rethink education, urban policies and its integration model, in an apparent recognition that the attacks exposed inequality in France and at its neglected, often violence-ridden suburban housing projects.

French police say up to six members of a terrorist cell that carried out the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket may still be at large, including a man seen driving a car registered to the widow of one of the gunmen. The country has deployed 10,000 troops to protect sensitive sites, including Jewish schools and synagogues, mosques and travel hubs.

Dieudonne, a comedian who popularised an arm gesture that resembles a Nazi salute and who has been convicted repeatedly of racism and anti-Semitism, is no stranger to controversy.

His provocative performances were banned last year but he has a core following among many of France’s disaffected young people.

The Facebook post in question, which was swiftly deleted, said he felt like “Charlie Coulibaly” — merging the names of Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who seized a kosher market and killed four hostages, along with a policewoman. In a separate post on Monday afternoon, the day the investigation was opened into Dieudonne, the comedian wrote an open letter to France’s interior minister.

“Whenever I speak, you do not try to understand what I’m trying to say, you do not want to listen to me. You are looking for a pretext to forbid me. You consider me like Amedy Coulibaly when I am not any different from Charlie,” he wrote.

In a posthumous video, Coulibaly had claimed allegiance to IS group.