Trump Picks Up Endorsement From Anti-Gay Holocaust Denying Neo-Nazi Racist French Politician Le Pen

Far Right French Political Party Founder Who Called for People Living With HIV to Be Isolated From Society Embraces GOP Frontrunner

Jean-Marie Le Pen has just endorsed Donald Trump for President. 

“If I was American, I would vote Donald TRUMP… But may God protect him!,” Le Pen tweeted Saturday, in French:

In reporting the endorsement, ABC News notes Le Pen “suggested that the 2014 Ebola outbreak could serve as a solution to the global population boom.”

Who is Jean-Marie Le Pen?

Le Pen founded the National Front in the early 1970’s and actively ran it until he was ousted by his own daughter in 2011.

Most Americans are likely unfamiliar with the 87-year old founder of France’s far right wing extremist party, but his positions should sound glaringly familiar to the Republican Party’s current frontrunner and likely presidential nominee. 

Le Pen is anti-gay. Anti-immigrant. He is a Holocaust denier. A racist. Xenophobic. Anti-Semitic. And he’s been fined by a French court for “inciting racial hatred.”

Labeled a neo-Nazi and an “eccentric fascist,” Le Pen “has been convicted numerous times of racism or anti-semitism and his daughter has said that she can offer no explanation for his provocative behaviour,” the UK’s Morning Star reported last year when he “rejected a call from his daughter … to leave politics.”

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The French neo-Nazi, or neo-Fascist, as some have called him, has defended his claim that Hitler’s gas chambers were merely a “detail of history.” And he called for people living with HIV/AIDS to be isolarted from society in specially designed sidatoriums.

Le Pen hasn’t been entirely ignored by the U.S. press.

“In 2008, Jean-Marie was found guilty of Holocaust denial, which is a crime in many European countries,” Salon’s Ben Norton wrote in December. “Jean-Marie, still to this day, insists that the Nazi gas chambers were a mere ‘detail of history.’ He has also defended French Nazi collaborators, and early members of his FN were former collaborators. According to the FN founder, the Nazi occupation of France — under which Jews, communists, and the mentally ill were executed — was ‘not particularly inhuman.'”

 

Image by Blandine Le Cain via Flickr and a CC license