A “Yellow Vest” protestor who hurled anti-semitic abuse at French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut over the weekend has been identified as a radical Islamic extremist known to French intelligence agencies.
The abuse of Alain Finkielkraut, a Jewish intellectual who has railed against the policies of multiculturalism in the past, was caught on video and showed a man with shouting, “You racist, you’re a hater, you’re going to die, you’re going to hell, you Zionist,” Le Parisien reports.
The video provoked mass condemnation across the French political spectrum from French President Emmanuel Macron to populist leader Marine Le Pen who wrote on Twitter that is was “a detestable and shocking act, which illustrates the attempted infiltration of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) by the anti-Semitic extreme-left movement.”
According to a police source, the man in the video has been identified as a radical Islamic extremist who has been under the watch of security services since being identified in the Salafist scene in 2014.
While Finkielkraut has spoken out against the attack he has so far not said he wishes to pursue charges against the attacker. The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) has, however, said they will be looking at filing charges against the man for, “public insult of an anti-Semitic or racist nature,” David-Olivier Kaminski, president of LICRA Paris, said.
The incident comes only a week after a damning report that revealed that anti-semitic incidents in France had risen by 73 percent in 2018 for a total of 541 incidents across the country including the brutal murder of 85-year-old holocaust survivor Mireille K. who had been stabbed eleven times and then set on fire.
The upward trend in anti-semitism has not been limited to France. In neighbouring Germany, incidents rose by ten percent with violent attacks rising by a massive 60 percent in 2018.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com