(JTA) France's interior minister has called boycotts against Israeli products in France "a crime." In a recent letter to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux wrote, "You have called my attention to the value of punishing the agitation of the group Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions in view of the acts of its members in certain food stores....Just as you, I consider the campaign led by this group and their statements made on such occasions calling for a boycott of Israeli products as, arguably, constituting a crime of racial provocation and discrimination." Last month the center's Paris-based director for international relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, described in a letter to Hortefeux how members of the group remove kosher products it suspects to be from Israel from store shelves and burns them.
2010-08-13 09:39:57Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive