French President’s Party Withdraws 2nd Candidate Who Supported BDS
(JTA) – For the second time this month, the party of French President Emmanuel Macron withdrew from its parliamentary elections ticket a candidate who promoted a boycott of Israel.
William Tchamaha was removed Thursday from the En Marche party’s list in next month’s elections, the news site Actu reported.
CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organizations, had called for his removal, citing his support for the boycott campaign. Promoting a boycott of countries or their citizens is illegal in France, where it is classified as hate speech.
“A state outside the law that despises the law,” Tchamaha wrote Feb. 8 on Twitter in a message that has since been deleted. “Boycott Israeli products and [apply] an economic embargo!”
In 2015, Tchamaha tweeted about the slaying by Israeli police officers of Palestinians while they were trying to carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis.
An En Marche spokesman neither confirmed nor denied to Actu that Tchamaha’s removal from the ticket was connected to the tweets.
“He no longer corresponded with the values that we uphold,” the party’s elections committee said without elaborating.
Last week, En Marche withdrew from its list another candidate that CRIF had urged the party to withdraw over anti-Israel tweets.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO