Soros-funded blogger linked to death threats against Marine Le Pen

The blogger gained prominence through his writing for the Bondy Blog, a pro-migrant blog set up following the 2005 Paris riots and financed by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

Marion Le Pen expressed her surprise that the blogger had been shielded by the media for so long.

The Bondy Blog is a site created for and by sub-Saharan and North African second-generation immigrants seeking to celebrate “ethnic diversity” and insert “the stories from the ‘hood into the larger national debates”.

Medhi Meklat, 24, published thousands of anti-white threatening and homophobic tweets under a pseudonym. His threats were only discovered last month. He boasts more than 50 000 offensive tweets from 2012 to 2014.

He had even appeared on the cover of a ‘Inrockuptibles’ edition, with Badrouine Said Abdallah and former justice minister Christiane Taubira. Taubira, who was featured alongside Meklat on the front cover of the French culture magazine, later said that she regretted allowing him to take a platform beside her.

The tweets included depraved death threats against the Front National leader Le Pen, but his supporters have tried to shrug them off as a joke.

“I am going to slit your throat Muslim style” read the tweet threatening Le Pen. Another called for the “anal rape” of former Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Charb, one of the victims of the January 2015 terror attacks, with a “Laguiole knife”.

The tweets were published under the pseudonym “Marcelin Deschamps”, described by Meklat as a “fictional character” but he later denied his attachment to the ideas he had tweeted. He called them an experiment in “provocation” instead.

A French tweeter, identified by Le Monde as a teacher, expressed outrage at one of Meklat’s television appearances. The teacher pleaded, successfully, for the country to demand the author answer for Meklat’s obscene and offensive tweets.

In a lengthy note on Facebook Meklat apologised for the posts while attempting to absolve himself of culpability, claiming to be victim of a time when Twitter was “a digital Wild West. A new object, almost confidential, where no rule was enacted, no moderation exercised”.

Meklat is a Muslim Algerian who grew up in Seine-Saint-Denis, where immigrant riots have recently resurfaced.

In France almost 2 000 teenagers have been radicalised by Islamic State, officials say, with a 121 percent increase between 2015 and 2016.

Terrorism is a social activity, not one undertaken by crazed loners. Research last year found that 45 percent of Islamic militant cases talked about their inspiration and possible actions with family and friends.