French embassy intern fired over anti-Semitic Facebook posts
This Feb. 19, 2014 file photo shows the Facebook app icons on an iPhone in New York. AP Photo
NEW YORK, United States—A Kuwaiti intern at the French embassy in the United States was dismissed Tuesday after she was accused of publishing an anti-Semitic rant on Facebook.
She was also suspended by Sciences Po university in Paris, where she was a student, pending further investigation, a faculty spokesman told AFP.
The alleged comments were published Friday on the website of a group called “The Inglourious Basterds,” which says it aims to expose anti-Semitic postings.
The student’s Facebook and Twitter pages were no longer available, and the date the alleged remarks were posted was unknown.
“Yes you Jews deserve to learn these lessons,” the student said in an Facebook exchange, according to the Inglourious Basterds site—which borrows its name from a Quentin Tarantino movie about a band of Nazi-hunting Jewish soldiers.
“You don’t belong anywhere in this world—that’s why you guys are scums and rats and discriminated against wherever you are. Do not blame it on the poor Palestinians,” continued the exchange.
After being accused of racism, she responds, “First of all you dispersed rat, i am not an immigrant from France. I am from Kuwait so my country can buy you and your parents and put you in ovens.”
The embassy told AFP that the intern, working in the Cultural Services division in New York, confirmed to her manager, after learning of the allegations, that she wrote some of the exchange, but claimed the “ovens” comment and others were not by her.
She also told her manager she apologized to the user with whom she had exchanged the comments before Inglourious Basterds’ post went up, according to the embassy.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development has learned with dismay of anti-Semitic remarks, on her personal Facebook page, by a student doing an internship in Cultural Services of the French Embassy of the United States. She was immediately terminated from her internship,” the cultural department posted on its Facebook page Friday.
“This intern of Kuwaiti origin, sent by Sciences Po, was immediately sent back,” French Ambassador to the US Gerard Araud said Tuesday on Twitter.
“Given the gravity of the charges against (the woman), the director of Sciences Po has decided to suspend her studies as a precautionary measure, pending a disciplinary ruling,” a Sciences Po spokesman told AFP.
