The Marine Le Pen Case Shows That Supposedly Enlightened France Treats Political Speech As a Crime a

France ranked 12 notches above the United States in this year's World Press Freedom Index, produced by Reporters Without Borders. But such ratings can be misleading, as illustrated by the prosecution of Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing National Rally party (formerly the National Front), for posting images of ISIS atrocities on Twitter. Last week Le Pen revealed that she had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination as part of the investigation into her speech crime, which added another layer of Soviet-style thought control to the story. It is inconceivable that an American politician, no matter how extreme his views, would be prosecuted for doing what Le Pen did, because a law like the one she is charged with violating would be clearly inconsistent with the First Amendment. That law, Article 227-24 of the French Criminal Code, makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of €75,000 (about $88,000) and up to three years in prison, to distribute "a message bearing a pornographic or violent character or a character seriously violating human dignity...where the message may be seen or perceived by a minor." Le Pen allegedly ran afoul of that prohibition in 2015 by posting three pictures of men murdered by ISIS—one beheaded, one burned alive, and one run over by a tank—in response to a Twitter user who likened her party to the terrorist organization. "Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] is this!" she tweeted. -- More....