Annecy, France - Three Anti-Semitic Attackers Condemned

Annecy, France - Three young men were condemned to nine months imprisonment by a criminal court in Annecy, eastern France, for an anti-Semitic attack against a young Jewish boy in August.

Hakim Bouaoune, 21, Yassin Gsimi, 25, and Nabil Achenani, 20, all from Bellegarde, a small city in southeastern France, had been denied entrance to a nightclub in the nearby city of Annecy, on the grounds that they were drunk.
When the three heard a teenager call someone "Abraham", they started beating the 16-year-old boy and yelling anti-Semitic insults. The nightclub’s bouncers intervened with dogs and held the assailants until the police arrived. Abraham was taken to hospital and was unable to work for six days.
The prosecutor had requested a one-year prison term, claiming that the “racist insults were clear” and that the boy’s first name, Abraham, led to an outburst of violence.
The defence lawyer, Philippe Metral, denied any anti-Semitic intent, saying the three didn’t intend to go on “a commando-like Jew-beating rampage”. “They were not in a normal state because they drunk a cocktail of whiskey and beer,” he said.

Annecy’s Jewish community leader Robert Moos welcomed the sentence and congratulated local authorities for acting quickly. “The police arrested the thugs immediately and made it possible to bring them to justice,” Moos said, describing the assault’s impact on the community. Moos also stressed that Abraham was not really Jewish. "The youth’s father was Jewish but Abraham doesn’t have any particular attachment to the community."