Djamel Boumaaz, an official in the southern French city of Montpellier, celebrated his birthday with a swastika-decorated cake.
In a Facebook post discussing how he spent his 40th birthday, he wrote, “I spent a beautiful day with my family, music, food in the home of my SS friend, then my birthday cake arrived, a gift from my SS friend.”
Boumaaz, who is Muslim, previously a member of the far-right National Front Party, has a history of neo-Nazi activism. He was second on the party’s list for the local 2014 elections in Montpelier.
Two years later, Boumaaz’s Twitter account was investigated, as it marked that it was “forbidden to dogs and Jews,” and included tweets denying and mocking the Holocaust.
He has previously been fined for performing the quenelle gesture—an inverted Nazi salute popularized by French political activist and comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, known for his anti-Semitic views—at a session of the Montpellier city council, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The gesture is illegal in France.
