France is investigating fascist National Front leader Marine Le Pen for a series of Tweets. She’s no good, but this prosecution would aid the global fascist movement.

French far-right presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen leaves a polling station after casting her vote in Henin Beaumont, Northern France, Sunday, June 18, 2017. French voters are casting ballots Sunday in the final round of parliamentary elections that could clinch President Emmanuel Macron’s hold on power, as his fledgling party appears set to rout mainstream rivals and turn politics as usual on its head. (AP Photo/Michel Spingler)

Marine Le Pen, aunt of CPAC speaker Marion Le Pen, is the leader of the National Front party in France. The party, founded by a group of Vichy collaborationists and originally led by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, has a long history of fascist rhetoric and Holocaust denial. Further, she has taken large payments from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, putting her national loyalties into question.

That said, the French investigation of her is terrible. Her alleged crime is to publish a series of images depicting Islamic State beheadings. Was it tasteless? Yes. Is she a fascist? No doubt. Was that criminal? No way.

France has legitimate reason to watch out for certain extremist groups. After all, it was as recently as the 1940s that their country was taken over by the Vichy regime of fascist collaborationists. And the National Front is a direct descendant of the Vichy regime. So it’s reasonable for France to have prosecuted Jean-Marie Le Pen for his (repeated) Holocaust denials.

But Marine Le Pen isn’t denying the Holocaust in these tweets. Like her or not, she is in fact exposing an ongoing holocaust in the Middle East. To prosecute her will make her a martyr world wide, make her side look like the reasonable one to impressionable kids, and will do nothing but make the global fascist movement more powerful than it is today.