Fashioning a flimsy defense

   I need help with this one.
   Okay,  (John) Galliano is a British clothes designer and the pride of the froggish fashion houses Givenchy and Christian Dior.
   Make that was the pride.
   Apparently Mr. Galliano likes to go to his local Parisian bistro, get tanked and hurl anti-Semitic insults at customers willy nilly. He's done it more than once and his most recent antics were recorded on a cell-phone camera and spread around the globe.
  And there's some doozies, courtesy of the Associated Press:
   He apparently blurted, "I love Hitler.”
   One of the offendees testified, “He had different expressions, dirty Jew, Dirty Jewish face ... At a certain point, he told us to leave because he said I was in his bar and his neighborhood. He finished by saying, ‘I am John Galliano,”’ she said, noting that he also peppered his comments with observations about her hair and what he called her “revolting” eyebrows and boots. {Have you seen the pictures of this guy?}
   Galliano's defense: I’m a triple addict (alcohol, barbiturates and sleeping pills).
   What puzzles me most is that Galliano is Jewish, with ancestry from the Sephardi Jews who emanated from Spain and Portugal.
   None of the people targeted by his insults were Jewish.
   So my question is: is it hate speech or just the rantings of a garden-variety junkie who needs a little bit of liquor to loosen his tongue?
   According to the AP, Monsieur Galliano faces more than $7,000, per plaintiff in damages, but no prison sentence. Worse yet for the fastidious fab fop, Natalie Portman immediately 'un-friended' the lout. (She had been one of his favorite dress-up dolls.)
   What could make this weirder?
   Well, it's a French court {chuckle} and (I'm not kidding) one of the key legal points made during the case was whether English swear words have the same effect in French.
   Apparently the packed attendees couldn't suppress their giggles during the judge's attempts at pronouncing some the words in English.
   "Thees is no laughing matter!" chided the judge.
   I beg to differ. This could be the first time I've heard of a legal case involving an anti-Semitic Semite.