PARIS, France (AP) – Tens of thousands of demonstrators, including ministers and politicians of all stripes, joined in a show of force against racism and anti-Semitism yesterday, marching through the French capital after the torture and killing of a Paris Jew.

Some 33,000 people took part in the march, police said. Anti-racism groups that organised the march did not immediately issue a figure. Smaller marches took place in other cities, including Lyon and Bordeaux, where Archbishop Jean-Pierre Ricard, named a cardinal this week, took part.

“Today, we must march, we must stand up, to say that in France each of us has the right to live in dignity whatever his God, his religion, the colour of his skin,” said Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy.

With punches and boos, a crowd ejected right-wing politician Philippe de Villiers from the march. De Villiers’ Movement for France blames immigration for France’s social ills – like the extreme-right National Front which was banned by the organisers from the demonstration.

The march was called after a 23-year-old cell phone salesman, Ilam Halimi, was kidnapped January 21, sequestered and tortured for three weeks in the southern Paris suburb of Bagneux. Allegedly held by a suburban gang, he was found naked, handcuffed and covered with burn marks on February 13 near railroad tracks south of Paris. Halimi died on his way to a hospital.

It remains unclear whether anti-Semitism was the motive for the grisly killing, which may have been part of a suburban extortion racket.

France has Europe’s largest Jewish community, as well as the largest Muslim community in Western Europe. Anti-Semitic acts, as well as acts against Muslims, increased in France starting in 2000, reflecting the rise in Israeli-Palestinian violence. After reaching a peak, such acts ebbed. The Halimi case has revived fears that anti-Semitism remains in French society.