Is Our Blood Any Less Red- Ilan Halimi
I am really late in covering this. In large part I blame myself and a desire to ignore what I see, but I have waited long enough. Ilan Halimi was kidnapped and tortured by a Muslim gang in France. For 24 days he and his family were tortured. The French government, those fabulous people who a short time ago watched as Muslim youths rampaged throughout the country refused to call this a hate crime.
It is only after his death and much media attention that they have begun to call this what it was.
Here is a short collection of links about this:
OpinionJournal
YNET (This quote needs to be highlighted)
All is not well in France“The janitor, who lent the gang the empty lodging without notifying the owner, is among the suspects in the ongoing investigation, which everyday seems to reveal a little more of the horror of what took place in the sordid apartment. According to an unofficial source, police came to realize that many in the building knew what was going on, but did not act since it appears everyone knew the victim was Jewish.”
On a related note Mark Steyn has an excellent column.
“In five years’ time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents’ apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam’s throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, “I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven.”
Is that an gripping story? You’d think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You’ve got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.
Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.
This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan’s screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.
This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone. And, if the gang did seem inordinately fixated on, ah, Jews, it was just because, as one police detective put it, ”Jews equal money.” In London, the Observer couldn’t even bring itself to pursue that particular angle. Its report of the murder managed to avoid any mention of the unfortunate Halimi’s, um, Jewishness. Another British paper, the Independent, did dwell on the particular, er, identity groups involved in the incident but only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by ”radical young Jewish men” who’d attacked an ”Arab-run grocery.”
At one level, those spokesmonsieurs are right: It could happen to anyone. Even in the most civilized societies, there are depraved monsters who do terrible things. When they do, they rip apart entire families, like the Halimis and Selams. But what inflicts the real lasting damage on society as a whole is the silence and evasions of the state and the media and the broader culture.”
There are many things that can be said. I’ll be brief. Evil things happen when good people remain silent. I don’t believe that all Muslims are bad people or that all Muslims hate Jews. I do believe that there is a very vocal element that is fighting a war.
They are involved in a war and they are not taking prisoners. We are faced with a very bad situation and one that I fear is going to get worse before it gets better. I wrote about some of this here, here and here.
Fern Sidman March 3, 2006 at 4:27 am
MURDER OF FRENCH JEW NOT AN ISOLATED INCIDENT
BY: FERN SIDMAN
The gang that kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered Ilan Halimi, 23, had threatened several prominent businessmen, lawyers and a well-known humanitarian activist, a French newspaper reported Saturday. The daily Liberation reported that the group behind the murder, which authorities have linked to anti-Semitism, tried to extort money from a founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders. Also targeted were the director of the Arte TV channel, a Paris lawyer and the head of a supermarket chain, the newspaper reported, citing police officials.
Police investigating the murder of Halimi earlier this month have made several arrests. The suspected gang leader, was arrested Wednesday in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and France is seeking his extradition. Fourteen people have been placed under investigation – a step short of being charged – in the case, and two more people were detained Friday for questioning.
Ilan Halimi was abducted on January 21 after a woman came into the mobile phone store where he worked and charmed him into a dinner date. The first break in the case came after the police released an Identikit image of the woman suspected of “baiting” Halimi. After turning herself in our of fears that neighbors would identify her, the woman claimed that she was indeed asked to seduce a number of young men, but was unaware of the act’s purpose. She identified the apartment where Halimi had been kept.
Halimi was found on February 13, tied to a tree, naked, wounded, handcuffed, gagged and covered with burn and cut marks on 80 percent of his body. Authorities found Halimi near railroad tracks in the Essonne region south of Paris a few days after the kidnappers ended contact with Halimmi’s family. He died en route to a hospital.
“They acted with indescribable cruelty,” the judiciary police chief leading the investigation said. “They kept him naked and tied up for weeks. They cut him and in the end poured flammable liquid on him and set him alight.”
Halimi’s family received a series of ransom demands – starting with one for nearly $537,000. Ilan Halimi’s mother revealed to the Haaretz newspaper that the police told the family to ignore the gang’s attempts to contact them for five critical days, after which Ilan was found near death outside the city. “Five days before Ilan was found, the police told us, ‘Don’t answer the phone, don’t repond to text messages.’ We saw dozens of calls and ignored them. On Thursday they found Ilan dead.”
“We think there is anti-Semitism in this affair,” Rafi Halimi, Ilan’s uncle, told the press.
“First, because the killers tried to kidnap at least two other Jews, and second, because of what they said on the phone,” Rafi Halimi added. “When we said we didn’t have 500,000 euros to give them they told us to go to the synagogue and get it,” Rafi said. “They also recited verses from the Koran.”
Under questioning by investigators, one of the suspects “made it clear that he had attacked Ilan Halimi ‘because he was Jewish, and Jews are rich”.
“If Ilan hadn’t been Jewish, he wouldn’t have been murdered,” Ilan’s mom said. She accuses the police of ignoring the anti-Semitic motivation in the case in order not to alienate Muslims, Haaretz reported.
According to a recent article on this subject by Caroline Glick, she states, “It appears that Ilan Halimi’s murderers had some connection to Hamas. Tuesday, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that police found propaganda published by the Palestinian Charity Committee or the CBSP at the home of one of the suspects. The European Jewish Press reported this week that Israel has alleged that the organization is a front group for Palestinian terrorists and that in August 2003 the US government froze the organization’s US bank accounts, accusing it of links with Hamas.”
It is clear that the French authorities remain callous and indifferent when it comes to Jews being murdered on their soil or anywhere else. This attitude was evidenced in their initial denial that anti-Semitism played a role in this murder and their expressed policy of ignoring any evidence of anti-Semitism.
This may be the first act of Hamas terrorism directed against a Jew outside of Israel, but clearly it won’t be the last. Everyday, we are being saturated with the anti-Semitic diatribes of an Iranian President named Ahmadnajed, of Hamas leaders and leading intellectuals. We can no longer deny it. Anti-Semitism is in full swing. It can only get worse.
Jack's Shack March 1, 2006 at 6:33 am
Mirty,
I am appalled and angered by this. Sadly I am not surprised at how the French handled this affair at all.
Mirty March 1, 2006 at 12:53 am
The outrage over this has been building slowly. I can only imagine how heartbroken Ilan’s family is. He was a young man, killed for being a Jew. We can’t be silent about this.