Don't Let Me Stop You: Anti-Semitism in France

In Nazi-occupied France the Vichy government cheerfully rounded up extra Jews for deportation to the death camps. There's a French streak of anti-Semitism that goes back a long way, and it's on the rise again. A few years ago Ariel Sharon provoked French ire by publicly suggesting that French Jews consider emmigrating to Israel for safety's sake.

Like their blindness at the failed "Integration Model" for French Muslim immigrants, denial by the French of French anti-Semitism is practically the state religion. While the US was pre-occupied with the riveting tale of Dick Cheney's hunting accident a particularly nasty kidnapping and murder occurred in France. The target: a young, French Jew. The kidnappers: a gang of French Muslims.

Nidra Poller at OpinionJournal:

PARIS--Two weeks ago a 23-year-old man initially identified as "Ilan" was found by a passerby stumbling in a field near the railroad tracks in the Essonne region south of Paris. Handcuffed, naked, with four-fifths of his body covered with bruises, stab wounds and serious burns, Ilan died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Soon after, police provided more details. The victim had been kidnapped Jan. 20 and held for 24 days by a gang from the banlieues, the poor suburban projects that ring the French capital, who eluded capture while repeatedly contacting Ilan's family with ransom demands. The police suspect the group was involved in other kidnapping attempts in the past two months that used young women as bait. Several of the targeted men worked, as Ilan did, in the small cell phone shops along Boulevard Voltaire in the mixed 11th arrondissement of Paris. In another case, a suspicious father replaced his son for a meeting with a girl who claimed to be a singer, and fell into the hands of masked men who tried to capture him but ran away when someone called the police.

Throughout Ilan's disappearance, the police handled his case as a straightforward kidnap for ransom. The discovery of his body, bearing signs of barbaric torture over an extended period of time, raised serious doubts about this hypothesis. Later, a policeman admitted to the press that he and his colleagues were baffled by the gang's erratic behavior. Ransom demands went up to 400,000 euros, dropped to 100,000 euros one day, 5,000 euros another. The kidnappers called off several pickup arrangements, acting like amateurs, but were highly sophisticated in using untraceable emails and cell phones.

Yet one detail was consistently played down by the investigators and missing from the early media reporting on the killing. The victim, whose full name is Ilan Halimi, was Jewish. Most of the men targeted in other kidnapping attempts were Jewish. Most members of the gang who allegedly carried out the crime are Muslims, whose families come from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa and live in the very sort of neighborhoods that went up in flames during three weeks of nationwide rioting last fall.

You'll want to read the rest. Even though the killers tortured him on the phone as they taunted the family with anti-Semitic remarks and passages from the Koran, the police didn't see any evidence that a hate crime was in progress. And:

No longer able to deny or play down the racial motive, the investigation is entering a new phase. One of the most troubling aspects of this affair is the probable involvement of relatives and neighbors, beyond the immediate circle of the gang, who were told about the Jewish hostage and dropped in to participate in the torture.

Fortunately Islam is a Religion of Peace. Otherwise just imagine how nasty this might have been. We paean Allah and Mohammed for these works of their devoted disciples.

Update: From Jihad Watch. The "mastermind" of the murder, Youssouf Fofana, has been returned to France from the Ivory Coast where he fled. Lots more information including this:

Twenty-one people have already been arrested, nineteen are behind bars, several big goons are still on the run. Police think that an even wider circle of people knew about the hostage and the torture, and kept silent. Some may be charged with "non-assistance to an endangered person."