As if the kidnap, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi near Paris wasn’t bad enough, the way it has been dealt with and reported has graphically illustrated what can only be described as a pathological refusal within Europe to acknowledge the fact that French Jews are being attacked and murdered by Muslims in a kind of rolling pogrom. Ilan Halami was a Jew. He was almost certainly kidnapped and murdered because he was singled out as a Jew for this fate. A number of recent kidnappings have taken place of which the vast majority of victims have been Jews and their kidnappers Muslims. As Nidra Poller has reported in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

The murder of Ilan Halimi invites comparison with the November 2003 killing of a Jewish disc jockey, Sébastien Selam. His Muslim neighbor, Adel, slit his throat, nearly decapitating him, and gouged out his eyes with a carving fork in his building’s underground parking garage. Adel came upstairs with bloodied hands and told his mother, ‘I killed my Jew, I will go to paradise.’ In the two years before his murder, the Selam family was repeatedly harassed for being Jewish. The Selam case has not been opened by the magistrate. The murderer, who admits his guilt, was placed in a psychiatric hospital, and may be released soon.

Yet originally the French authorities insisted the crime was motivated by money and there was no racial motive.

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...In initial statements to the press, Public Prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin and various police officials stuck to their hypothesis that money was the motive for the crime, not anti-Semitism. They noted that Ilan Halimi had been tortured as if the gang were following 'a known scenario.' Photos of Ilan, naked, with a sack on his head and a gun pointed at his temple were emailed to family members suggesting, according to the police, 'scenes of torture at Abu Ghraib.' As it turns out, the beheading of Daniel Pearl or Iraqi snuff films are the better comparison.

However, the French authorities have now been forced belatedly to acknowledge the blindingly obvious:

An anonymous police detective quoted in Monday’s edition of Libération said: ‘It’s simply that, for those criminals, Jew equals money.’ Later that same day, investigating magistrate Corinne Goetzmann detained seven of the suspects on charges of kidnapping, sequestration, torture, acts of barbarism and premeditated murder in an organized gang. They will also be charged with targeting the victim on the basis of his religion, French for hate crime, which carries a stiffer penalty. Justice Minister Pascal Clément explained that the charge of anti-Semitism was based on the fact that one of the suspects had declared to the judge that they picked a Jew because Jews are supposed to be rich. But, according to reports in the French press, some of the suspects in police custody said that they tortured Ilan with particular cruelty simply because he was Jewish...

Ilan’s uncle Rafi Halimi told reporters that the gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Quran, while Ilan’s tortured screams could be heard in the background. The family has publicly criticized the police for deliberately ignoring the explicit anti-Semitic motives, which were repeatedly expressed and should have dictated an entirely different approach to the case from the start. Police searches have now revealed the presence of Islamist literature in the home of at least one of the gang members.

The highest echelons of the French government are now preoccupied with the murder of Ilan Halimi. Paris is well aware that the case threatens France’s international reputation, but far more than that is at stake. Once again, as in the suburban riots of 2005, the country is forced to come face to face with the criminalized, alienated and racist Muslim youth and their adult enablers in its midst. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared, in a long speech delivered at the annual dinner of the CRIF, that this heinous crime was anti-Semitic, and that anti-Semitism is not acceptable in France.

But before people in Britain get too self-righteous about the slowness of the French to admit the reality of the Muslim victimisation of Jews, the British ‘liberal’ media was also slow to acknowledge the Jewish dimension of this crime. As Tom Gross records, last Sunday’s Observer story failed to mention that Ilan was a Jew. Says Gross:

It is very unlikely that The Guardian or The Observer would report on an almost certain racial attack on a black or Asian Muslim without mentioning that it was a racial attack, or who the perpetrators and victim were. This was undoubtedly clear to The Observer at the time of publication as illustrated by the fact that Ha'aretz, for example, had already published an article highlighting this.

The Independent was worse. Its story on February 21 (subscription required), headlined

Jewish anger at 'racist' murder by kidnap gang,

implied that the Jewish reaction was paranoid because

Most of the other victims, or intended victims, were not Jewish

and furthermore that it was the Jews who were violent:

At the weekend, a mainly peaceful protest march by Parisian Jews was marred by a number of violent actions by radical young Jewish men. A black man was beaten up, allegedly for "smiling" at the protest. An Arab-run grocery was attacked. A motorist who was caught up in the march was assaulted and had to be rescued by demonstration marshals.

Two days later, however, the paper abruptly changed its offensive tune. In a story headlined

This anti-Semitic attack is terrifying

it now said:

Anyone who has spent time in the banlieues will know that they are not race ghettoes but social ghettoes where different races are accepted reasonably well. All, that is, except for Jews. The ‘fuijs’ or ‘feujs’ (backward slang for juifs) have become an object of hate-filled fantasy among suburban youths (and not just youths). This is partly because the otherwise apolitical, suburban kids identify with the Palestinian cause. They also have the grotesque conviction that all Jews are super-rich and conspire to prevent other ethnic minorities from rising in French society. French authorities now admit that anti-Semitism was a ‘factor’ in the torture and murder of M. Halimi. They insist, however, that the main motive of the Barbarians was money, not race or politics. One police officer said: ‘If this gang had heard that all Martians were rich they would have tried to capture a Martian.’ This was meant to be reassuring. It is not. It is terrifying. The gang abducted M. Halimi for money. They casually tortured him for three weeks because he was Jewish.

This saga is an object lesson in the lethal state of European denial. Jewish victimisation, despite the Jews’ own factual evidence about their own victimisation, is not recognised as such until it becomes overwhelmingly and undeniably apparent. And that is because to acknowledge it is to acknowledge the murderous hatred of Jews by Muslims, which is unacknowledgeable for two reasons: 1) it destroys the governing fiction that Muslim rage in France is driven by poverty, discrimination and French racism and 2) it destroys the governing fiction that the Jews of Israel are the aggressors and the Palestinians are their victims. That is why Jewish victimhood is being expunged from the European mind.

Posted by melanie at February 24, 2006