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The Jew Killers of France
WSJ, subscriptionIn life, Ilan Halimi sold cellular phones on a boulevard named after Voltaire, off a square dedicated to la République. He was an ordinary young Frenchman, except for one thing; he was Jewish, which got him killed. So in death, after 25 days of torture, Ilan Halimi became a symbol of this Continent's failures in dealing with its poor and maladjusted Muslims. His story is shaking France in a deeper, possibly more lasting, way than the recent riots or the ongoing fracas over the Muhammad cartoons. Last week, on a Monday morning, Ilan was found naked, handcuffed, with burns and bruises over 80% of his body, stumbling on train tracks in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, south of Paris. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Each detail of his kidnapping and ordeal that emerged in the past week fed widespread popular outrage. On Jan. 20, the 23-year-old Ilan, depicted here, went for a rendezvous with a young woman he met at his store and fell right into the hands of his kidnappers. In the previous month, this group tried to entrap six other men, four of them Jewish, using women as bait. Ilan was whisked to the cité de la Pierre-plate, a large housing project in Bagneux, a Paris suburb (or banlieue) that's home to immigrant and French lower-middle-class families. In an empty third-floor apartment and later a basement utility room, he was tortured to death. Several times, as Nidra Poller this week reported in the Journal's European editorial pages, the kidnappers called Ilan's family and read them verses from the Quran while their son screamed in agony in the background. Their demands for ransom from Ilan's modest parents never turned out to be serious. Once unmasked, the identity of these barbarians came as no surprise. The police believe that up to 15 young men and women from the banlieue, maybe more, took part. These "youths," a French euphemism, grew up together in Bagneux. The gang is a mixed lot. Most, but not all, are Muslims born in France to Arab or African parents of limited means. In their raids, police found Islamist literature and documents supporting a Palestinian aid group. But last year's bonfires of cars set by similar "youths" showed that the bonds formed among the delinquents of the projects often transcend religion or ethnicity. That doesn't make the "gangrene" in French society, in the acid words of the left-leaning Libération yesterday, any less difficult to live with. As it happens, the gang that murdered Ilan Halimi calls itself the "Barbarians." The crime was orchestrated by their leader Youssouf Fofana, a 26-year-old Muslim with a criminal past who refers to himself as the "brains of the Barbarians." On the run for a week, he was arrested late Wednesday in the Ivory Coast, the birthplace of his parents. Fofana told the Ivorian police that Ilan Halimi was kidnapped because Jews "have money"; he denies that he or his accomplices were motivated by hatred for Jews, specifically. By all accounts, Fofana is a vicious thief, and now admitted killer, who could never keep a job and, according to one acquaintance quoted in the French press, "spent all his time with kids of 16-17, around whom he could feel superior." Posted by: Captain America 2006-02-25 |
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