The Murder of Ilan Halimi

Opinion Journal ^ | Sunday, February 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST | NIDRA POLLER

[Sarah]

The Murder of Ilan Halimi A Jewish man is kidnapped in Paris, tortured for 24 days and then dies. BY NIDRA POLLER Sunday, February 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST 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.

[Sarah]

I've promised to report from the demonstration today. I'll do interviews and try to post photos. Chiraq was at the memorial service, and France has reacted very strongly to this, (perhaps, as the author maintains, because they see the danger to themselves now), additionally, I understand that the leader was forcably brought from the country he had escaped to. I'll check on this though

[Dallas59]

Islam is disgusting.

[Sarah]

Here's the latest: (translation follows)
Mandat d'arrêt international

Un mandat d'arrêt international le visant a été transmis vendredi aux autorités ivoiriennes. Certains membres du "gang des barbares" accusés d'avoir commis l'enlèvement d'Ilan et d'en avoir tenté au moins deux autres, se connaissaient "dès le collège", avait révélé Nicolas Sarkozy jeudi lors d'un déplacement à Lyon.

Au total 14 personnes ont été mises en examen dans ce dossier depuis le 18 février par les juges Corinne Goetzmann et Baudoin Thouvenot. Douze d'entre elles ont été placées en détention provisoire. Parmi les mis en cause, 10 personnes ont été mises en examen avec la circonstance aggravante "d'antisémitisme". En outre, trois autres personnes, deux femmes arrêtées mardi et un homme interpellé vendredi matin en région parisienne, devraient être déférées samedi, selon une source judiciaire. Enfin, deux autres personnes étaient en garde à vue vendredi soir, dont une jeune femme interpellée vendredi, qui pourrait être une "rabatteuse". Outre l'enquête sur la mort d'Ilan, la police travaille sur six tentatives d'enlèvement. Au moins 100.000 personnes sont attendues dimanche à Paris par les organisateurs d'une marche contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme après le meurtre d'Ilan.

[Sarah]

International extradition requested.
Friday, authorities contacted their counterparts on the Ivory Coast to extradite the head of the gang. According to interviews, many members of the gang have known each other since grade school. (wait, this is the wrong excerpt)

[xJones]

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.

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 Koran, 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.

Words fail me....

[Sarah]

.... elle cherche maintenant à retrouver les lieutenants présumés de Fofana. Celui-ci a été interpellé mercredi soir à Abidjan et se trouvait toujours samedi dans les locaux de la police ivoirienne, où deux policiers français de la brigade criminelle l'interrogent sur l'enlèvement et le meurtre.
____________________________________________________

Youssef Fofana is still in custody in the Ivory Coast, where 2 French police officers have been interrogating him concerning the kidnapping and murder. He was arrested on Wednesday, and continued being questioned on Saturday.

[JohnBovenmyer]

The best thing that could come out of this would if France reacted to the murder of Ilan Halimi as the Netherlands did to the murder of Theo Van Gogh. I don't see that happening. The revulsion after the latter was prompt and nationwide. I'm afraid it's going to take a more martyrs to save the French. I'm not even sure they can be saved, but then their chances didn't look too good before Joan came along either.

[Sarah]

I have to go for a while, I'll be back. I am really impressed by the French reaction to this, they have had it. I believe that it is time for the Jewish community to work with the authorities to fight their common enemy, radical Islam.
The holocaust was 60 years ago, the French are no longer the antisemites they were, the Arabs are. I have said this many times, and I live it here.
It reminds me of the Jewish fear of certain Christians in the US, as if the inquisition was really the big threat in our time. We can discuss this, but let's agree that France's and Chiraq"s reaction have been unprecedented.

[Sarah]

see above post, I'll be back

[Travis McGee]

Thanks....keep writing about this.

[Emmet Fitzhume]

I know.

The Mohammedans read the Koran as they tortured him. One of the scumbags confessed to "hating him because he was Jewish" as he put cigarettes out in his face.

[grey_whiskers]

Police searches have now revealed the presence of Islamist literature in the home of at least one of the gang members.

Words fail me....

Well, most Islamic terrorists have the IQ of moose droppings (I mean, how smart do you have to be to WANT to blow yourself up to kill 'infidels', when you could just keep yourself alive just as easily?).(*)

But it seems that they have just enough intelligence to keep from attacking governemnt officials and thereby alerting them to the danger...

Paging Chief Moose by the way :-)

Or maybe since this is France, inspector Clouseau.

"Does your dog Islamicist bite?"?

Cheers!

(*) The bombers are moose-sh*t for brains. The top schemers and plotters often have extraordinarily high IQ's, like top Marxists.

[JohnBovenmyer]

I'd love for your hopes to prove justified. Glancing at the untranslated reports here I'm pleased to find I can still read a fair amount of it in spite of a couple decades of not using my high school and college French. It sure would be nice for the French to become worthy again of the ideals that convinced my grandmother to study and eventually teach it and thus indirectly convinced me to study it. I'm not raising my hopes yet. At least until recently, Chirac has been the Roy Riegels of the War on Terror.

[Sarah]

http://s.tf1.fr/mmdia/i/71/7/2168717_5.jpg

[Sarah]

how does one post a photo?

[cgk]

Malkin ping!

Please FReepmail me if you would like to be added to, or removed from, the Michelle Malkin ping list...

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THE FUNERAL FOR ILAN HALIMI

By Michelle Malkin   ·   February 24, 2006 03:20 PM

Paris mourned the death of Ilan Halimi today (via Haaretz):

Cries of "vive la France" and "la justice" accompanied President Jacques Chirac, his wife Bernadette and Premier Dominique de Villepin last night as they left the memorial evening held here yesterday for Ilan Halimi.

The ceremony, which was held in the Grand Synagogue on rue de la Victoire, was seen by many in the Jewish community as the state leaders' formal declaration that anti-Semitism was to blame for the horrific kidnapping, torture and murder of the 23-year-old Parisian.
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At 5 P.M., two hours before the ceremony's official opening, police cars surrounded the synagogue area. Police at roadblocks inspected the bag of everyone who entered the area. Hundreds of thousands of people crowded on either side of the street, waiting their turn to enter the synagogue. At the synagogue's entrance police used metal detectors and checked the identity cards and passports of all who pushed in.

The synagogue's 3,000 seats were full, dozens more mourners stood in the aisles and many thousands remained outside and could not get in.

During the chilling ceremony, an 8-year-old read the Psalm "I will raise my eyes to the mountains, whence will come my help?" near a giant picture of Halimi.

Halimi's family and others in the Jewish community said that had the authorities admitted earlier that the young man had been attacked for being a Jew, he could possibly have been saved.

Halimi was found dying, covered with burns and cuts, on Monday February 13. He had been kidnapped three weeks earlier, after a Muslim gang sent a blonde to seduce him. Halimi had agreed to meet with her after meeting in a chat room. Immediately after his abduction his mother went to the police, saying he was kidnapped by anti-Semites. Sources in the community said three Jewish youngsters had managed to escape similar abdications in recent months.

The police told Halimi's mother, Ruth, to stop all telephone connection with the kidnappers, as a way of forcing them to use electronic mail, which was traceable.

The police did not know that during the five days in which the kidnappers tried in vain to contact Halimi's family, Halimi suffered terrible torture. One of the kidnappers said, "We put our cigarettes out on him because he was a Jew."

May he rest in peace.

Israpundit: The murder of Ilan Halimi

Caroline Glick/Jerusalem Post:

Anti-Semitism in the Muslim dominated suburbs of Paris and other French cities is all-encompassing. As Nidra Poller related in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, "One of the most troubling aspects of this affair is the probable involvement of relatives and neighbors, beyond the immediate circle of the gang [of kidnappers], who were told about the Jewish hostage and dropped in to participate in the torture."

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.
Halimi's family alleges that throughout the 20 days of Ilan's captivity, the French police refused to take the anti-Semitic motivations of the kidnappers into account. The investigators insisted on viewing his kidnap as a garden variety kidnap-for-ransom criminal case, which they said generally involves no threat to the life of the captive. The police maintained their refusal to investigate the anti-Semitic motivations of the kidnappers in spite of the fact that in their e-mail and telephone communications with Ilan's family, his captors repeatedly referred to his Judaism, and on at least one occasion recited verses from the Koran while Ilan was heard screaming in agony in the background. The family alleges that if the police had been willing to acknowledge that Ilan was abducted because he was Jewish, they would have recognized that his life was in clear and immediate danger and acted with greater urgency.

Debbie Schlussel notes that Halimi's family, Sephardic Jews, had emigrated from north Africa to France to escape anti-Semitism.

Technorati search: Ilan Halimi

[Northern Alliance]

I am really impressed by the French reaction to this, they have had it.

Chirac went to the funeral. Politicians gave speeches. Two French cops went to the Ivory Coast.

Personally, I am not impressed - not yet and I certainly don't see any evidence that the French 'have had it'. Talk is cheap - as cheap now as after the car-burning riots. What has really changed since then? Anything other than talk? What are you impressed with this time?

[Sarah]

What do you want, specifically?

[Sarah]

(translation follows)

"Dénué de toute compassion"

Le chef présumé du "gang des barbares" a menacé les enquêteurs, affirmant leur avoir "mis un contrat sur la tête". "C'est lui l'instigateur" de l'enlèvement et du meurtre d'Ilan Halimi: "il faisait peur aux autres (membres de la bande), mais tous le mouillent", a souligné cette source proche de l'enquête. Fofana est "loin d'être un imbécile. Il avoue tout, sauf ce qui concerne la mort d'Ilan. Mais c'est précisément lui qui est parti le matin du meurtre avec la victime dans sa voiture..." Selon cette même source, il ne voulait s'attaquer qu'à des juifs, et à personne d'autre, sous prétexte "qu'ils avaient de l'argent".

[Northern Alliance]

What do you want, specifically?

Good question, but you avoid answering the one I asked you. What are you impressed by?

What do I want? I won't answer on specifics - that is Chirac's and his Attorney General's job (and his counterparts in other countries), but in general legislation passed and enforced to make sure these immigrants assimilate, inlcuding accepting European values or leave the country. The Dutch are discussing legislation like this. If they pass and enforce it, then I'll be impressed.

Specific to this case, which would not indicate that the French have 'had it', but at least have a sense of justice, would be the arrest, hopefully conviction and very long sentences for conspiracy to commit torture, kidnapping and murder for the family members of the kidnappers that knew what was going on, and firing of the cops that ignored the racial/religious connection when the kidnappers were reading the Koran over the telephone to the victim's family.

So again, what in the French reaction impresses you?