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French police opened an investigation Monday after suspected members of an extremist group marched through a Jewish quarter in central Paris shouting anti-Semitic slogans over the weekend. Shoppers in the historic Marais neighbourhood, one of the busiest districts in the Jewish area of Paris, were left in shock early Sunday evening after a group of extremists terrorized community members with anti-Semitic verbal abuse. More than 20 men claiming to be members of the Tribu-Ka anti-white group walked up and down the crowded Rue des Rosiers shouting at the families and youths in the area. The French Office of Vigilance against...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Philippe Karsenty, the founder and president of Media-Ratings, the first media-ratings agency in the world that closely monitors French media outlets and, among other things, their anti-American and anti-Israeli bias. FP: Philippe Karsenty, tell us a bit about your background, what Media-Ratings is and what motivated you to create it. Karsenty: Media-Ratings was created in 2004 in reaction to all the mistakes, and sometimes lies, that the French media outlets were publishing on every subject. I have a financial background and I thought that the tools we used on the financial markets, ratings agencies, could...

THE pretty schoolgirl known as Yalda wore tight white trousers and thigh-high boots to the rendezvous. Her target, a young Jewish telephone salesman, quickly fell under her spell. He meekly followed her when she suggested a nightcap at her place. It would be his last date. The testimony of this 17-year-old femme fatale who happily offered herself as “bait” in the kidnapping of Ilan Halimi, whose tortured body was found on wasteland, has shocked a country which is haunted by a painful history of anti-semitism. Yalda’s only moment of doubt came when she heard Halimi’s shrieks as he was carried...

In working-class Parisian suburbs like this one, heavily populated by North African immigrants, the word "Jew" is now a standard epithet. It appears in graffiti on middle school walls and neighborhood playgrounds and on the tongues of the young. "It's blacks and Arabs on one side and Jews on the other," said Sebastian Daranal, a young black man standing in the parking lot of a government-subsidized housing project with two friends. Eight men beat the son of a rabbi here in March. Another Jew was attacked the next day. In the wake of the torture and killing in February of...

PARIS, March 6 — Three attacks against Jews over the weekend have added to anxiety that anti-Semitism is growing among a new generation of French citizens in the country's immigrant-heavy, working-class neighborhoods. The police said two young men, 17 and 18, were attacked late Friday by black and Arab youths in the northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles, home to a large number of Jewish families. The attackers broke the nose of one victim, a rabbi's son, and stole the cellphone of the other. On Saturday, a 28-year-old Jewish man was beaten in the same suburb by youths who made anti-Semitic...

-snip- Mr. Halimi, 23, died Feb. 13, shortly after he was found near a train station 15 miles away by passers-by, after crawling out of the wooded area where he was dumped. He was naked and bleeding from at least four stab wounds to his throat, his hands bound and adhesive tape covering his mouth and eyes. According to the initial autopsy report, burns, apparently from the acid, covered 60 percent of his body. "I knew they had someone down there," said a young French-Arab man, loitering in the doorway of a building adjacent to the one where Mr. Halimi...

New York’s French Consul General Francois Delattre attempted to reassure American Jewish leaders Tuesday that France was committed to eradicating the “black shadow of anti-Semitism,” in the wake of the shocking murder of a young French Jew who was abducted for ransom. “You can trust my government, you can trust my authorities, you can trust my country” to aggressively combat anti-Semitism, Delattre told Jewish communal professionals and lay leaders, who met in New York to show solidarity with their French counterparts. Despite such assurances, the kidnapping and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi has jolted France’s already uneasy Jewish community —...

In 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...

The Associated Press has a report on the Paris demonstration. The account of the demonstration is straightforward, but then we have this: The march was in memory of a 23- year-old cellphone salesman, Ilan Halimi, who was kidnapped on Jan. 21 and allegedly tortured by a gang in the southern Paris suburb of Bagneux. What is the point of that completely gratuitous "allegedly"? The very next sentence says: He was found naked, handcuffed and covered with burn marks on Feb. 13 near some railroad tracks south of Paris. And this kind of thing is a staple of reporting on Halimi's...

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...

HE HAD been told that the bulging envelope might contain a wartime diary. As he began to read, however, Oliver Rubinstein grew increasingly excited. This was what every publisher dreamed of: a great story with global appeal. “It is the sort of thing that only ever happens once in a publisher’s life,” said Rubinstein last week, describing the text written in German-occupied France by a Jewish novelist shortly before she was sent to her death at Auschwitz in 1942. * Irène Némirovsky’s manuscript, written in tiny letters to save paper during wartime shortages, had been kept in a battered old...

One day last month, a young woman entered the Paris mobile phone shop where Ilan Halimi worked. She had no interest in a phone, according to police. She wanted to flirt with the 23-year-old salesman. She left with Halimi's phone number, and soon after, the two arranged a date. Last week, French police found Halimi -- the son of Jewish Moroccan immigrants -- near a railroad track in a southern Parisian suburb. His naked body was covered with cigarette burns and he was handcuffed. He died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. French police initially described the...

Anti-Semitism may have played a role in the torture and murder of a young Jewish man who was kidnapped and held for ransom, French authorities said Monday. Authorities found 23-year-old Ilan Halimi naked, handcuffed and covered with burn marks last Monday near railroad tracks in the Essonne region south of Paris. He died on the way to a hospital, officials said. Justice Minister Pascal Clement, speaking to reporters outside an annual meeting of France's main Jewish umbrella group, CRIF, confirmed investigators had alleged "aggravated circumstances of anti-Semitism." One 19-year-old suspect was placed under investigation - a step short of formal...

PARIS - The mother of Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Parisian Jew who was abducted, tortured and murdered by a gang in a suburb of the capital, accuses the police of missteps that led to her son's death. She revealed to Haaretz Sunday 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. She also accuses the police of ignoring the anti-Semitic motivation in the case in order not to alienate Muslims. "If Ilan hadn't been Jewish, he wouldn't have been murdered," she...

France arrests gang suspected in killing of Parisian Jew By , Haaretz Correspondent PARIS - The French police arrested late Thursday night most of the members of the gang that abducted, tortured and murdered Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jew from Paris. Hundreds of SWAT officers raided apartments in Bagneux and arrested 12 people. Another suspect was arrested in Belgium. "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."

French police launched a wide-range investigation on Tuesday after a twenty three-year-old Jewish man was kidnapped and murdered. Jewish community security services have said they suspect the crime may have been motivated by anti-Semitism. Ilan Halimi was found critically wounded, naked and hand-cuffed along a railway track in the suburb of Saint Genevieve des Bois, 30 kilometres south of Paris on Monday, three weeks after he was kidnapped by a gang in Paris. The victim, who was burnt and cut on 80 percent of his body, died of his wounds as he was taken to hospital. Series of crimes Judiciary...

Ilan Halimi, 23-year-old Parisian man, found tied to tree, naked, wounded, with burns covering his body; police arrest 13 suspects, say act not motivated by anti-SemitismThe French police arrested 13 people on suspicion of kidnapping, torturing and murdering Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Parisian Jew. Halimi was found on Monday tied to a tree, naked and wounded, with burns covering all parts of his body. He died on the way to the hospital. Police officials said that the abduction and murder were apparently not motivated by anti-Semitism, but added that they have not yet discovered what led the group to commit...

A man stands before a monument in Lyon honouring Jews killed in the Second World War that was painted with a Swastika. Acts of desecration and violence against Jews in France have escalated since the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, pushing many to leave for new homes abroad. French Jews are leaving the country in ever-growing numbers, fleeing a wave of anti-Semitism...

French Riots Fan Anti-Semitism 14:52 Nov 11, '05 / 9 Cheshvan 5766 By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu Moslem riots in France have fanned anti-Semitism, and four synagogues and Jewish schools have been firebombed, despite Jewish media reports that Jews are not being targeted more than others. "Walter H," who lives in France, stated that the violence against Jews has been country-wide. "In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed [as] were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles [and] a Jewish school in Creteil," he wrote in an e-mail.. He...