FRENCH JUSTICE BLIND TO ANTISEMITISM

Muslims can't commite hate-crimes, apparently. Post taken from Unsealed Room

Amidst all of this hullabaloo surrounding cartoons, the story of the extremely horrific kidnapping, torture and murder of a young man named Ilan Halimi in France has gotten lost.

The story is horrific in several ways -- not the least of which is the fact that the French authorities have had the audacity to prematurely claim that anti-Semitism didn't play a role in the crime, when it so obviously did.

It all started on January 21, when a good-looking young woman walked into a cellular telephone store, started flirting with Halimi, and they made a date. It turned out that she was bait, used by a gang to lure Halimi into a kidnapping.

The woman had been sent by the gang, which calls itself "The Barbarians." A police source said the gang is a group of childhood friends who grew up in Bagneux, a suburb south of Paris. The gang includes Muslims of North African descent and is headed by Youssef Fofana, who has escaped police capture so far. According to Marin, the gang had made six similar abduction attempts in the past.

After overpowering Halimi, the gang brought him to an apartment in a high-rise in Bagneux. They contacted Halimi's family and over the next three weeks demanded ransoms ranging from 300,000 to 500,000 euros. According to reports, at one point they agreed upon a deal and set a meeting place but the kidnappers backed out and eventually ended contact.

On Monday, several weeks after he was seized, Halimi was found tied to a tree, naked and burned all over his body. He died on the way to the hospital.

"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."

Late Thursday night, a SWAT team stormed an apartment building and arrested 12 members of the gang suspected in the kidnapping. Another was arrested in Belgium.

The fact that they caught the perpetrators is good. The fact that the Paris public prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, told the media that "no element of the current investigation could link this murder to an anti-Semitic declaration or action" is outrageous.

How about these elements?

According to Halimi's father, two of the previous kidnapping targets before his son were Jewish. And what's more, he told the media that:

"When we said we didn't have 500,000 euros to give them they told us to go to the synagogue and get it," Rafi said. "They also recited verses from the Koran."

Now, I really don't think the grieving father has any reason to make this up.

Add to that the fact that there are many simpler methods of murdering a standard kidnap victim -- but holding him prisoner naked? Setting him on fire and tying him to a tree? If this was a white gang and the victim was black would anyone be questioning if it was racist?

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that anti-Semitism just might have played a role in this. Instead, it seems we've got Inspector Clouseau on the case.

Surprisingly, this story hasn't gotten major play even in the Israeli media until today when the arrests were made -- we've all been too busy and the papers stuffed to the brim, not only with the Danish cartoon saga, but with Hamas, the Israeli election campaign and the Olympics.

It's nowhere to be found in the international media, not in the U.S. press and not on the wires. Only the Jewish and Israeli press, and one British paper.

I heard about it several days ago, only because my in-laws are French, and the affair has understandably shaken the French Jewish community to the core. We had a large wave of French Jews immigrating to Israel last summer. Something tells me that this summer we're going to have another one.



(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)