Nice job on the article, BoP. You get a gold star for giving a damn. And no, that is not sarcasm. Maybe, you're wondering why I didn't mention Ilan Halimi, z"l, at all or do a piece on it for Blog Critics?

I wanted to see how long it would take for someone in America (or Europe), on his own, to report this. Ilan's body was found on 13 February and the news was all over the country here the same day. That was three weeks ago.

You're not Jewish, BoP. You're a Protestant pastor living in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You didn't lose anybody in that murder (unless you view this through the Christian lens that every person is the reflection of Jesus, and that therefore someone who dies is a loss for everyone). I wouldn't expect you to write a piece on Ilan Halimi, z"l. Kol hakavód l'khá. All honor to you.

That no American Jew even bothered to mention this murder in the midst of all the hooting and hollering over cartoons in a Danish newspaper and all the crap from Iran over the holocaust, and all the whining over David Irving getting sent to jail for holocaust denial says something. One of their own brothers was murdered in Paris. Further, it has not been the first murder of its kind to take place in France. The saying "kol Yisraél arevím ze el ze" - all Israel is involved with one another - stops at the American border.

This warning sits in my computer from an article first published in 1989:

""I have come here to warn the Jews and to call upon them to move to Israel; for those who will not (move to Israel) will be harmed. This will happen due to anti-Semitism that will in a short time spread throughout the United States. Anyone who trivializes the signs of the coming anti-Semitism will be lost, similar to those who were lost during the plague of darkness that struck Egypt (during the Exodus). With this same energy, the process of the redemption begins, and soon after this will be revealed the one who is to lead it."

The article continues a few paragrphs later:

"Every Jew who does not come to Israel but remains here will be destroyed, and this time it will be by the Hand of Heaven. This is what was requested of me to tell you."

This is taken from a warnng by Dr. David Golander, a man who spent his own money on a trip to the United States in 1989 to warn Jews there to leave and come home. The full text can be found on the internet at this .PDF file. I now understand why he made the trip, and why he gave out the warning.

Excellent post. I have been asking the same question. I have sent messgaes to Fox News, CNN ect. asking why this crime is being ignored. And of course all my messages have been ignored. The New York Times appears to be doing the best job see Graig Smiths recent article. The world should know of this crime. It boggles my mind why the US is paying no attention to it.

Maybe the story was simply not considered important enough to report. Otherwise, one might conclude that whatever suppression occured was part of this administrations efforts to curry favor with muslims while conducting a war in Iraq that is unpopular with muslims.

I got this e-mail

The Barbarians of Europe from the Nationl Post in Canada.

In following the changed pattern of responses to Jew-hatred in France the article quotes in part:

In Nov. 2003, for example, a young French Jewish DJ, Sébastien Selam,
was approached by his Muslim neighbor, Adel Boumedienne, in their
building's underground garage. Boumedienne slit Selam's throat,
gouged out his eyes with a carving fork and then ran upstairs and
told his mother, "I killed my Jew, I will go to paradise." In the two
years before the murder, the Selam family had been repeatedly
harassed by their neighbors for being Jewish.

As with the perpetrators of other attacks on French Jews in recent
years, Boumedienne was clearly inspired by the most vicious
anti-Semitism. Yet the case was barely commented on in the French
media and there was no response of any significance from the French
government.

It contrasts the coverage of Mr. Halimi's, z"l, murder:

Following an outcry by French Jews, both the police and the judge
presiding over the case admitted that anti-Semitism had played a key
role, while Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told the French
National Assembly that the gang had targeted Jews because "they were
convinced that 'the Jews have money.'"

Prime Minister de Villepin also accused the police of initially
failing to acknowledge the anti-Semitic aspects of the murder.

Meanwhile there has been a similar belated but welcome willingness to
recognize the facts on the part of the media. After doing its best to
confuse the issue and downplay the anti-Semitism of the perpetrators,
The Independent in London was suddenly running a piece titled "This
anti-Semitic attack is terrifying". Major U.S. papers such as The New
York Times and Los Angeles Times, which had been silent about the
story, have now reported it. In France itself the significance of the
killing has been widely discussed and analyzed. An editorial in Le
Monde called it "a crime of an era, a sort of looking glass onto the
true state of our society."

The Americans would rather not see the ugly truth of Jew hatred in Europe and its slow spread across Canada and the United States. Jews living there might wake up and come home.

Thank you, Ruvy, for your kind thoughts. Many American bloggers have kept track of this story and many have been scratching their heads as to why the story got buried under the avalanch of Dick Cheney & Muhammed Cartoon stories. I understand that, although it was reported quite thoroughly in the Israeli press, Israel sent no one to represent it at the funeral. From what I have read, Ilan was working to earn enough money so that he could emigrate to Israel. Ironically, his family moved to France from Morrocco to be free from the anti-Semitism they had experienced in their homeland.

Ruvy,

With great interest I look foward to the comments on this blog. Americans are, me being one are so dam ignorant. We are ripe for picking.

Pleased to know your ok Ruvy. Say safe mi amigo.

Elvira, the lady of song. Listen to Ruvy. He's right.

Go fishing ya-all

I'm curious to know what evidence exists that the murderers of Ilan Halimi are in fact Muslims. A great deal of evidence has been put forward to show they are anti-Semitic. I have little trouble accepting that assertion. However, the evidence I have seen here so far does not prove they are Muslims.

Anyone can recite verses from the Qur'an. Anyone could have realized a Jewish family would be more frightened of kidnappers who convincingly claimed to be Muslims. This claim would make the family feel greater fear for the victim's safety, and in the minds of ruthless killers might seem like a way to make the family more likely to pay the ransom.

Please note I'm not making a claim either way. I don't know whether these brutal murdering kidnappers are Muslims or not. (Except in the absolute sense that no genuine follower of any great world religion would stoop to committing such a barbaric crime against humanity and against God.)

All I'm asking is what evidence exists to indicate these people actually are Muslims, and not merely claiming to be Muslims as part of their twisted criminal scheme.

Victor,

You'll have to dig into the stories from France - the later ones that deal with the deportation of the gang leader, etc. to see the proofs. It took a while for the French police to a tually admit this. Like the BBC reluctant to admit who practices female genital mutilation in Britain, the French press may have been reluctant. This is understandable, unfortunately.

Yes, anybody can read from the Qur'an - but the Qur'an is read in Arabic, and folks listening to the tapes probably heard the Arabic in the background. While Arabic is not the exclusive province of Moslems, most Arabic speakers - either as a first or second language - are Moslems. And the reason that Indonesians and Pakistanis, for example, learn Arabic is specifically so that they can lern the Qur'an - which is supposed to be taught only in Arabic.

Thank you, Ruvy.

The facts you state about the Arabic language are true, and would also be easily knowable by any kidnappers who weren't Muslims but wanted the victim's family to think they were. That was why I considered the shouted quotations from the Qur'an to be inconclusive evidence. By itself that piece of evidence is not proof, if the police had no leads as to the actual identities of the gang members.

The other evidence you cite provides much stronger support. For the police to have identified even one gang member as also being a member of the Muslim community would be a strong indicator. Knowing the gang leader's identity provides even stronger evidence.

I hope all the gang members are soon found out and brought to justice.

The powers that be have decided that it is more important to combat racism and discrimination than to provide accurate news stories. The harm of informing the masses that a Muslim gang perpetrated the violence, reinforcing the stereotypes, is greater than a small lie of omission by not mentioning it. The ends justify the means.

Likewise, if a muslim were killed in a similiar fashion, the media would loudly protest it as a hate crime and make sure the majority realized what it had done. The point being to bring guilt upon the masses and show them that they are equally violent.

The 'cultural relativism' propaganda most everyone must receive in order to get a degree these days is finally bearing fruit, I'm just not sure who is benefitting.

I just received this interesing essay (from a non-Jew):

AWAITING THE NEW FALL OF ROME By Avi Davis

In his work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the historian Edward Gibbon describes how a vacillating Roman Senate, with the army of the Barbarian Goths at its city gate, debated fretfully about the Roman Empire's future. Apparently unknown to them, a civil rebellion, led by slaves and domestics, had erupted within the city walls, leading to anarchy. Days after the appearance of the enemy, the gates were opened from within and the Barbarians poured in to pillage Rome. Within a week, 1100 years of empire building had come to a close.

Sixteen hundred years after that epochal event, it should surprise no one that new barbarians threaten the safety and security of the continent Rome once controlled. When the body of Ilan Halimi turned up last week on a railway track outside of Paris the group responsible was identified as the Barbarians. Yet these were not Goths, Huns or Vandals of ancient times, but Muslim criminals whose intent was clearly to commit a racial murder. The torture to which Halimi was subjected and the methods with which he was eventually dispatched should remind everyone in Europe of the original provenance of the term "barbarian" - that of men intent on destruction of centers of Western culture and civilization.

The actions and justifications of the present day Barbarians, are of course, more than a match for their ancient predecessors. The brutal slaying of Halimi, a young French Jew of no particular importance, has opened the eyes of the European public to the dangers of the Muslim jihadist culture as no other act of terrorism or criminality has done until now. Tens of thousands protested the murder - recognized universally as an attack - not on just a Jew, but on France itself. Not even the brutal slaying of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh or the murder of the gay Dutch politician Pik Fortuyn has quite provided the same political impact. That is because in the wake of the recent French riots and the worldwide disturbances caused by the publication of the Danish cartoons, European politicians now recognize that radical Islamic sentiment is no longer confined to a few scattered sects, focused on anti-Semitic provocations, who can be tamed through dialogue and discussion. It rather represents an ideological pandemic spreading voraciously in European cities, which vouchsafes the notion that the murder of Jews, gays, conservatives, journalists, editors - and in fact anyone who is perceived as a barrier to Islam's advance, entitles those with requisite religious belief to issue and execute death warrants. And further, that flimsy, ignorant responses and the cognitive dissonance of denial only fans these flames higher.

A word should certainly be offered to those secular humanists who still believe that amelioration of the economic plight of Islamic urban centers will substantially change the attitudes of the jihadists in their midst. This view not only ignores the historical pattern of the jihadist culture and motivation; it is a sop to the Islamists - clerics and leaders - who see such soft-pedaling as a weakness to be exploited. One must wonder at the blindness of European politicians who still believe that the fire bombings of synagogues, the murder and harassment of Jews or the torching of Jewish businesses are merely isolated examples of urban unrest, economic disenfranchisement or even latent anti-Semitism. They are, in fact blows, aimed against Western civilization. Imams and Islamic clerics throughout Europe have prophesied for years about the West's imminent collapse. They do this while employing the liberal values of tolerance, openness and dialogue to protect their mosques while propagating hatred, racism and incitement to murder beneath the shield of freedom of speech.

Most Western countries have not, as yet, recognized the profundity of the threat. But for some there is a growing measure of clarity. Last week Peter Costello, the Australian treasurer, made public his government's opinion that those who do not subscribe to Australian values or deny the supremacy of Australian law over Islamic law should be denied both citizenship and the right to enter Australia. Costello went further, in an interview on television, in declaring that even Australian citizens who fail to pass this basic litmus test should be subject to deportation. The Australian government, particularly its feisty prime minister John Howard, have been well ahead of the rest of the world in legislating firm controls against incitement and racism emanating from their country's mosques. But few Western leaders have been as forthright as Costello in recommending deportation as a measure against a country's citizens for denying the basic values upon which their own societies are founded.

Meanwhile, time is running short for Europe. Without recognizing that an unbalanced emphasis on pluralism at the expense of security, will gradually erode the moral superstructure of liberal democracy, there will be thousands more Ilan Halimis - Jew and non-Jew alike - tortured in third floor apartments and dying on the streets of restive Islamic communities.

For that reason, no one should be deceived. Barbarism has returned to Europe. But this time the barbarians are not just outside the city, battering at the walls. They are inside it, with sufficient political clout and public sympathy to open the gates from within.

Avi Davis is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.

Amazing - in the course of doing research for an article on how the (non-Jewish) media has dealt with the Halimi murder (i.e. largely NOT dealt with it, or incompletely dealt with it), I find this great post and the very interesting and helpful info provided by those commenting!

If I come up with interesting info I'll be happy to add to this thread.

Query: Do you think the murder, in addition to being driven by anti-Semitism, is also an example of animus for Israel? To the extent that the hostilities have become overt as a result of the coverage of the Arab Palestinian war against Israel, I think that is a connection. Otherwise?

Thank you all for pursuing this.

Lori Lowenthal Marcus
Philadelphia, PA USA

Lori,

In this case, yes. This was not merely a case of anti-Semitism, it was also a case of hatred for Israel. There is in Europe a basic dislike for Israel built on ther fact that Jews have been a success, and Europeans resent the fact that until recently Israelis were not victims like other Jews were. There is also the issue of Moslems who live in Europe who have an animus against us because, until recently, we have wiped the floor with Arabs militarily.