Barbarians Inside the Gate

February 4
· Europe's New Dissidents


By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
February 25, 2006; Page A10

PARIS -- 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 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."

This murder dredges up the ghosts of French anti-Semitism past
(Dreyfus, Vichy), but that's more than a trifle unfair. The police and
media early on downplayed the racial motive, fearing as is their habit
these days a backlash from Muslims, yet soon changed their tune. Now
the whole establishment is united in condemning what the government
calls an "anti-Semitic hate crime." The French president, prime
minister, head of the biggest mainstream Muslim organization, the
archbishop of Paris and the leader of the Socialist opposition stood
together at a Thursday night memorial ceremony for Ilan at a synagogue
in Paris. Hundreds marched in Bagneux, in the words of a banner,
"against barbarism, anti-Semitism and racism." Home to 600,000 Jews,
the most of any European country, France has succeeded in reducing
anti-Semitic violence, which peaked in 2004.

Yet France's bigger worry is its Muslim population of five million,
also Europe's largest. So it's not the anti-Semitism but the crime
itself and the profile of the perpetrators that best explain the
national revulsion. To put it bluntly, Ilan Halimi, many people here
figure, could just as easily have been a Christian.

Since the riots petered out in early November, the country, contrary to
impressions, hasn't been calm. On New Year's Day, a gang of some 40
young, mostly Arab men terrorized a Nice-Lyon train, sexually
assaulting and robbing passengers, car by car. A female applied arts
teacher in a Paris banlieue was repeatedly stabbed this December by one
of her male students during class; in the schools dominated by kids of
immigrants, teachers often report being intimidated or attacked by
their pupils. And cars continue to burn nightly, if in fewer numbers.

With each incident a gulf widens between a political elite whose first
instinct is to appease and tolerate the rot in its midst and the
hardening of popular views about crime, immigration and Islam. The
clever politician, like Nicolas Sarkozy or, out on the extremes,
populists like Jean-Marie Le Pen, makes sure to be on the side of the
voters. This split is apparent too in the war over the cartoons.
Europe's establishment prostrated itself before the Islamic radicals,
while its press and people were on the whole appalled by the assault on
freedom of expression. Knowing which way the wind blows, Mr. Sarkozy
pointed out that he for one preferred "an excess of caricature to an
excess of censorship."

Will Ilan Halimi be the wakeup call for France that the riots failed to
be? An editorial in Le Monde, the voice of the French establishment,
called his murder "a crime of an era, a sort of looking glass onto the
true state of our society." No one here will as a result rush to aid
America's global war on terror in Iraq or elsewhere. But the Europeans
are in many ways in a bigger pickle than the U.S. The gravest threat to
their safety and way of life comes not from across an ocean but just
down the street.

WSJ EDITORIAL BOARD

are you playing evleth, cochon ?
hope not.

"Cochon Capitaliste" a écrit dans le
message de news: ...

February 4
· Europe's New Dissidents


By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
February 25, 2006; Page A10

PARIS -- 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 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."

This murder dredges up the ghosts of French anti-Semitism past
(Dreyfus, Vichy), but that's more than a trifle unfair. The police and
media early on downplayed the racial motive, fearing as is their habit
these days a backlash from Muslims, yet soon changed their tune. Now
the whole establishment is united in condemning what the government
calls an "anti-Semitic hate crime." The French president, prime
minister, head of the biggest mainstream Muslim organization, the
archbishop of Paris and the leader of the Socialist opposition stood
together at a Thursday night memorial ceremony for Ilan at a synagogue
in Paris. Hundreds marched in Bagneux, in the words of a banner,
"against barbarism, anti-Semitism and racism." Home to 600,000 Jews,
the most of any European country, France has succeeded in reducing
anti-Semitic violence, which peaked in 2004.

Yet France's bigger worry is its Muslim population of five million,
also Europe's largest. So it's not the anti-Semitism but the crime
itself and the profile of the perpetrators that best explain the
national revulsion. To put it bluntly, Ilan Halimi, many people here
figure, could just as easily have been a Christian.

Since the riots petered out in early November, the country, contrary to
impressions, hasn't been calm. On New Year's Day, a gang of some 40
young, mostly Arab men terrorized a Nice-Lyon train, sexually
assaulting and robbing passengers, car by car. A female applied arts
teacher in a Paris banlieue was repeatedly stabbed this December by one
of her male students during class; in the schools dominated by kids of
immigrants, teachers often report being intimidated or attacked by
their pupils. And cars continue to burn nightly, if in fewer numbers.

With each incident a gulf widens between a political elite whose first
instinct is to appease and tolerate the rot in its midst and the
hardening of popular views about crime, immigration and Islam. The
clever politician, like Nicolas Sarkozy or, out on the extremes,
populists like Jean-Marie Le Pen, makes sure to be on the side of the
voters. This split is apparent too in the war over the cartoons.
Europe's establishment prostrated itself before the Islamic radicals,
while its press and people were on the whole appalled by the assault on
freedom of expression. Knowing which way the wind blows, Mr. Sarkozy
pointed out that he for one preferred "an excess of caricature to an
excess of censorship."

Will Ilan Halimi be the wakeup call for France that the riots failed to
be? An editorial in Le Monde, the voice of the French establishment,
called his murder "a crime of an era, a sort of looking glass onto the
true state of our society." No one here will as a result rush to aid
America's global war on terror in Iraq or elsewhere. But the Europeans
are in many ways in a bigger pickle than the U.S. The gravest threat to
their safety and way of life comes not from across an ocean but just
down the street.

WSJ EDITORIAL BOARD

On 26/02/06 20:20, in article
, "Cochon Capitaliste"
wrote:

Good post, Cochon. `Thanks for posting it, it might get
a meaningful discussion going here.

What is your own opinion?

I don't agree with all of what was written. I am not sure
as yet as to the over religious composition of the gang that committed
this crime. There are a lot of culturally rootless kids in the banlieue,
which is not unusual for children of immigrant, the parents lose their
authority in a culture which is not their own. Islam is no longer a guide
to many young from Moslem families.

Anyway, there was a demonstration in Paris today at which the family
of victim did not participate, thinking it had become too politicized.
Even the far right tried to show up to what is inherently a center to
left wing demonstration. In France, things are often not simple.

there is no space for your discussions here, as you know perfectly well.

"Earl Evleth" a écrit dans le message de news:
...
On 26/02/06 20:20, in article
, "Cochon
Capitaliste"
wrote:

Good post, Cochon. `Thanks for posting it, it might get
a meaningful discussion going here.

What is your own opinion?

I don't agree with all of what was written. I am not sure
as yet as to the over religious composition of the gang that committed
this crime. There are a lot of culturally rootless kids in the banlieue,
which is not unusual for children of immigrant, the parents lose their
authority in a culture which is not their own. Islam is no longer a guide
to many young from Moslem families.

Anyway, there was a demonstration in Paris today at which the family
of victim did not participate, thinking it had become too politicized.
Even the far right tried to show up to what is inherently a center to
left wing demonstration. In France, things are often not simple.