The Murder And Torture Of Ilan Halimi: Update

Some of you may recall reading here about the torture and murder of French Jew Ilan Halimi, at the hands of a Muslim mob. The case went to trial but has apparently now been stopped; more on this very shortly. Meanwhile, check out the article below, by Pam Geller of the Atlas Shrugs blog, written while the trial was ongoing.

The Halimi Cover-Up

by Pamela Geller

The abduction and murder in Paris of a young Jewish man by a gang of Muslim immigrants calling themselves the Barbarians shocked the whole of France in 2006. But now that the accused are on trial – silence.

A French judge has ordered the latest issue of the magazine Choc (“shock”) removed from the shelves. The cover showed a man with duct tape completely covering his head, except for a small opening around his nose. His nose is bloody. His hands are also bound with duct tape

It was a photo of Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Parisian Jew who was kidnapped and tortured for 24 days by the Barbarians. His captors took the picture and sent it to his family.

A lawyer for Halimi’s family had complained about the magazine, but ‘Choc’s editor-in-chief Paul Payan responded:

“Of course, we understand the anguish of the parents and, of course, we share their anguish…. But what’s so harrowing is not the publication of this photo. What’s harrowing is what it represents, what happened, the reality behind it.”

And it gets worse. The New York Times reported last week that “in the two and a half weeks since 27 people went on trial [in Paris] for the brutal 2006 kidnapping, torture and killing of a young Jewish man, little has filtered out about the proceedings.”

Worse still, the little that has emerged indicates that French government and law enforcement have done everything in their power to obscure the Islamic Jew-hatred that led these Muslims to commit this crime.

The corrupt media, aligned with the jihad forces, has long blacked out the truth about the homemade concentration camp and the inconceivable horrors that were suffered by this French Jew, chosen by Islam’s soldiers for unimaginable torture. They covered up the religious aspects of this depraved barbarity. Law enforcement did as well.

No one said anything about the Quran’s statement that the Jews are the Muslims’ worst enemies. No one referenced Muhammad’s words: “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'”

Never was there heard anything about the Islamic tradition that says: “When judgment day arrives, Allah will give every Muslim a Jew or Christian to kill, so that the Muslim will not enter into hell fire.”

Ilan’s uncle, Rafi Halimi, reported that “the gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Quran, while Ilan’s tortured screams could be heard in the background.”

Three weeks of unimaginable torture. Three weeks. So many clues. So many guilty animals partaking in the continuing torture in their “homemade concentration camp.”

Twenty-three people participated in torturing Ilan. Another twenty were involved indirectly. The custodian of the building gave them the key to an apartment where they said they wanted to “keep someone.”

French journalist Guy Millière reported that “the screams must have been loud because the torture was especially atrocious: the thugs cut bits off the flesh of the young man, they cut his fingers and ears, they burned him with acid, and in the end poured flammable liquid on him and set him on fire.”

Horrible tortures. Horrible torturers. One of the torturers would go to work at a TV station every day and come back to partake in the torture. The girls who lured Halimi into the trap knew he had been kidnapped. They knew Youssef Fofana, the leader of the Barbarians, was extremely violent. They knew Ilan was still in his hands three weeks later.

All they had to do was make an anonymous phone call to the police. No one would have known. They did not do it. No neighbor thought to say to the police that something strange was going on in their building.

The police told the family not to say a word. The Jewish community was not warned when prior attempts to kidnap Jewish men had failed. The Jewish community was not warned before the successful attempt.

Even the one member of the gang who dropped out because he was shocked by their violence did not call the police.

When Ilan was found, the head of the fire department who was called to the scene, a man with decades of experience, almost fainted when he saw the victim.

The last thing Youssef Fofana did was slit Ilan’s throat, twice, and pour a flammable liquid on him to try to set him on fire. But this did not burn him to death, because Ilan walked for perhaps one hour, trying still to find a way to live.

It was another brutal Islamic slaughter of a defenseless Jew. To cover it up now is only to help ensure that it happens again.

I wanted to write something about this article by Pamela Geller but I’m on the verge of tears having read those details. I wish long life to Ilan Halimi’s family and I hope and pray that Ilan is in a far, far better place right now.

Jews don’t believe in hell but, if there does exist such a place, I hope that the bastards who killed Ilan Halimi will rot there for all eternity.

Relevant links:

Atlas Shrugs

Jew With A View: Muslim Mob On Trial For Torture And Murder Of Jewish Man Lured by Honeytrap

Palestinian Boy Murdered By His Own Family – For ‘Collaborating’ With Israelis

Yep, once again, the Palestinian Arabs show their true colours. This story concerns a family that slaughtered one of their own – purely on the basis that he may have ‘collaborated’ with Israel. And yet we’re supposed to believe that these same people want peace with the Israelis? Anyone with a semblance of understanding knows damn well that if and when a Palestinian state becomes a reality, it will just be one huge base from which Hamas and its supporters will attack Israel even more often.

Here’s the Jerusalem Post on this pitiful story:

“A Palestinian family has killed its 15-year-old son in the West Bank after accusing him of “collaboration” with Israel.The boy’s body was discovered near Kalkilya on Wednesday.

The Palestinian Authority security forces announced that they have arrested a number of the boy’s family members in connection with the killing.

The victim was identified as Raed Wael Sawalha.

PA security sources said the suspects confessed to the killing, claiming that they decided to kill Sawalha  because of his alleged connections with the Israeli authorities.

A preliminary investigation launched by PA security forces revealed that Sawalha had been brutally tortured before he was hanged to death.

Gen. Adnan Damiri, spokesman for the PA security forces in the West Bank, said the perpetrators were all members of the boy’s family, including the father, uncle and cousin.“

Ilan Halimi: Anti Semitism Was The Motive

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This is a follow up post to the previous one on the tragic death of Ilan Halimi at the hands of a Muslim mob. Apparently in France, the media and police tried desperately hard to hide details which revealed that anti semitism was the motive behind the murder – not, as police tried to claim, financial gain.

We have to place this horrendous murder in the context of sharply rising anti semitism within France over recent years. Indeed, hundreds of Jews have already left France precisely because of this problem.

Here are more details on the Ilan Halimi case and the motive underlying it:

Nidra Poller in The Wall Street Journal

PARIS — The police suspect the group was involved in other kidnapping attempts in the last 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.

Later, a policeman admitted to the press that he and his colleagues were baffled by the gang’s erratic behavior. Ransom demands went up to €400,000, dropped to €100,000 one day, €5,000 another. The kidnappers called off several pickup arrangements, acting like amateurs, but were highly sophisticated in using untraceable emails and cell phones.

* * *

Yet one detail was consistently played down by the investigators and missing from the early media reporting on the killing. The victim, whose full name is Ilan Halimi, was Jewish. Most of the men targeted in other kidnapping attempts were Jewish.

Most members of the gang who allegedly carried out the crime are Muslims, whose families come from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa and live in the very sort of neighborhoods that went up in flames during three weeks of nationwide rioting last fall.

Jewish community leaders like Roger Cukierman, president of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France, an umbrella group for the country’s 600,000 Jews, cautioned against hasty conclusions and unreasonable panic. But French Jews have become sensitive to a well-documented rise in violent Muslim anti-Semitism over the past five years and saw anti-Semitism as the missing link in this senseless crime.

After all, Ilan’s family is simple and modest. Ruth Halimi, works as a receptionist. Why else, people are asking, would Ilan be tortured so cruelly for so long? No other motive, aside from sheer hatred, is apparent.

After Ilan was found on Feb. 13, the pieces started to fall into place quickly. When the police put out a sketch of a blond woman who had tried to bait other young men in similar circumstances as Ilan Halimi’s, Audrey Lorleach turned herself in. She led police to a housing project in Bagneux, a suburb in Hauts-de-Seine.

Fifteen suspects in the Halimi murder, who call their gang the “Barbarians,” were brought into custody. Youssouf Fofana, who refers to himself (in English) as the “Brain of the Barbarians,” is the apparent ringleader.

Ilan was held prisoner and abused in an apartment and later a utility room in the cellar in one of the project buildings. Both were lent to the gang by the concierge, who is also now in custody. Some in the gang were known delinquents. Mr. Fofana, who is 26, had served time for armed robbery. But another member was in on-the-job training in the IT service of a French TV station.

In initial statements to the press, Public Prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin and various police officials stuck to their hypothesis that money was the motive for the crime, not anti-Semitism.

They noted that Ilan Halimi had been tortured as if the gang were following “a known scenario.” Photos of Ilan, naked, with a sack on his head and a gun pointed at his temple were emailed to family members suggesting, according to the police, “scenes of torture at Abu Ghraib.“ As it turns out, the beheading of Daniel Pearl or Iraqi snuff films are the better comparison.

An anonymous police detective quoted in Monday’s edition of Libération said: “It’s simply that, for those criminals, Jew equals money.”

Later that same day, investigating magistrate Corinne Goetzmann detained seven of the suspects on charges of kidnapping, sequestration, torture, acts of barbarism and premeditated murder in an organized gang.

They will also be charged with targeting the victim on the basis of his religion, French for hate crime, which carries a stiffer penalty. Justice Minister Pascal Clément explained that the charge of anti-Semitism was based on the fact that one of the suspects had declared to the judge that they picked a Jew because Jews are ‘supposed to be rich.’

But, according to reports in the French press, some of the suspects in police custody said that they tortured Ilan with particular cruelty simply because he was Jewish.

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 Quran, 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.

* * *

The highest echelons of the French government are now preoccupied with the murder of Ilan Halimi. Paris is well aware that the case threatens France’s international reputation, but far more than that is at stake. Once again, as in the suburban riots of 2005, the country is forced to come face to face with the criminalized, alienated and racist Muslim youth and their adult enablers in its midst.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared, in a long speech delivered at the annual dinner of the CRIF, that this heinous crime was anti-Semitic, and that anti-Semitism is not acceptable in France.

The murder of Ilan Halimi invites comparison with the November 2003 killing of a Jewish disc jockey, Sébastien Selam. His Muslim neighbor, Adel, slit his throat, nearly decapitating him, and gouged out his eyes with a carving fork in his building’s underground parking garage. Adel came upstairs with bloodied hands and told his mother, “I killed my Jew, I will go to paradise.”

In the two years before his murder, the Selam family was repeatedly harassed for being Jewish. The Selam case has not been re-opened by the magistrate. The murderer, who admits his guilt, was placed in a psychiatric hospital, and may be released soon.

The initial response to the kidnapping of Ilan Halimi suggested a comparably selective ignorance. But many things have changed in French society in the past two years. Then, faced with the new tide of anti-Semitism, the Jewish community was left alone with its distress and at times even accused of being justifiably targeted because of its support for Israel.

Today the government has apparently decided that the barbarous hatred unleashed against one Jewish man is a threat to all of France.

Ms. Poller is an American novelist living in Paris since 1972.

France: Muslim Mob Uses ‘Honeytrap’ To Lure Young Jewish Man To His Death

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Ilan Halimi: lured to a basement, then tortured for three weeks, before being murdered.

Today, finally, a Muslim mob known as ‘the barbarians’ goes on trial for the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi.

Halimi, 23, disappeared in January 2006, during a date with a girl he had met through his work, in Paris. But the girl wasn’t actually interested in dating Ilan. Instead, she was the ‘honeytrap’ – and she lured him to the basement of a building in a Paris suburb.

Inside, Ilan was attacked, drugged with ether, handcuffed, and then his feet and mouth bound with tape. He was then moved to a vacant flat in Bagneux, another Parisian suburb. The gang’s ringleader, Youssouf Fofana, then demanded 450,000 euros from Ilan’s family.

He sent pictures of Ilan, blindfolded and bruised, and also a videotape of Ilan pleading for his life. On February 13th, Ilan was loaded into the trunk of a stolen car. Several hours later, a train driver glimpsed his naked body, handcuffed to a tree near the railway tracks, and called the police.

Ilan died on the way to hospital.

Youssouf Fofana, and 27 others are to answer various charges during the trial, which will be held before a Paris juvenile court, as  two defendants were minors at the time of the murder.

Prosecutors have described Mr Fofana, 28, as a “perverted megalomaniac”, obsessed with kidnapping Jews. He escaped to the Ivory Coast shortly after the murder but was arrested and extradited to France.

Also known as “Ossama” and “Mohammed”, Mr Fofana admitted to the murder – but later changed his story a number of times, frequently lapsing into unintelligible anti-Semitic rants. He has switched lawyers almost 40 times.

The French-born son of Ivorian immigrants is accused of stabbing Mr Halimi and dousing his body with  alcohol before setting him alight because the victim “looked at him in the eyes” before he was let go.

Tens of thousands took to the streets to march against anti-Semitism after the brutal crime.The murder came just months after France’s high-immigrant suburbs exploded into three weeks of nightly riots, and rapidly took on political overtones.

The victim’s mother has accused police of having botched the investigation by ruling out anti-Semitism as a factor in the crime. “If Ilan wasn’t Jewish, he wouldn’t have been killed,” she has pointed out. Ruth Halimi is expected to urge the court to open the hearings to the public today to provide a full accounting of her son’s death.

Prosecutors believe the gang had used women to lure nine other men in the kidnapping scheme but that these attempts failed. The “Barbarians” also tried to racketeer several doctors and company bosses.

Original story: Daily Telegraph