Update on Ilan Halimi, tortured and killed by French Muslims

Ilan Halimi, 23 years old, was kidnapped, tortured and killed by a terrorist gang of French Muslims and their neighbors. The entire story is found in Political Islam in France and the World.

A few new and interesting specifics have come to light concerning this incident. "The gang phoned the family several times and made them listen to verses from the Koran while Ilan screamed as he was tortured in the background. Even when it became clear that the family, who are not rich, couldn't pay, the gang continued committing violence against Ilan for its own sake because, the police say, he was Jewish."

The brutal torture and killing of Halimi was not the first incident of this type. "The police also found literature linking the suspects to extremist Muslim causes and discovered that the gang had already tried to kidnap four other Jews in recent weeks, hospitalizing at least one 50-year-old Jew who was pistol-whipped before managing to escape, and throwing a hand-grenade at a Jewish doctor in another attack."

And certain newspapers, such as Le Figaro in Paris and The Observer in London reported the case while scrupulously avoiding any mention of the fact that the victim was a Jew. (It is hard to imagine that The Observer, or its affiliate newspaper The Guardian, would report on an almost certain racial attack on a black or Asian Muslim without mentioning that it was a racial attack, or who the perpetrators and victim were.) source

Although slow in reacting and reporting, some outlets did come around. "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." source

We need to call incidents like this what they are, whether it involves Jews, Muslims, Christians, whatever. Racism should never be acceptable.