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Murder of French Jew is a wake-up call to the reality of jihad

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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/28576/full/28576/murder-of-french-jew-is-a-wake-up-call-to-the-reality-of-jihad/ Murder of French Jew is a wake-up call to the reality of jihad Friday, March 3, 2006 | by caroline glick Ilan Halimi’s barbarous murder in France should awaken all Jews to the most significant truth of our times: Today, every Jew in the world is on the front lines of war. As was the case 70 years ago, every Jew today is a target for our enemies, who shout from every soapbox and prove at every opportunity that their goal is the annihilation of the Jewish people. From 1933-1945, the enemy was Nazi Germany. Today, the enemy is political Islam. Its call for jihad aimed at annihilating the Jews and dominating the world is answered by millions of people throughout the world. Among the lessons of the Holocaust, there is one that is almost never mentioned. That lesson is that it is possible, and indeed fairly easy to exterminate the Jews. The fact that the Holocaust happened proves that it is absolutely possible for the Jewish people to be wiped off the map — just as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamas leader Khaled Mashal promise. The story of Ilan Halimi’s murder at the hands of a terrorist gang of French Muslims brings to the surface the various pathologies now converging to make the prospect of annihilating all Jews seem possible to our enemies. First, there are the murderers who took such apparent pleasure and felt such pride in the fact that for 20 days they tortured their Jewish hostage to death. This makes sense. Anti-Semitism in the Muslim-dominated suburbs of Paris and other French cities is all-encompassing. As Nidra Poller related in the Feb. 23 Wall Street Journal, “One of the most troubling aspects of this affair is the probable involvement of relatives and neighbors, beyond the immediate circle of the gang [of kidnappers], who were told about the Jewish hostage and dropped in to participate in the torture.” It appears that Ilan Halimi’s murderers had some connection to Hamas. On Tuesday, Feb. 21, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that police found propaganda published by the Palestinian Charity Committee at the home of one of the suspects. The European Jewish Press reported that Israel has alleged that the organization is a front group for Palestinian terrorists and that in August 2003 the United States government froze the organization’s U.S. bank accounts, accusing it of links with Hamas. Halimi’s family alleges that during the 20 days of Ilan’s captivity the French police refused to take the anti-Semitic motivations of the kidnappers into account. The investigators insisted on viewing his kidnap as a garden variety kidnap-for-ransom criminal case, which they said generally involves no threat to the life of the captive. The police maintained their refusal to investigate the anti-Semitic motivations of the kidnappers in spite of the fact that in their email and telephone communications with Ilan’s family, his captors repeatedly referred to his Judaism, and on at least one occasion recited verses from the Koran while Ilan was heard screaming in agony in the background. The family alleges that if the police had been willing to acknowledge that Ilan was abducted because he was Jewish, they would have recognized that his life was in clear and immediate danger and acted with greater urgency. Like the police, the French government waited an entire week after Ilan was found naked, with cuts and burns over 80 percent of his body, by a train station in suburban Paris, before acknowledging the anti-Semitic nature of the crime. According to the press reports, the French government was at least partially motivated to suppress the issue of anti-Semitism because it feared inflaming the passions of the French Muslims who make up between 10 and 13 percent of the French population and comprise a quarter of the population under 25 years old. And yet, now that the French government has acknowledged that the crime was motivated by hatred of Jews, it is behaving responsibly in pursuing the murderers and decrying the attack on French Jewry. In addition to the exterminationist anti-Semitism of Ilan’s murderers and the unwillingness of the French authorities to acknowledge the anti-Semitic nature of the crime until it was too late, there is one more aspect of the case that bears note: Israel’s reaction to the atrocity. In short, there has been absolutely no official Israeli reaction to the abduction, torture and murder of a Jew in France by a predominantly Muslim terrorist gang that kidnapped, tortured and murdered him because he was a Jew. No Israeli government minister, official or spokesman has condemned his murder. No Israeli official has demanded that the French authorities investigate why the police refused to take anti-Semitism into account during Ilan’s captivity. No Israeli official flew to Paris to participate in Ilan’s funeral or any other memorial or demonstration in his memory. The Foreign Ministry’s Web site makes no mention of his murder. The Israeli Embassy in Paris — which has been without an ambassador for the past several months — only publicly expressed its condolences to the Halimi family Feb. 23, 10 days after Ilan was found. This, when the French Jewish community considers Halimi’s murder to have been the greatest calamity to have befallen it in recent years; when aliyah rates rose 25 percent last year; and when Ilan’s mother has told reporters that her son had planned to make aliyah soon and was just staying in France to save money to finance his move to Israel. For its part, as Michelle Mazel recently pointed out in the Jerusalem Post, the French press has noted that the Israeli media has not given the story prominent coverage. Halimi’s murder has not appeared on the front pages of the papers or at the top of the television or radio broadcasts. Although appalling, the absence of an official Israeli outcry against Halimi’s murder is not the least surprising. Today, the unelected Kadima interim government, like the Israeli media, is doing everything in its power to lull the Israeli people into complacency toward the storm of war raging around us. Against the daily barrages of Kassam rockets on southern Israel; nervous reports of al Qaida setting up shop in Judea, Samaria and Gaza; the ascension of Hamas to power in the Palestinian Authority and Iran’s threats of nuclear annihilation, Israel’s citizenry, under the spell of Kadima and the media, appears intent on ignoring the dangers and pretending that what happens to Jews in France has nothing to do with us. Caroline Glick writes for the Jerusalem Post, where this column previously appeared.

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