I will keep this post pinned to the top until I have kept my promise to write something for every one of the 24 days that Ilan Halimi was held captive and tortured.
On the final day, Youssef Fofana, the leader of the Barbarians, slit Ilan's throat, twice, and poured a flammable liquid on him to try to set him on fire. But this reportedly did not burn him to death, because Ilan walked for perhaps one hour trying still to find a way to live. Source
I know I promised to "post something on Ilan Halimi every day until the 13. February, day of his death, to get a tiny inkling of how long his torture lasted". I did not keep my promise, but I will make up for it, and add something here, for each of the 24 days he was tortured. And I will pin this post to the top until I have done so.
Here is how Ilan's mother, Ruth Halimi, described the 13. February 2006 to the journalist, Deborah Freund: (Full article at Aish.com)
February 13
That night I feel a strong force hurl my bed against the wall and I wake up. “Something happened to Ilan! I’m sure of it!” I tell the policemen in my living room. Of course, they think it’s only the ranting of a hysterical woman. It was five a.m. They say that a mother knows. I checked it out later.
On February 13, at five o’clock in the morning, Ilan was first shaven, like six million other Jews, and flung into the forest by his torturers. He managed to take the mask off his eyes, and as Fofana later reported, look them straight in the eye. I am a human being, his eyes told them. He received a few knife stabs for that. Then, like many of the six million before him he was set on fire and burned alive, having been sprayed with a flammable substance. Then his tormentors left.
It was raining that morning; Ilan managed to roll down on the leaves towards the highway. A black woman, a secretary like me, saw him lying by the side of the road, stopped her car and called the police. She accompanied him in the ambulance and did not leave his side. He was still alive in the ambulance but died on the way to the hospital. I console myself that my son died hearing a soothing voice.
When he was found guilty Fofana declared, “I killed a Jew, and for that I will go to Paradise.” The police publicly admit to the press that it was an anti-Semitic crime.
..
The second part of the video shows members of the French Branch of the Jewish Defence League entering the "cité" of Bagneux, a no-go zone where even Firefighters need police protection. It was in Bagneux where Ilan was held prisoner and tortured. The young men from the Jewish Defence League put up posters and chanted "Justice for Ilan" remembering him on the 5th anniversary of his death.
I consider the JDL a brave group of young Jews who do not believe in "meekly tending the other cheek" and consequently get often a bad press from a media who tend to be more on the side of the racaille.
Day 6
Ilan's Mother
While I will write something for each day of Ilan's Calvary, and while I will number the days in order, it will not be a correct chronology of facts. I will also keep the posts on one page to make it easier to read.
Marc Weitzmann, in a series on French anti-Semitism, wrote one article on Ilan Halimi. He titled it:
The following extracts come from this article.
Ruth Halimi, Mother of Ilan
About Ilan's mother Marc Weitzmann writes:
"The 20th (January 2006, day of the abduction) was a Friday.
“It was Sabbath! Sabbath!” Ilan’s mother, Ruth Halimi, told me.
A small but strong and maternal woman of Moroccan origins, she has managed to keep her strength and dignity through the whole ordeal thanks, she says, to the comfort of her religion and the support of the Jewish community. (Ruth Halimi has been employed at the Council of Jewish Organizations in Paris for the last 22 years.)
I’m furious with Ilan to this day!” she said, before adding, “Do not get me wrong, he was a great, great kid. He was amazing, the pillar of the house. He played the father role with his sisters since I divorced, a very responsible young man. But I was already pulling my hair out because of this Chinese girlfriend he got. So, what did he need to see this other one for? A Muslim? And a Friday night on top of it?
Well, he was 22."
Day 7
"Yalda" the honey trap
"...The daughter of an Iranian nurse and political refugee, Sorour Arbabzadeh was 17, beautiful, and fleshy. Although obviously smart, she also was still in the 10th grade.
In France since 1999, after the death of her father—a violent man, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, who had married her mother by force and reportedly beat Sorour during most of her childhood—she was raped two years later, at 14, by three teenagers of the cité. (A complaint filed by the mother against the boys at the time was soon withdrawn, possibly under pressure of the neighborhood.) The battalion of juvenile court judges, trained caregivers, and social workers who’d followed the girl since then had been unable to prevent her from multiple suicidal attempts.
Sorour, the trial showed, was brought into the gang by Tiffen, a semi-homeless young woman of 20, who was born in Brittany to a Catholic family and then converted to Islam at 15. Out of her devotion to Fofana, Tiffen had found some targets for the kidnappings in the cité for him—some of them among her own friends—but she lacked confidence to play the vamp part and had suggested Sorour instead. In a blink, Fofana was convinced. “I can do marvels with you,” he is reported to have said to Sorour the minute they met.
Immature, manipulative, and manipulated both, Sorour said she accepted Fofana’s proposal to be used as a honey trap as “a favor to him” only—and against the promise of a reward of 3,000 to 5,000 euros...."
Day 8
The Kidnapping
"...On Jan. 16, 2006, Sorour entered a cellphone store on the Boulevard Voltaire, where she flirted with a 22-year-old clerk named Ilan Halimi. One hour after the young man gave her his number, she called him to fix a date for a drink four days later, on the 20th at 10 p.m., in the inner south suburb. “He’s nice,” she confided to Tiffen after hanging up, “he’s cute.”
The said day, he met his new acquaintance for a drink at the Paris-Orléans, one of those gray, anonymous cafés where the ground is strewn with cigarette butts and race tickets and migrant workers from the old generation watch TV. She said she lived alone, offered that he bring her back home. When she arrived, to the gang hidden nearby she gave the proper signal, which was to look in her purse for her keys.
Some months later, after Ilan had been found walking on a railway line, naked and handcuffed, three times wounded by a knife and with two-thirds of his body covered in third-degree burns (he died a few hours after his transportation to the hospital), Sorour told the cops that she heard his shrill voice cry for two minutes as he resisted the gang members who were trying to lock him up in a car trunk. (Students in an adjacent street also saw him from afar, struggling as he was taken by the arms and legs. Because of the high pitch of his cries, they say they took him for a girl playing a joke, and thought of a joke and didn’t call the cops—they would’ve come too late, if ever, anyway.) In tears after the car took off, Sorour found comfort in the kind words of Maurice, another one of the gang members—a computer engineer from Martinique who also had converted to Islam. “This is not your fault,” he told her. “This is all over anyway.”
A bit later that same evening Fofana invited the two of them plus Sorour’s boyfriend Sami—an apprentice model she’d recently met on the Internet—to a cheap restaurant in Montparnasse to celebrate. She had an ice cream. Fofana also offered Sorour and Sami a 109-euro three-star hotel room nearby for the night. Not exactly the 5,000 promised but a good, relaxing time nonetheless. And she did get pregnant that night..."
Day 9
The Torture
During the whole three weeks Ilan Halimi was wrapped in tape from foot to head with only a hole left for him to breathe (“He looked like a mummy,” said one of his jailers to the police afterward), nourished with a straw only and left on the ground, first in an empty unheated apartment of the cité, then in the building’s boiler room, which was even colder.
 |
| The cellar where Ilan was held and tortured (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images) |
Ilan would be untied only to be taken to the toilet, and beaten and burned with cigarette butts out of Fofana’s frustration, since, despite threats and pressure, “the Jews” did not pay.
His situation worsened, once in the boiler room because then he could only piss in a bottle and defecate in a plastic bag, which infuriated the jailer who had to hold the bag for him and would beat him for it— at the end of these weeks he was cleaned up with cheap soap and water first, and then with acid, because his jailers, inspired by a TV series, thought acid would erase any traces of their DNA. He was then beaten again, handcuffed, and put naked in a pair of sheets, taken out of the building and into the woods only to be stabbed and burned alive by Fofana.
Day 10
The Demonstration
A friend commenting on the riots taking place in Paris at the moment under the pretext of "solidarity with Theo" a black Muslim migrant who was (allegedly) man-handled by the Police while resisting arrest, asked me why there were no such demonstrations of solidarity with the young Ilan Halimi after his assassination. "There were demonstrations" I told him. But when Jews demonstrate in Paris, they don't attack police, bash people, burn cars and destroy property as do the thugs referred to by the French people as "racaille". (Politicians will refer to them as "disadvantaged youth" or other such euphemisms, religiously avoiding any allusion to their mostly migrant, more often than not arabo-sub-Saharan Muslim background).
A fortnight after they found the tortured body of Ilan Halimi, a crowd of up to 200,000 people, of mainly Jewish confession, went into the streets of Paris, demonstrating against violence, racism and anti-Semitism.
Day 11
A Song
Day 12
“All Jews are rich”
In the final part of a series on French anti-Semitism, dated September 2, 2014, Marc Weitzmann writes about what he calls "echoes and paradoxes of a gruesome murder". The title of the article reads:
ILAN HALIMI’S TORTURED GHOST
WILL CONTINUE HAUNTING FRANCE
"The trap that would lead to the abduction, torture, and murder of Ilan Halimi was set in the winter of 2006 on Boulevard Voltaire in Paris, a few blocks from where I live. In the months prior, kids from one of the toughest cités, Bagneux—who called themselves, Clockwork Orange-style, “the gang of the Barbarians”—had repeatedly tried to abduct people for ransom. Led by a 27-year-old first offender named Youssouf Fofana, the fifth child of Ivory Cost migrants, the gang members were between 16 to 26 years old and ethnically diverse.
They set up their prospective victims in a particular way: A girl, selected by Fofana, would get in touch with some man for a date and ask him to bring her back into the suburb after their appointment. As a diversion for the cops, the youngest members of the gang would set fire to a car, while the others would jump on the potential victim.
So far, though, their method had spectacularly failed: All the targets, most of whom had Jewish names, had either foreseen the trap or escaped. In one almost successful attempt—which ended after the gang apparently panicked—the victim, Mickaël D., was found handcuffed and swimming in his own blood and told the police that his aggressors had called him “kike” and “dirty Jew.” Fofana had also tried to blackmail doctors by sending his pawns to ask for fraudulent sick leave. All those doctors were also Jews. And he had sent anonymous threat letters or Molotov cocktails to public figures—the president of Doctors Without Borders, Rony Brauman; Jérôme Clément, director of the French cultural channel Arte; lawyer Joseph Cohen-Saban among others, all of whom were Jewish. All these plots had failed, too.
But persistence is the key to success. In January 2006, under the assumption that had driven Fofana from the start, and that he repeatedly stated at his trial three years later—namely, that “all Jews are rich”—he and some of his gang started to pace the Boulevard Voltaire, looking for “Jewish stores.”...
(from: Tablet Magazine)
Day 13
Anti-Semitism Kills
In this ^^^ video, there is mention of Mohamed Merah who murdered, among others, 3 little Jewish children and a father/teacher. I wrote about it then, but things have become even more repulsive in that there are now nasty pieces of work who openly and shamelessly "hero-worship" the Arab terrorist, Merah, among them one of his brothers and his sister who are reported to have become quite "popular" among local jihadis.
Day 14
Does this Darkness have a Name ?
Day 15
"24 Days" The Film
Published on Sep 23, 2014
The True Story of the Ilan Halimi Affair
Now on Blu-ray, DVD & Video-on-Demand
French director Alexandre Arcady delivers one of the most “wrenching and politically astute” films to come out of France over the past year (Screen Daily). Based on a book co-written by the victim’s mother, Ruth Halimi, Arcady’s cinematic adaptation offers a vicious circle of dangerously realistic events: from the kidnapping and torture of Ilan Halimi at the hands of the Gang of Barbarians, to the the 600-plus phone calls, insults, and threats received by the family, though the Parisian police’s incompetence in dealing with what was clearly an anti-Semitic crime.
Learn more at http://www.MenemshaFilms.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/24DaysFilm
Twitter: http://www.Twitter.com/24DaysFilm
iTunes: http://goo.gl/oEH5Wj
Day 16
The Dying
"...It was raining that morning; Ilan managed to roll down on the leaves towards the highway. A black woman, a secretary like me, saw him lying by the side of the road, stopped her car and called the police. She accompanied him in the ambulance and did not leave his side. He was still alive in the ambulance but died on the way to the hospital. I console myself that my son died hearing a soothing voice..."
An extract from the film "24 Days":
Day 17
Going Home to Israel
Following are a few short extracts from the book that Emilie Frèche wrote in co-operation with Ruth Halimi, Ilan's Mother "24 Jours" The book was also the base for the film of the same title. The following passages are taken from pp 13 - 15.
"There is no tranquillity in this cemetery of the Paris region, no peace, no silence, nothing but a dull and incessant noise that hinders the repose of the dead. No doubt this is why I wanted to bury Ilan in Jerusalem.
I wanted it right away, right from the start, it was obvious to me. But his father and sisters thought differently. They wanted to keep him close to them, to be able to visit him whenever they felt the need. And so Ilan was buried here, in Pantin, on Friday, February 17, 2006."
...[...]...
"I came back to Ilan's grave in March, April, May, and then every other month until this Wednesday, February 7, which is the first anniversary of his death. Throughout this year, I have never abandoned the idea of transferring his remains to Israel. I felt it my duty, as a mother, to offer my son a rest that I thought was impossible here. For it is here, on this earth, that Ilan was starved, beaten, wounded, burnt. How can you rest in peace on a soil where you have suffered so much? "
...[....]...
And as Ilan's coffin is loaded on to the hearse for his last voyage, his mother, Ruth Halimi, has this message for his torturers:
"It's finished. Ilan leaves the cemetery of Pantin, he leaves Paris, he leaves France, and you who have massacred him, you will never be able to hurt him ever again. I came to take him away for that reason, now I know, I took him out of here because one day you will be free, and you could have spit on his grave...."(*)
(*) "Dieu Donné" is the self-given name by a nasty piece of Jew-Hatred-Made-Flesh who will prove Ruth Halimi wrong yet. I shall report on that later. "Dieu Donné" meaning "Gift of God".
Day 18
The Grave Desecrators
Paris, 24. March 2017
Breaking News:
Sandra Wildensteinfrom the Europe Israël News reports:
Dozens of Jewish graves were destroyed and / or vandalised in the Parisian cemetery of Pantin.
The incident reportedly took place in the night from Thursday to Friday, according to a source close to the cemetery.
Only Jewish squares and Jewish graves were targeted. There are at least 20 tombstones destroyed and / or vandalised, tombstones have been broken or fallen to the ground.
According to an "official" official of the cemetery we contacted on the telephone, it was a "car accident" ... But, knowing the configuration of the cemetery it is impossible for a car to do this much damage.
A car could strike 2 or 3 graves but not several dozen ... This is an excuse of circumstance that must be confirmed or reversed by the investigation.
Last update: According to a new version circulating on social networks, it was the accident was caused by a Paris Council truck that had hit the graves ... This explanation is far from convincing.
Anti-Semitic act or accident? No media reported this incident.
Perhaps a modest silver lining for Ruth Halimi, the mother of Ilan who, today, might feel vindicated having taken her son Ilan from this very cemetery (Pantin) to Israel. (see entry under "Day 17").
Day 19
French "black" humour:
 |
| Dieudonné M’bala M’bala |
Here is a little "fait divers" reported on July 4, 2014:
French "comedian" (my quotation marks),
Dieudonné, mocks Ilan Halimi.
PARIS (JTA) —
Months after his comedy tour was banned for its anti-Semitism, comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala launched a new show that mocks the Holocaust and Jewish murder victim Ilan Halimi.
Dieudonné (*), who has multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred against Jews, is planning to launch his new show, titled “The Impure Beast,” in the coming weeks, according to a report earlier this week by the France TV Info channel and the Le Point weekly magazine.
The show contains profanities connected to Halimi, a young Parisian Jewish phone salesman who was tortured and murdered in 2006 by a gang of mostly muslim kidnappers who targeted him because he was Jewish.
“If I knock down a Jewish journalist, it will be a serious thing,” journalists who saw sneak previews of the news show quoted Dieudonné as saying on stage. “They will reopen the Nuremberg trials. They will even exhume Ilan Halimi. They’re going to find my DNA in his ass hole.”...
(*) Dieudonné translates as "Gift of God" or "Godgiven".....seriously !!!
PS: meanwhile, this racist creep has been leading protest marches FOR the libération of Yousuf Fofana, the sub-human who burnt Ilan alive.
Day 20
Another Jew named HALIMI massacred by another Muslim
Another Jew named HALIMI massacred by another Muslim
How many days have I left, until the next "anniversary" comes around ? I was negligent....have waited.....was not even able to fulfill this little promise of posting something for each day, Ilan was tortured....."life interfered" as they say. So, before another year comes around, quickly:
The Murder of Sarah Halimi
Same name, no family connection, but the same "cause" for murder: Sarah Halimi, like Ilan Halimi was Jewish. Same kind of killer (Muslim). Same city: Paris.
"...Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish woman, mother of three children and a retired physician,[1] was beaten and defenestrated. It is uncertain if she was killed before the fall or if death occurred as a result of the fall. This occurred at her residence, a 3rd floor apartment in the Belleville district of Paris on 4 April 2017.[2][3]
The murder was committed by a 27-year-old neighbor, a drug dealer and drug addict who claimed insanity despite having no previous history of mental illness, and was promptly held in a psychiatric hospital.[4][5]
The alleged murderer is a Muslim African from Mali.[6] Enraged after a family dispute, he entered the apartment of a different family, who immediately locked themselves into a bedroom, phoned police for help, and waited in fear as they listened to the intruder reciting verses from the Quran.
[5] Police responded but are thought to have first gone to the wrong building while the intruder climbed via a balcony from the apartment where the family was sheltering behind a locked door, to the apartment of Halimi, known locally as the sole Jew in the building.[5]
When police finally arrived at the apartment the intruder had entered first, they deferred entering while awaiting the arrival of an elite squad, while more phone calls came in to the police emergency hotline reporting a woman screaming as a man apparently beat her and shouted "shut your mouth," Allahu Akbar, and "I killed the Shaitan" (the demon, or Satan, in Arabic).[5][7][5][4]
After throwing Sarah Halimi out of the third- floor window, the attacker returned to the first apartment where the family, still cowering in a room and awaiting the police, again heard him praying aloud.[5][8]
As a result of the insanity claim and of the hospitalization, the suspect has not yet faced murder charges. Judicial experts are determining if the insanity claims are valid.[9]
The second district of the judicial police (2nd DPJ) of Paris is responsible for the investigation. On 7 April 2017, the prosecutor of Paris, François Molins, declared that for the moment this act could not be considered as an antisemitic murder but also that this track would be explored by the investigators.[10] ..."
This murder happened in the middle of the Election Campaign. The French Media were absolutely silent about it - one did not want to "upset" the French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood who had put their voices behind Emmanuel Macron.
The only politician who commented and condemned this barbarian act was Marine LePen. I recommend you go to the Jewish/Israeli media for more information.
I post this following article about this barbarism, not because it's the best, but because it's in English. It was published on The Jewish Chronicle in late August 2017:
Sarah Halimi:
Beaten, tortured and killed —yet France turned a blind eye
"The horrifying murder of a Jewish mother in Paris was initially overlooked by the authorities — evoking echoes of the past and fears for the futureAlmost five months ago, on April 4, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman called Lucette Attal-Halimi and known by her Hebrew name, Sarah Halimi — a retired doctor and the head of a kindergarten — was attacked in the middle of the night at her home on Vaucouleurs Street, in Paris’ 11th arrondissement, apparently tortured to death and finally thrown out of a third-floor window.
This horrific crime is now turning into a serious judicial and even political issue in France — so much so that President Emmanuel Macron insisted in a public speech on July 16, on the 75th anniversary of the Nazi-ordered round-up of thousands of Parisian Jews, that “the judiciary must shed full light” on the case.
Which was a bold move, since the judges are supposed under French law to be independent from the executive. According to Jean-Alex Buchinger, the lawyer representing Sarah Halimi’s children, “such a statement is indicative, at the very least, of a very troubled situation”.
In order to understand what is at stake, one must go back to the events of April 4.
At 4am, Kobili Traore, a 27-year-old of Malian Muslim descent living one floor below Sarah Halimi, went to the flat of an older relative, Diara Traore, on the third floor of the adjoining building on 30 Vaucouleurs Street.
Kobili’s behaviour was clearly problematic, since Diara Traore locked himself, his wife and children in one of the apartment’s rooms and called the police at 4.25am.
Three minutes later, a unit of the Anti-Crime Brigade (BAC) — who happened to be patrolling the area — took up position in front of Diara’s door.
They heard Kobili Traore chanting Muslim prayers and Koranic verses. Unsure about the situation and the potential threats to the family, they asked for reinforcements. Additional policemen arrived quickly. However, for some unclear reason, the BAC unit still refrained from breaking in.
In the meantime, Kobili Traore put on new clothes and climbed out of the window to reach Sarah Halimi’s apartment, which was at the same level as Diara Traore’s.He allegedly assaulted the Jewish woman and hit her mercilessly. From time to time he resumed Koranic recitation. Many neighbours, woken by the old woman’s screams or the assaulter’s religious chanting, called the police.
Some gave details about the exact location of the assault, the attacker’s identity, the fact he vilified his victim as a Jewish person and as “a Satan” while hitting her, or even — as far as the Muslim neighbours were concerned — the Koranic portions he chanted.
Yet the police still failed to storm Sarah Halimi’s apartment and rescue her. Eventually, Kobili Traore is claimed to have shouted that the woman was “mad and about to commit suicide”, and threw her out of the window.He had time enough to climb back to Diara Traore’s apartment where he finally was arrested. His hands were covered in blood. There was blood everywhere in his victim’s apartment.
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| Sarah Halimi was thrown from the balcony of her flat in Vaucoloeurs Street (Le Parisien) |
The behaviour of the police was strange enough throughout this tragic night. Further questions were soon to be raised about the handling of the case. First, while the murder and its circumstances were reported almost instantly within the Jewish community and by the press agency AFP, the mainstream media didn’t mention it at all for two days until BFMTV, a 24-hour news channel, quoted at least one AFP dispatch on April 6 on its website.
Likewise, very little was shown or said about a protest march by 1,000 people in the Vaucouleurs Street neighbourhood on April 9. Considering the enormity of the crime, the reporting remained bafflingly low-key.
Things changed only after Sarah Halimi’s relatives and their lawyers convened a press conference on May 22 with the support of Jewish community leaders.
On June 1, 17 prominent French intellectuals, from philosophers Alain Finkielkraut, Marcel Gauchet, and Michel Onfray, to historians Jacques Julliard and Georges Bensoussan, to demographer Michèle Tribalat and sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff, called for “full light” in the Halimi case — the very words President Macron would later use — in a collective statement published by Le Figaro. From then on, the mainstream media devoted more space to the case, and, ironically, wondered why they had not paid it more attention earlier.
Axel Roux, a journalist for Le Journal du Dimanche, a widely read Sunday paper, admitted on June 4 that when he started investigating the case, he was “stunned” by the paucity of the media archives and the “minimalist” approach taken by his profession.
No less disturbing was the public officials’ silence. French members of the cabinet or government officials usually react to such crimes ex officio. Some may even take a more personal stand.
For instance, President Macron tweeted on August 14 his concern for the victims and their relatives just a few hours after a car ran into a pizzeria and killed a 13-year-old girl.
No such reactions occurred after Sarah Halimi’s murder, even though the Minister of the Interior granted an emergency audience to the leaders of the Jewish community. Neither did the political class comment publicly, except for the then National Front presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, who made an indirect (*) statement on April 11."
(*)Her statement was not indirect, it was explicitely condemning the bestial murder).
 |
| Marche Blanche - Silent March (*) in memory of Sarah Halimi |
(*) Resistance Republicaine reported at the time that the silent march (Marche Blanche) in memory of Sarah Halimi was interrupted by young Muslim thugs throwing bottles and shouting "Sales Juifs" (Dirty Jews) and "Nous avons nos kalach" (we have our Kalaschnikovs). They were chased away by young Jews from the Jewish Defence League.
"Third, there is the legal angle. The issue of the attacker’s sanity, and thus of his penal responsibility, was left undecided for more than four months, and is still pending. Dr Daniel Zagury, the noted psychiatric expert commissioned to deal with the case, is due to submit his report by the end of August.
Kobili Traore was first sent to two psychiatric hospitals. It was only on July 11 that he was formally indicted for murder and kidnapping and transferred to the Fresnes prison.
In the meantime, he was able to build up his own version of the April 4 events.
He now maintains that he had absorbed large quantities of cannabis on the previous day and that he was “possessed” by “outside forces” or “devilish forces”.
There is evidence that he also spent some time the previous day at the nearby Omar Mosque, a place connected to radical Islam. However, his mother claims that she sent him there precisely to help him overcome his “Satanic” obsessions.
More disturbingly, the investigative judge, Anne Ihuelu, has declined to charge Kobili Traore with antisemitic motivations. Under French law, hatred for any given group, be it an ethnic, religious or philosophic group, or a gender is counted as an aggravating circumstance when it comes to violent acts — and all the more so when it comes to murder.
The Halimi family’s lawyers note that many witnesses, including many of Sarah Halimi’s Muslim neighbours, have reported Kobili Traore’s antisemitic language during the assault. They also note that, while Sarah Halimi had good relations with her neighbours irrespective of their ethnic or religious background, she had “problems” with members of the extended Traore family who may, at times, have indulged in antisemitic abuse or threats.
Another decision that comes as a surprise is that Judge Ihuelu has both charged Kobili Traore for kidnapping Diara Traore’s family and declined to charge him for kidnapping Sarah Halimi herself.
The Halimi family’s lawyers see both moves as unacceptable and have taken steps to get them reversed, just like the refusal to qualify the murder as antisemitic.How is one to explain so many disquieting developments, on so many levels, and such a manifest willingness from so many quarters, to silence or minimise the case?Clearly, it clashed with France’s political calendar. The first round of the French presidential election was scheduled on April 23, and the second round on May 7. Then, parliamentary elections were scheduled for June 11 and 18.
There seems to have been a feeling among officials that criminal cases involving “community relations” might easily escalate into large-scale violence and derail the electoral process. This may account for the police’s semi-inertia on the fateful night.
A year earlier, a case in which police accidentally killed a Chinese resident during a domestic incident led to mass demonstrations and diplomatic difficulties with Beijing.In February 2017, the alleged molestation by police officers of a French citizen of African descent was used as a pretext for demonstrations, riots and looting.
There seems also to have been a concern, at least throughout the presidential election, that reporting or commenting on the Sarah Halimi murder might benefit Marine Le Pen, who at the time was running high in the polls. A concern warranted, in some measure, by Ms Le Pen’s attempt to discuss the case.
Gilles William Goldnadel, a counsel for Sarah Halimi’s siblings who is suing the BAC officers, thinks that both attitudes tend to be common in France, even outside electoral periods:
“The issue is not so much about covering up antisemitic crimes than about covering up any crime against white, Judeo-Christian people, for fear of political consequences.”
There is something reassuring in President Macron’s request for a thorough investigation — as well as in the June declaration by prominent intellectuals.
For the moment, France retains its reputation as the country of Dreyfus — a place where injustice may happen but can be eventually redressed.
Still, there is also a feeling, both in the country at large and in the Jewish community, that a dangerous tide is rising."Day 21
Twitter Search:
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The term you entered did not bring up any results. You may have mistyped your term or your search setting could be protecting you from some potentially sensitive content."
Day 22
France, November 2017:
the Ilan Halimi stele profaned in Bagneux
A stele erected in tribute to Ilan Halimi in the Parc Richelieu in Bagneux (Hauts-de-Seine) was degraded.
A swastika, the slogan "free Fofana" - the leader of the "gang of barbarians" under lock and key - and the name "Hitler" defaced the stele.
Day 23
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| 229 Boulevard Voltaire in Paris, the telephony shop where Ilan Halimi worked |
Day 24
Rest in Peace
Ilan Halimi
Update 19. June 2018
Just found this on Twitter:
Translation:
"Here is the photo of Ilan Hamili's killer.
She has left prison, how can one give freedom to this woman ?
Bravo France...
Please re tweet this photo, prison does not efface everything, and certainly not our memory. "
Voici la photo de la tueuse de Ilan Hamili— SACHA (@sacha_team) February 5, 2018
Elle est sortie de prison, comment laisser cette femme en liberté ?
Bravo la France...
Retweetez cette photo la prison n’efface pas tout et surtout pas notre mémoire.#IlanHalimi #RIP #GangDesBarbares pic.twitter.com/kh2dU5nZcP
