Somehow, the atmosphere in Europe harkens the 30s when people began closing their eyes, so horrific was the aftermath of the Great War.
In Paris, a young Jewish man was kidnapped and tortured, left to die on railroad tracks.
From the report in Le Figaro.
“The discovery Monday afternoon of the naked body of Ilan, 23 years-old, near the railroad tracks at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois (Essonne) is the tragic epilogue of a long police stake out. The victim had been tortured, 80% of his body was covered with bruises, deep cuts, and burns from an inflammable fluid. The young man, handcuffed and gagged, left for dead by his torturers, died on his way to the hospital.
Was it a criminal attack or was he targeted by the gang because he was Jewish? That is the question the paper and the government should be asking. Fortunately, the journalist Nidra Poller does at Atlas Shrugs and she shows the difficulty of conducting criminal investigations when you must also be politically correct.
Since I've always found it difficult to comprehend anti-semitism, I was especially glad to find ShrinkWrapped's post Pity the Poor Anti-Semite
Here is the crucial point for those who imagine that a tiny group of people, barely 60 years out of an almost successful genocide, left with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, comprising approximately .05% of the world's population, who came to the desert in Palestine and built a modern technological nation while devoting themselves to oppressing the Muslim world, with almost 100 times their population and oceans of oil:
The anti-Semite necessarily defines himself as monumentally inferior to the Jew.
UPDATE. The French have arrested 12 people from the gang called "The Barbarians" suspected in the killing of Ilan Halimi.
"They acted with indescribable cruelty," the judiciary police chief leading the investigation said. "They kept him naked and tied up for weeks. They cut him and in the end poured flammable liquid on him and set him alight."
The French officials say anti-Semitism was not a factor, his family say otherwise.
"We are in total shock," a close friend of Ilan's said Saturday. "All of us, Ilan's mother especially, have not yet begun to comprehend what happened."
Technorati Tags: anti-Semitism, Ilan Halimi
Posted by Jill Fallon at February 17, 2006 6:53 AM | Permalink