Saturday, 25 February 2006

I have to say that I am really bothered about what to do about Islam and Muslims. I want to accept them, know that so many are wonderful people. Then I read things like the kidnapping, beating, torture, and murder of Ilan Halimi in Paris this week. I want to be open minded about my fellow human beings who worship in mosques rather than churches. But how do you deal with this shocking crime?

Here's the link to that story in the Wall Street Journal: it says a lot. But I'll put on a few quotes and lines from that article.

In life, Ilan Halimi sold cellular phones on a boulevard named after Voltaire, off a square dedicated to la République. He was an ordinary young Frenchman, except for one thing; he was Jewish, which got him killed. So in death, after 25 days of torture, Ilan Halimi became a symbol of this Continent's failures in dealing with its poor and maladjusted Muslims.

His story is shaking France in a deeper, possibly more lasting, way than the recent riots or the ongoing fracas over the Muhammad cartoons. Last week, on a Monday morning, Ilan was found naked, handcuffed, with burns and bruises over 80% of his body, stumbling on train tracks in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, south of Paris. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Each detail of his kidnapping and ordeal that emerged in the past week fed widespread popular outrage.

On Jan. 20, the 23-year-old Ilan, depicted here, went for a rendezvous with a young woman he met at his store and fell right into the hands of his kidnappers. In the previous month, this group tried to entrap six other men, four of them Jewish, using women as bait. Ilan was whisked to the cité de la Pierre-plate, a large housing project in Bagneux, a Paris suburb (or banlieue) that's home to immigrant and French lower-middle-class families. In an empty third-floor apartment and later a basement utility room, he was tortured to death. Several times, as Nidra Poller this week reported in the Journal's European editorial pages, the kidnappers called Ilan's family and read them verses from the Quran while their son screamed in agony in the background. Their demands for ransom from Ilan's modest parents never turned out to be serious. . . . .

Yet France's bigger worry is its Muslim population of five million, also Europe's largest. So it's not the anti-Semitism but the crime itself and the profile of the perpetrators that best explain the national revulsion. To put it bluntly, Ilan Halimi, many people here figure, could just as easily have been a Christian.

Since the riots petered out in early November, the country, contrary to impressions, hasn't been calm. On New Year's Day, a gang of some 40 young, mostly Arab men terrorized a Nice-Lyon train, sexually assaulting and robbing passengers, car by car. A female applied arts teacher in a Paris banlieue was repeatedly stabbed this December by one of her male students during class; in the schools dominated by kids of immigrants, teachers often report being intimidated or attacked by their pupils. And cars continue to burn nightly, if in fewer numbers.

With each incident a gulf widens between a political elite whose first instinct is to appease and tolerate the rot in its midst and the hardening of popular views about crime, immigration and Islam. The clever politician, like Nicolas Sarkozy or, out on the extremes, populists like Jean-Marie Le Pen, makes sure to be on the side of the voters. This split is apparent too in the war over the cartoons. Europe's establishment prostrated itself before the Islamic radicals, while its press and people were on the whole appalled by the assault on freedom of expression. Knowing which way the wind blows, Mr. Sarkozy pointed out that he for one preferred "an excess of caricature to an excess of censorship."

Will Ilan Halimi be the wakeup call for France that the riots failed to be? An editorial in Le Monde, the voice of the French establishment, called his murder "a crime of an era, a sort of looking glass onto the true state of our society." No one here will as a result rush to aid America's global war on terror in Iraq or elsewhere. But the Europeans are in many ways in a bigger pickle than the U.S. The gravest threat to their safety and way of life comes not from across an ocean but just down the street.

Ciao.