Is Our Blood Any Less Red- Ilan Halimi

I am really late in covering this. In large part I blame myself and a desire to ignore what I see, but I have waited long enough. Ilan Halimi was kidnapped and tortured by a Muslim gang in France. For 24 days he and his family were tortured. The French government, those fabulous people who a short time ago watched as Muslim youths rampaged throughout the country refused to call this a hate crime.

It is only after his death and much media attention that they have begun to call this what it was.

Here is a short collection of links about this:

OpinionJournal

The Murder of Ilan Halimi

Michelle Malkin

YNET (This quote needs to be highlighted)
All is not well in France

"The janitor, who lent the gang the empty lodging without notifying the owner, is among the suspects in the ongoing investigation, which everyday seems to reveal a little more of the horror of what took place in the sordid apartment. According to an unofficial source, police came to realize that many in the building knew what was going on, but did not act since it appears everyone knew the victim was Jewish."

An Unsealed Room

On a related note Mark Steyn has an excellent column.

"In five years' time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven."

Is that an gripping story? You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.

Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.

This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.

This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone. And, if the gang did seem inordinately fixated on, ah, Jews, it was just because, as one police detective put it, ''Jews equal money.'' In London, the Observer couldn't even bring itself to pursue that particular angle. Its report of the murder managed to avoid any mention of the unfortunate Halimi's, um, Jewishness. Another British paper, the Independent, did dwell on the particular, er, identity groups involved in the incident but only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by ''radical young Jewish men'' who'd attacked an ''Arab-run grocery.''

At one level, those spokesmonsieurs are right: It could happen to anyone. Even in the most civilized societies, there are depraved monsters who do terrible things. When they do, they rip apart entire families, like the Halimis and Selams. But what inflicts the real lasting damage on society as a whole is the silence and evasions of the state and the media and the broader culture."

There are many things that can be said. I'll be brief. Evil things happen when good people remain silent. I don't believe that all Muslims are bad people or that all Muslims hate Jews. I do believe that there is a very vocal element that is fighting a war.

They are involved in a war and they are not taking prisoners. We are faced with a very bad situation and one that I fear is going to get worse before it gets better. I wrote about some of this here, here and here.