Stretching the Jihad

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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 would think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, another 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 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 burned while his torturers read out verses from the Koran.

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. Couldda 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 in the incident but only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by "radical young Jewish men" who had 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.

Many folks are, to put it at its mildest, indifferent to Jews. In 2003, a survey by the European Commission found 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the "greatest menace to world peace". Only 59 percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of 'em? Well, don't worry: in Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent.

Since then, Iran has sportingly offered to solve the problem of the Israeli threat to world peace by wiping the Zionist Entity off the face of the map. But what a tragedy that those peace-loving Iranians have been provoked into launching nuclear armageddon by those pushy Jews.