French Justice

Nidra Poller (Via: The Iconoclast)

Choosing a Jew because he is Jewish, torturing a Jew day and night for 24 days while purportedly negotiating for ransom, seeing a young man reduced to nothing, beating him, starving him, tormenting him--or knowing about it and not tipping off the police--letting the whole mess degenerate, preparing the creature to be finished off by Fofana…well, in the eyes of the court, it’s no big thing.

The accomplices were at home in their banlieue, at home as the verdict was pronounced, and it looks like they will be at home in jail. Youssouf Fofana, who shouted Allahu Akhbar at the first hearing, repeatedly insulted the victim’s family, and proudly admitted he stabbed Ilan five times, poured flammable liquid over him, and set him on fire, will have endless opportunities in prison to exercise his charismatic charm and train new barbarians.

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Update here:

As of this afternoon, the French Justice Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, apparently agrees with Ruth Halimi. Fourteen members of the gang, known as “The Barbarians,” now face a retrial, on the grounds that their original sentences were too lenient.

UpdateII: BHL in "Le Point":

After the courtroom stabbing of Marwa Al-Sherbini in Dresden, which the media reported on so laggardly, it is interesting to read Bernard-Henri Levy's column in Le Point, which remembers another hate crime: the gruesome gang murder of the young Jewish man Ilan Halimi in a Parisian banlieue last year. "We must remember that France is a country in which a man – just like Daniel Pearl in Karachi – was held captive, transported from one place to another, starved and fed, killed little by little, tortured and transported again – for an entire 24 days and with the tacit consent of an entire neighbourhood." Those involved in Ilan Halimi's murder were sentenced in court this week.