[pnews-news] Muslims target French Jews

     -----
    / o o \
====OO=====OO===
 http://pnews.org/
Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||


--
The Sunday Times April 02, 2006

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2089-2114296%2C00.html

Barbarians of suburbs target French Jews

Matthew Campbell, Paris

THE pretty schoolgirl known as Yalda wore tight white trousers and 
thigh-high boots to the rendezvous. Her target, a young Jewish telephone 
salesman, quickly fell under her spell. He meekly followed her when she 
suggested a nightcap at her place.

It would be his last date.

The testimony of this 17-year-old femme fatale who happily offered herself 
as 'bait' in the kidnapping of Ilan Halimi, whose tortured body was found 
on wasteland, has shocked a country which is haunted by a painful history 
of anti-semitism.

Yalda's only moment of doubt came when she heard Halimi's shrieks as he 
was carried away by thugs in balaclava helmets. "He screamed for two 
minutes, with a high-pitched voice like a girl," she told investigators.

She soon forgot, however. On Halimi's first night in captivity, she and 
her boyfriend celebrated in a hotel room paid for by the kidnappers.

Forget the French idyll portrayed in such books as A Year in Provence. 
France is being forced to confront her dark side as details emerge of 
horrific crimes in the suburbs.

Testimony from this grim underbelly, the immigrant banlieues - literally 
'places of banishment' - has fortified the elite's view of young 
immigrants on the wrong side of the Paris ring road as 'barbarians at the 
gate'.

For years the Parisian establishment has quaked at the prospect of angry 
hordes invading their affluent heartland and last week that nightmare came 
true as gangs of hooded youths robbed and bludgeoned white students 
attending anti-government demonstrations.

Disquiet about the spread of barbarism across the boulevard périphérique 
has been fuelled by the chilling story of Yalda.

The gang she worked for was known as "les Barbares", the Barbarians, and 
included blacks, Arabs and whites from Portugal and France.

Barbarians seemed an appropriate name. The shocking cruelty inflicted on 
Halimi seemed to have little to do with efforts to extract money from his 
anguished family. It evoked the sadistic moral universe of A Clockwork 
Orange, the novel by Anthony Burgess, with a dose of anti-semitism thrown 
in.

Thanks to Yalda's charms, Halimi was imprisoned and tortured with acid and 
cigarette burns for more than three weeks in the heart of a council 
estate.

More than 30 neighbours in the building knew what was happening but said 
nothing about the crime, part of a worrying wave of attacks against Jews 
all over the country.

Besides Yalda, several women have been arrested in an investigation into 
their role in botched efforts to lure other Jewish men into 'honey traps'.

"He wanted a Jew," a girl called Audrey told police, referring to Youssouf 
Fofana, the charismatic leader of the Barbarians, who was listed by the 
girls in their telephone directories as "Youssouf the barbarian".

His choice of victims was based on two anti-semitic myths: that Jews are 
all rich and that they stick together. "They're a big community," Fofana 
told Audrey. "United and willing to pay."

Audrey lost her nerve after reeling in two targets, one of whom was 
rejected when it turned out that he was not a Jew. She infuriated Fofana 
when she failed to follow up on her second victim. "When you start 
something you have to finish it," he shouted.

Tifenn, a small, dark 19-year-old from Brittany, was also a procurer in 
this macabre operation. She described herself as being less 'sexy' than 
the other girls and said that her role was limited to putting prettier 
school friends in touch with Fofana.

Like Audrey and Yalda, Tifenn attended a boarding school on the outskirts 
of Paris that was funded by social services. Yalda had been followed by 
children's courts and was receiving counselling: at 13 she had been the 
victim of une tournante - as the commonplace ritual of gang rape has come 
to be known in the suburbs.

Other examples of savagery in these lawless enclaves were exposed on 
Friday at the trial of Jamal Derrar. He was accused of burning 17-year-old 
Sohane Benziane to death in 2002 in Vitry-Sur-Seine, where last year's 
orgy of suburban rioting began, after she defied his order to stay away 
from his 'territory'.

"You?re frightened, huh?" he jeered, according to testimony, after pouring 
petrol over her head and taking out his cigarette lighter. He lit the 
lighter several times in front of her face to torment her to tears until 
finally setting her alight.

"It is barbarism," Kahina, the victim's sister, said last week. "I want 
barbarism rejected. It is becoming so banal. We are not in a war. I refuse 
to live in a country that cannot defend its citizens."

Another girl, 18-year-old Chahrazad Belayni, was doused with petrol by a 
suitor and set alight in November last year. She remains in a coma. In 
Marseilles in 2004, Ghofrane Haddaoui, a 23-year-old woman from the 
suburbs, was stoned to death by a gang of youths.

The choice of Halimi as a victim because he was Jewish was a particularly 
distressing component of the crime for a nation whose anti-semitic past 
included wartime collaboration in the transfer of Jews to the death camps.

France has the biggest Muslim and Jewish populations of any European 
country and in some suburbs it is not uncommon to see anti-Jewish 
grafitti. "We've got blacks and Arabs in one camp and then it is the Jews 
in the other," said Mamadou Menibe, a young man of west African origin 
from Vitry-Sur-Seine.

The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France claims that 
violent attacks against Jews began rising abruptly in France at the start 
of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000.

Some experts say it has been fuelled by Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala, a popular 
comedian who blames Jews for the suffering of blacks and was found guilty 
last month of incitement to racial hatred.

The hostility has led thousands of French Jews to move to Israel in the 
past five years, including about 3,300 last year, the highest number in 35 
years.

So obsessed was Fofana, the Barbarians? leader, with targeting Jews that 
he had established which shops were Jewish by checking which of them 
closed during Jewish holidays.

When he met Yalda he was impressed. "With you," he said, "I can do 
wonders. With your physique you'll make a fortune . . . all the boys will 
fall into the trap."

He offered her £3,000 to approach Halimi in his shop and lure him to a 
meeting. She got Halimi's number and rang him up to ask him out on a date.

She told her friend Tifenn that she found Halimi "friendly" and "cute". 
After they met in a cafe, she invited him back to her fictitious flat on 
the other side of the ring road. The Barbarians were lying in wait.

Some commentators seem traumatised by too much reality, upbraiding the 
foreign media for painting 'la belle France' in an unflattering light. But 
the truth is ugly, particularly when it comes to the barbarians camped at 
the gate.


|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
          M A I L I N G   L I S T S
(1) pnews-news - NEWS mailing list - (text only)
    Send "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" as subject
     ----> pnews-news-request(at)inyourface.info
=======================================================
(2) pnews-views - VIEWS mailing list- (text only)
OPEN discussion - "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" as subj
 Send to  ------> pnews-views-request(at)inyourface.info
=======================================================
(3) fightback - articles and pointers distribution list
(html/text) - expert informed opin., credentialed authors
          ----> http://pnews.org/dada/
========================================================
(4) ATTN: WEBMASTERS - Link Exchange/improve site rank
----> links_only-subscribe(at)googlegroups.com - or, go to:
-----> http://groups.google.com/group/Links_Only
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||