French police charge that seven members of a gang, seven, five men and two women, who call themselves The Barbarians, beat, burned and mutilated a twenty-three-year-old Jew, Ilan Halimi. Police said anti-Semitism “influenced” the killers.
The gang snatched him off a street, under clever circumstances, police say, simply because he was a Jew. The Barbarians hustled him into a basement in a tough immigrant neighborhood where they hammered away at his body for weeks while simultaneously psychologically torturing the people closest to him.
They cut off Mr. Halimi’s ears.
They cut off his fingers.
They set him on fire.
He may not have clung to sanity. But, by a shaky thread, he kept breathing through his astounding will to live.
Before going on, dear reader, pause to ponder the horrific landscape of the beating of the helpless Mr. Halimi:
Lying in a basement that probably was filthy, given the neighborhood, he was surrounded for endless, unmarked days, by (as it turns out more than a dozen) people who hated him, who were furious at his mere existence because he was a dirty, stinking Jew.
Surely he wanted everything to end. Still, he fought to live. The human will is a magnificent organ.
For twenty-four days, the gang pursued dual tracks of staggering cruelty.
While stomping on the young man’s body, repeatedly mutilating his skin, the gang battered Mr. Halimi’s family and his rabbi in a more imaginative way, with taunting telephone calls and emails. While spewing anti-Semitic written and spoken phrases, the kidnappers demanded varying amounts of ransom, from $60,000 to $500,000, which they never bothered to collect.
If anyone doubted their seriousness, The Barbarians sent along photos of torture scenes. Mr. Halima was shown in the most humiliating positions, gun to his head, blindfolded, tied up.
Nothing about the case was ordinary, random or bespoke the lightest dusting of civility. These killers who were born as human beings descended to the deepest layer of depraved conduct.
Had it not been for his spectacular brutalization and death, Mr. Halimi appeared to be so unremarkable that he might have passed through this world completely un-noticed. Unmarried, he lived at home with his mother and two sisters in a middle-class Paris neighborhood. He worked in a store that sold cellular telephones.
Who cared? The gang, The Barbarians, did. They cared that he was a dirty, stinking Jew. Everybody knows that all dirty, stinking Jews are rich. The Barbarians, evidently known well to French police, made at least three previous attempts to kidnap Jews out of a conviction that Jews are rich. When the kidnappers found out their prey were not rich, they whaled on them anyway, segueing their crime into an orgy of anti-Semitism.
Mr. Halimi’s heart still was beating when he was found on Monday of last week. Barely. Eighty percent of his body was wilting with bruises and burns. He died, mercifully, on the way to a hospital.
And Now for a Different View
Since being transferred from the Times’ South America bureau to Paris, Mr. Rotella has meekly morphed into a weaseling apologist for the worst of the world’s rampaging Muslim radicals. His skewered stories must bring smiles at Al-Jazeera because when Mr. Rotella writes about Muslim crime, Muslim mention is scarce or non-existent.
Unfortunately, overt capitulation to the enemy does not qualify as a sin at the Times in the present environment. This may be the first American war where reporters who overtly empathize with the enemy not only avoid punishment but win awards, as Mr. Rotella has. In other wars, capitulation would have warranted a severe reprimand if not outright dismissal.
When Mr. Rotella covers stories involving Muslim extremists doing crimes, he conveniently forgets their chief identifying mark and motivation.
The worst insult to a veteran reporter is that he is factually sloppy. Mr. Rotella has fine-tuned his sloppiness to an artful level that appears deliberate. One can picture Mr. Rotella, story in hand, dashing into the next room to show off the studiously expunged portions to his Muslim censors.
The chap’s latest story is a golden example of his deceitful reporting for several reasons, but one that is overwhelming and unmasks his skulduggery:
Even though it was clear from last week’s first public disclosure in France that a Muslim gang with Black Muslim leadership was behind it, Mr. Rotella never made the connection in yesterday’s story. He worked avidly to bury the most salient, most explosive fact. Only in the twenty-third paragraph of a twenty-five-paragraph story did he allude, with fragility, to the fact that all suspects were Muslims and that they had killed a Jew, reviving a fourteen-hundred-year pattern.
Mr. Rotella’s dainty wording wore kid gloves in the only identifying sentence, which was a paraphrase: “The perpetrators are generally Muslim youths, police say.”
Ever since the Dreyfuss scandal one hundred years ago, France has been known — proudly, say some— as one of the most aggressively unreceptive countries in the Western world toward Jews.
By repeatedly blowing the most important fact in a volatile stories, Mr. Rotella forfeits his bond of trust with the reader, just as a cheating spouse permanently loses his presumption of trust.
To be exactly analagous, Mr. Rotella’s Muslimic manipulation mirrors an oldtime Deep South reporter writing that several gentlemen from Porkerville killed a young man from Cowville without noting that the killers were white, were sheeted, were KKK members, and their victim, by the way, was black.
As a Creole, Times Editor Baquet’s static-ridden antennae should be far more sensitive than the Rotella story reflects.
A Rerun of Distortion by Rotella
Last October and November, when thousands of young Muslim gangsters carried out carefully orchestrated rioting across dozens of French cities over twenty nights, murdering one man and torching thousands of cars, Mr. Rotella performed as delicately as if he were lifting a newborn from his crib.
Distorting events for his unsuspecting readers, morning after morning, Mr. Rotella cleverly crafted his stories to make the rioting read like a Yale reunion instead of an incendiary outrage. The players, he wrote dishonestly, were merely “French youths.” No Pierre here. But “French youths” blotted the truth and spread a lie. The violent, scripted nightly Muslim rampaging — that led to 2,888 arrests and one hundred twenty-six injured cops —was reported by Mr. Rotella as simply random civil unrest by regular old French boys.
One of two explanations seems plausible:
Either Mr. Rotella is as scared as all other non-Muslims in France that the huge Muslim community will deconstruct him if he displeases them, or he subscribes to their violence.
The cherry on top of the sundae in this case is that the boss of the killer gang, The Barbarians, is black. You did not read that in the Times, only every place else.
The ringleader of these yahoos is named Youssef Fofana. But Mr. Rotella, scrupulously shielding his tush, must have simply overlooked the fact the gentleman is a Black Muslim.
In recent years, Times reporters would swallow poison, or even embrace religion, before they would put Black and Muslim together in a story where a Black Muslim is accused of a crime.
For French law enforcement officials to charge the suspects with anti-Semitism is wildly uncharacteristic. It is scarcely hyperbolic to argue that overt anti-Semitic acts are socially acceptable in France. A kid reporter would know that.
Initially, and far more typically, French police were ambivalent about admitting the victim’s Jewishness and the role of anti-Semitism. While they did not acknowledge that Ilan Halimi was a Jew , until much later, his name hints at the fact.
Post-Vacation Stress Syndrome?
The sixteen thugs of The Barbarians’ gang who have been picked up so far by police have, by the greatest coincidence, the identical profile of those virgin-white “French youths” who caused “civil unrest” last autumn. On the theory that even bad guys deserve a vacation, they took several weeks off at the end of last year, weary from the rioting, before resuming their violent spree. The gangbangers are described as unemployed fellows who grew up together in the ‘hood. They are between seventeen and thirty-two years old. The men are Muslims, not necessarily all Black Muslims.
Three girls and one young man whom they used as date bait to lure their kidnap victims into the gang’s lair are said to be white.
This is pretty darned spectacular thuggery, even in a day of televised beheadings. The main source of printed news in the western United States, however, has done a beautiful job of keeping a lid on its passive connivance.
Meanwhile, in the editor’s office at 2nd and Spring streets, the charts on Mr. Baquet’s desk show that the Times continues to bleed badly from huge revenue and circulation losses. This, alone, leaving aside his hollow performance, makes him as weak and vulnerable as his canned predecessor, the decidedly indistinguishable John Carroll.
One hopes, though, that even a diminished Mr. Baquet can summon enough reserve strength to fire a gutless, guilty Sebastian Rotella.
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