J’accuse, continued

As more information comes in on the Ilan Halimi case, it turns out that a lot of people knew what was happening — and did nothing, because he was a Jew. It’s an anti-Semitic twist on the Kitty Genovese case.

“I knew they had someone down there,” said a young French-Arab man, loitering in the doorway of a building adjacent to the one where Halimi was held. He said he lived upstairs from the makeshift dungeon, but would not give his name or say whether he knew then that the man was a Jew.

“I didn’t know they were torturing him,” he said. “Otherwise, I would have called the police.”

But it is clear that plenty of people did know, both that Halimi was being tortured and that he was Jewish. The police, according to lawyers with access to the investigation files, suspect at least 20 people participated in his abduction and the subsequent, amateurish negotiations for ransom.

Then there’s this, to the people who insist that Ilan’s Jewishness had nothing to do with what happened to him:

His captors told his family that if they did not have the money, they should “go and get it from your synagogue,” and later contacted a rabbi, telling him, “We have a Jew.”

And then there’s this:

By 2004, the police allege, Fofana tried extortion, aiming at prominent French Jews. When that failed, the gang apparently turned to kidnapping, using young women as bait.

The Barbarians are alleged to have been behind six attempted abductions, four of Jewish men, before succeeding with Halimi.

In a case in early January, a woman tried repeatedly to get a Jewish music producer to meet her on the outskirts of Paris, finally managing instead to persuade his father to come to a suburban parking lot, on the pretext that she had music CDs that belonged to his son.

Several men met the father instead, beating him senseless when he resisted their attempt to force him into their car.

No, that’s not evidence of targeting Jews. Nor is their statement that they went after Jews because “all Jews are rich.” Of course not. There is no anti-Semitism in France. French Jews are making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, it’s not like French Muslims have ever burned French synagogues, attacked French Jewish teens on soccer fields, stoned French Jewish schoolbuses, and desecrated French Jewish cemeteries.

It’s not like French Jews are bomb-proofing their schools.

Oh, wait. They did do all those things.