Anti-Semitism In France

Whilst on the BBC News website the other day I was reading through the world news and saw a story from France that caught my attention. The headline read, 'French prison head Goncalves suspended over Halimi girl'. Interested as to what Halimi meant I read the article. It detailed how a girl who had been used as a honeytrap in a murder of a young French man, Ilan Halimi, was now having a relationship with a prison guard whose care she was under.

Intrigued as to the story of Ilan Halimi, I googled it and uncovered a truly horrific story. Ilan was a French Jew of Moroccan descent living in Paris. He was lured via a honeytrap to an apartment in Paris where he was held and tortured for 3 weeks until his body was dumped, and although he was still alive when he was found he died on the way to hospital.

France was up in arms at the horrific crime and it garnered national attention. One of the main focuses of the case was that Ilan was Jewish. A number of the people who had been arrested for the crime had stated they put cigarettes out on him because they 'didn't like Jews'. Ilan's parents tried to push police to consider it as an anti-semitic murder, but the police just saw it as an extortion case. Eventually as the case progressed the police took up the anti-semitic angle and used it in the court case.

A few years previously there had been another high profile murder of a French Jewish man named Sébastien Selam. He had been murdered by a neighbour, someone who had previously been his friend, who after murdering Selam with a knife and fork went home and said to his mother, 'I killed my Jew'. Again when the case was being investigated the police did not state the basis for the murder was anti-semitism, but rather of jealousy between the two men. 


Two cases, both where people involved have admitted that they were aware that the victim was Jewish, and have shown reason for murdering them because they were Jewish. The French police are dealing with more and more of these cases, sometimes murders, sometimes assaults and muggings. The French authorities do not want to admit that anti-semitism is a problem in France even though there have been a number of cases of it, and the number of Jewish people leaving France is on the rise. 


It has been said that there is a link in the rise of anti-semitic violence and the ongoing problems in Israel and Palestine. It's not clear if this is just a phase in French history, or if this is an ongoing problem that will only continue to get worse. Only time will tell..