Anti-Semitism seen rising among France's Muslims

BAGNEUX, France -- In the bleak housing project where a young Jew named Ilan Halimi was held captive and tortured before being dumped in a vacant lot to die, there's scant sympathy for the victim.

''It's too bad this happened, because we immigrants are always blamed," said Ibrahim Ag Ahmalou, a lanky man of West African heritage who shares his girlfriend's apartment in the project. ''But Jews have all the money and power. Everyone knows this and resents them. That's why they have these problems."

Last week there were three more attacks on Jews by Arab and African immigrants in suburban Paris, according to police. None of the latest victims was seriously injured, but the attacks heightened the nervousness of French Jews. There is alarm that the antipathy of French Muslims toward Jews, long based on opposition to Israel, is reverting to the even more sinister prejudices that once pervaded Europe, making Jews the scapegoats for all social ills.

''Anti-Semitism is rising in our country," said legislator Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Halimi, 23, son of Moroccan-born Jews of modest means, sold cellphones at a shop in Paris. He disappeared on Jan. 20, allegedly abducted by a predominantly Muslim youth gang dedicated to crime, street fighting, rap music, and virulent anti-Semitism. The thuggish crew sought a cash ransom of more than $500,000 because they assumed all Jews were rich, according to French authorities. And when Halimi's hard-strapped family could not produce money, they killed their captive because he was a Jew.

In taunting calls to Halimi's family, the abductors addressed his parents with anti-Semitic slurs and told them to get cash ''from your synagogue." They also contacted a French rabbi, boasting, ''We have a Jew." Even more shocking, investigators believe that many inhabitants of the project were aware that the youth gang was holding a Jewish captive, but none called police or urged the abductors to show mercy.

The atrocity has stunned a country that is trying to cope with what Jewish leaders perceive as intensifying anti-Semitism in France, mainly among Muslims of Arab or African heritage, but also growing among Caribbean islanders from former colonies and, to a lesser extent, poor white immigrants from other parts of Europe who also inhabit the dreary suburbs -- known as ''banlieues" -- that surround all major French cities

Although tens of thousands of French turned out last month to march against anti-Semitism, few analysts believe the show of solidarity will change the attitudes of an embittered underclass of restive Arabs, Africans, and other dark-skinned newcomers who increasingly, if illogically, blame Jews for the poverty and prejudice that often beset their lives. France is home to Europe's largest population of Muslims -- about 6 million -- as well as the continent's largest community of Jews, about 600,000.

''That's a volatile combination," said Henri Hajdenberg, a prominent Paris lawyer and former president of the country's largest umbrella organization of Jewish groups, the Representative Board of Jewish Institutions. ''It's turning into a dangerous situation for French Jews.

''This was a monstrous but also complicated case," Hajdenberg said in an interview. ''Because the kidnappers demanded a ransom, some people are trying to say it was just an ordinary crime, not anti-Semitism. But it seems certain Ilan Halimi would not be dead if he had not been Jewish."

There is growing fear of a new and virulent anti-Semitism taking hold in the dingy subsidized housing tracts where most Arab and West Africans immigrants live in isolation from the French mainstream, suffering from poverty, unemployment, and school dropout rates often more than double the national average.

France is no stranger to anti-Semitism. Thousands of French Jews vanished in Nazi death camps with hardly a murmur of protest from their Christian countrymen. Hatred of Jews is the subtext of the shrill ultranationalism that still has a following among white French. Meanwhile, the past decade has seen a surge in ''ideological" anti-Semitism among Muslim immigrants -- based on opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinian cause, but often expressed with swastikas spray-painted on synagogues or desecration of Jewish graveyards.

But more recently, analysts say, anti-Semitism in France has taken an uglier turn as young Arabs and West Africans have adopted loud hatred of Jews as a proclamation of cool, an attitude powered more by rap music, ultraviolent jihadist videos, and radical Islamic rhetoric -- although with little or no adherence to Islamic religious practice -- than by any coherent stand on events in the Middle East. Equally alarming, the anti-Semitism appears to be spreading among non-Muslim Africans and Caribbean blacks in France, and even gaining ground among white immigrants from European backwaters who find it difficult gaining a place in French society.

Said Sammy Ghozlan, a retired police chief and activist against anti-Semitism: ''It's all mixed up: gang stuff, violence, and a glaze of ideology -- they hate Jews, they hate the West, they hate France. The Jews are the face they put on their generalized anger at the world."

The gang that allegedly kidnapped Halimi called itself the Barbarians and included a mix of cultures, including Arabs, blacks from Africa and the Caribbean, a French-Iranian, and a Portuguese. The alleged leader of the gang was Youssouf Fofana, the 26-year-old son of Muslim immigrants from Ivory Coast, a former French colony in West Africa. Most gang members were nominal Muslims, but there is no suggestion that their motives were religious.

So far, Fofana and 19 alleged accomplices have been charged in the savage abduction. According to police, the gang made at least four botched efforts to kidnap a Jew before snatching Halimi.

For three weeks, Halimi was held in Bagneux's dingy Pierre-Plate housing project, kept naked for most of this time in a makeshift dungeon in the basement pump room of the complex, bound with tape and strips of cloth. His face was slashed -- with photographs of the grisly blade work e-mailed to his family in Paris -- and a burning cigarette was squashed out on his forehead, according to autopsy reports.

Halimi's eyes and mouth were covered with adhesive tape, leaving only a tiny hole that allowed him to breathe and drink liquids through a straw. On Feb. 13, still alive, he was doused with acid -- apparently an attempt by his captors to remove traces of their DNA -- before being dumped in a wooded area. Bleeding from at least four stab wounds in the throat, he managed to crawl toward a train station. He was discovered, but too late. He died in the ambulance racing him to a hospital.

The slaying has horrified France and stunned Jews across Europe. ''This case is the first time [since World War II] that a French person has been killed for being Jewish," Roger Cukierman, head of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions, told French reporters.

Said Hajdenberg: ''The anti-Semitism being felt in France may be ideologically rooted in anger against Israel, but it is fed by a new generation also taking up old anti-Semitic delusions -- that all Jews are rich, that all Jews are powerful, that Jews are to blame for all the poverty and problems faced in immigrant communities."

Fofana was arrested in Ivory Coast and returned to France earlier this month after giving an interview to an African television station in which he insisted ''the abduction was carried out for financial ends," not because Halimi was Jewish. But Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in overall charge of the investigation, said the crime was driven by the abductors' near-obsessive belief that ''Jews have the money."

France recorded 974 anti-Semitic incidents in 2004, a record high for the post-World War II era. But officials were proud that slurs spray-painted on synagogues, the trashing of Jewish cemeteries, and other incidents fell dramatically last year, to about 500 incidents.

But Jewish leaders say the decline is less a reflection of growing tolerance than of the heavy precautions that synagogues have felt obliged to adopt in recent years, including installation of high, heavy-gauge steel security fences, 24-hour surveillance cameras, and armed patrols.