What Ilan Halimi’s killers did to him; the French are “stunned”

From the New York Times’s story about the kidnapping/torture/murder of the 23-year-old Moroccan-born Jew Ilan Halimi in Paris:

Mr. Halimi, 23, died Feb. 13, shortly after he was found near a train station 15 miles away by passers-by, after crawling out of the wooded area where he was dumped. He was naked and bleeding from at least four stab wounds to his throat, his hands bound and adhesive tape covering his mouth and eyes. According to the initial autopsy report, burns, apparently from the acid, covered 60 percent of his body….

The horrifying death has stunned France, which has Europe’s largest Muslim and largest Jewish populations. Last weekend, tens of thousands of people marched against racism and anti-Semitism in Paris, joined by the interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, and smaller marches took place in several other French cities, including Marseille.

On one hand, I remain forever unable to understand how any human being would want to harm physically, let alone torture and kill, an innocent human being. On the other hand, I know that such evil exists, and I specifically know what the Koran tells Muslims to do to Jews and other unbelievers, so I am not shocked by the event itself. Yet the French, according to the Times, are “stunned.” Why should they be stunned? Over the last 50 years, the French have admitted into their country a population of millions of Jew-hating Muslims. The French have spent the last 30 years supporting the terrorist Palestinians against the “oppressive” state of Israel. What right have the French to be “stunned” at the evil that they have helped unleash?

But this is the nature of liberals. Denying the existence of evil, except of course for the evil of the West, whites, capitalism, Israel, America, and George W. Bush, they are perpetually surprised when a seriously evil act occurs that does not emanate from one of their designated bogeymen. They have no way of explaining it, except as a pathology caused by some failure in Western society itself.

And what do they, the French, do about it? They conduct a march against “racism and anti-Semitism.” Racism? As in white racism? Then this is the same perverse logic as shown by the secularist anti-Islamists who, instead of condemning Islam, condemn “religious totalitarianism,” by which they mean Christianity as much as they mean Islam. Further, since “racism” today means such things as Alain Finkelkraut’s opinion that that Muslims need to assimilate, or any negative view about Muslims, a march against “racism,” by conflating savage torture and murder with ordinary rational opinions and thus condemning both kinds of behaviors equally, is not going to do much to build an effective social consensus against savagery, is it? If the French were serious about not wanting the evil of murderous Jew-hatred in France, they wouldn’t have welcomed and accommodated millions of Jew-hating Muslims, and they wouldn’t have taken the side of the Palestinian terrorists who are the among most evil people who have ever lived, and they wouldn’t have trafficked in every anti-Israel lie, and, further, they would at this moment be criticizing the Muslim community for the savagery it inculcates, instead of joining with Muslims in a liberal feel-good march against “racism.” But such a course of action would make the French “racist,” wouldn’t it?

Events like this show us what a sick and extreme belief system “mainstream” liberalism really is, and how deeply embedded in the Western psyche. Which further suggests that the only way Westerners can be shocked out of their liberalism is through the most horrendous suffering.

This is not an amoral, Leninist-style, “worse is better” analysis. I am not talking about manipulating the historical process, but about understanding the human soul. When human beings are deeply committed to a sin, when they think their sin is good, when they love their sin, all of which is true about Westerners and the sin of liberalism, they are not going to give up that sin because of one or two unpleasant experiences—a London bombing, a Paris riot. No. They must experience the degradation and ruin that comes upon them as a result of that sin, they must feel the full ugliness and falseness of that sin, and learn to hate it. And then, maybe, they will be ready to give it up.

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A reader from Belgium writes:

I agree with every single argument in your article. I even agree with the comment you omit:

“Over the last 50 years, the French Jews have been among the most frenetic supporters of immigration. Why should they be stunned, now that the evil they have helped unleash has turned against them?”

The reader of course is absolutely correct.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 07, 2006 04:50 PM | Send