The trial of Youssouf Fofana, the black Muslim murderer of Ilan Halimi, along with the verdict and the sentencing, has been one of the major topics at the websites. When I first began GalliaWatch in February 2006, the biggest story of the day was the incredible cruelty with which Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish boy, had been tortured and killed. The story made headlines around the world, and the Jewish communities demanded justice. They saw it, justifiably, as an act of anti-Semitism. But it is more than that: it is a grim reminder of what the presence of Islam in France can mean at its most sadistic. Unfortunately, many high-profile leftist Jewish "intellectuals" refuse to admit this, since to do so would be to admit that immigration is bad for France, and being committed immigrationists, they cannot do the right thing and call for an end to immigration. Yet this is a case that cries out for justice, not only for Ilan but for France.

Since there are so many things to consider, I've decided to stick primarily to two or three articles. The first from Bivouac-id (in French) goes back to April 29, 2009, when the trial began. This article is actually a somewhat shorter version of a Wikipedia web page (in English) that tells the entire story as it was known up to the time of the trial. However, the Bivouac article does give more information about Fofana's behavior and his threats:

Based in Bagneux, outside of Paris, a small gang, ages 16-32, baptized by its chief Youssouf Fofana as "the gang of barbarians", subsisted from small jobs and even more from trafficking and theft of all kinds. The motive of the crime was presumably money... And yet numerous details that came to light indicated that the religion of the accused and anti-Semitic stereotypes played an important role in the choice of victim and the calvary he endured, even though Youssouf Fofana has denied it.
 
At first the prosecution rejected the anti-Semitic motive of the crime, but in the end, the exacerbating circumstance of acts committed "because of the victim's ethnicity, race or religion" was retained as part of the accusation against Fofana and one other defendant for the kidnapping and killing of Ilan.
 
This is why there will be talk of religion, possibly in a low voice, since it is about Islam. Yes, Youssouf Fofana is Muslim, as are the majority of the defendants. Today, April 29, and for the next ten weeks, the trial of the "gang of barbarians" opens in juvenile criminal court.

The article, having provided a type of preface, then moves on to more concrete facts:

In custody, Fofana inundated the examining magistrates with letters filled with anti-Semitic insults. According to television channel TF1, Youssouf Fofana arrived in court and proclaimed "Allah will conquer" and then gave as his birthday the date of Ilan Halimi's death. He risks life in prison. One of his lawyers, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, said to journalists: "It is a human being that will be judged. Mr. Fofana is being mistreated by a campaign of political and religious marketing. He must be allowed to speak."

The twisted personality of Coutant-Peyre, who is married to the terrorist Carlos, will be the subject of another post, time permitting.

Because of the 1945 ruling on juvenile crime, the trial will take place behind closed doors. Two female defendants, out of the 27, were minors at the time of the crime (9 females have been indicted), so the ruling is being applied to all the defendants, 19 of whom are being held in custody...
 
The list of defendants expanded to include various accomplices, friends, and relatives who knew that Ilan was being held hostage, fed with a straw, tied up, gagged, and beaten, but who kept silent. They will be prosecuted for non-assistance to a person in danger and failure to report a crime. In all, 40 persons will be judged during the trial.
 
The accusers want the arguments to be made public. Ilan's mother, Ruth Halimi, believes that "silence has already killed her son once", and hopes that a public trial will serve as a lesson. (...)
 
Samir Aït Abdelmalek, known as "Smiler", the father of two, a multi-recidivist for drug crimes and car theft, presumably provided the apartment in Bagneux where the kidnapped Ilan was kept before being moved to the boiler room. Samir, considered to be Fofana's right-hand man, having known him for 10 years, also provided the acid and slashed the victim with a paper cutter. He was to receive 1500 euro for his contribution: "I took out the blade from the paper cutter and after he had taken some food and water, I looked for a spot to slash him so he would bleed without harming him too much. I didn't want to touch the tape that prevented him from shouting. Without warning Ilan, so as not to stress him out, I slashed him over 5 or 6 centimeters on his left cheek. Despite the bandage it bled quickly into his beard that had not been shaved". (...)
 
The policeman who interrogated Fofana picked up the thread of the story:
 
"At that moment, Ilan managed to lift up the bandage from his eyes. So he was able to look him in the eye. Just then Fofana stabbed him in the throat near the carotid, and then again on the other side of his throat. He then tried to cut the lower part of his neck. Then he stabbed him in his side. He must have returned with a can of gasoline because he told me that he had used a can to splash Ilan with the combustible fluid and set him on fire. At that point he said to me: 'there was a big flame and I left.'"
 
As the State prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin indicated, the kidnappers were also inspired by "some well-known scenes", an allusion to the kidnappings of westerners by al-Qaida in Iraq.
 
The anti-Semitic motive, rejected at first, is now officially acknowledged. But more than anti-Semitism, it is the ideology of jihad that motivated the killers, as several pieces of evidence have recently indicated.
 
Documents seized from the homes of several gang members, show that they belonged to a "salafist" organization, according to police.The police also found documents from the CBSP - the Committee for Assistance and Support to the Palestinians. Hidden under this seemingly benign name is an organization that collects money on French soil for the terrorist group Hamas. The CBSP, listed by the Americans as an association that funds terrorism, has still not been banned in France, despite repeated demands from the United States and Israel.
 
The links between the members of the gang of barbarians and the CBSP demonstrate once again how porous the boundaries between ideological jihad and armed jihad really are.
 
Ilan Halimi, a young Jew, 23 years-old, was targeted because he was Jewish. This sentence contains all the motives for the horrors subsequently perpetrated against Ilan. Some will deny it, preferring the theory that the motive for the kidnapping was money. Photos showing Ilan at gunpoint were e-mailed to his family with a demand for 450,000 euro...
 
llan Halimi was found near death on February 13, 2006 and died several hours later, as a result of horrible torture. He was buried in Jerusalem in February 2007.
 
Attracted into a fatal honey trap on January 20, 2006, outside Paris by "Emma", or rather Sorour, her Iranian first name, Ilan made a date with the 17-year-old girl who had approached him three days earlier in a telephone shop on Boulevard Voltaire in Paris. Emma was in fact the "lure" paid by Youssouf Fofana, who conceived the plan to kidnap Ilan. The girl led Ilan into the basement of an apartment building in Sceaux (Hauts-de-Seine) where he was struck by the accomplices, neutralized with ether, and stuffed into the trunk of a stolen car, then taken to an empty apartment in the neighborhood of Bagneux (Hauts-de-Seine). The apartment guard gave them the keys, for a sum of 1500 euros...
 
On the morning of February 13, at 5:00 a.m., Ilan Halimi was placed in the trunk of a car. Three hours later Ilan was spotted along a railroad track in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois (Essonne). Naked, handcuffed and bound, his body covered with burns, in a state of shock and unable to speak. The doctors found four wounds to the neck, one of them in the jugular vein, and one in the side, made by a "sharp, pointed, instrument". He died en route to the hospital. Between these two dates... indescribable, inhuman horrors.
 
The autopsy, performed on February 14 revealed burns over 80% of his body, multiple "hematomas and contusions", a cheek wound made with a paper cutter and two knife wounds under his throat. But the doctor concluded: "None of the wounds was fatal." It was the totality of violence and tortures that he endured for three weeks that caused his death.

The Bivouac article then posts a scanned image of a newspaper article from the days following the arrest of Youssouf Fofana in the Ivory Coast where he had fled. I posted the contents of the article in March 2006, using as my source a Novopress article by Fabrice Robert. At the time I was still learning about the KA Tribe, a gang of thugs, and its black supremacist chief Kemi Seba. Subsequently, I was to write long articles on both the "tribe" and its leader. Also, it was just coming to light that the KA Tribe and Youssouf Fofana were interconnected in some way. The "tribe" was theoretically banned by Interior Minister Sarkozy, but Kemi Seba has emerged recently as some sort of budding politician or activist in the violent suburbs of Paris. I will post more details on this, time permitting. Here is the message sent via e-mail from the KA Tribe to the French Jewish community:

"During the last several days following the death of the mobile phone salesman, Ilan Halimi, we have noticed that a veritable witch-hunt is emerging against Youssef Fofana, accused by your society of being responsible for the death of one of yours. We will not beat around the bush: whether or not our brother is guilty, we are warning you that if by chance you should harm one hair on our brother's head, instead of granting him a fair trial, we will personnally take good care of the ringlets on the heads of your rabbis, and believe us, your phony security forces like the JDL and the Betar will be of no help to you when faced with the will of our justice. See to it that our brother is judged fairly, or you will pay."

The message was signed "Kemi Séba, Fara of the KA Tribe.
 
What was the verdict? Of course Fofana was found guilty, as were most of the members of the "gang of barbarians". Fofana was given life, the others lighter sentences. Le Salon Beige had this post on July 15. It consists of an excerpt from a communiqué issued by Convergences Nationales, a nationalist club formed by members of the MNR, Bruno Mégret's party that split from the Front National in 1998:

For Convergences Nationales, the conviction of Fofana to "life in prison", 22 years of which will be without possibility of parole, seems rather light, considering the torture inflicted over a long period on his victim. The killer, who continued to boast and sneer at the court when the verdict was read, will be once again free in 20 years and this eventuality is intolerable.
 
In reality he deserved the death penalty, just as murderers of children deserve it. For Convergences Nationales, the restoration of the death penalty in certain cases, is indispensable and ought to be the keystone of our justice system. For in these ignoble cases, it is the only possible penalty that offers redemption, beyond its dissuasive aspects.

Another article from Le Salon Beige, pursuing the same theme, points out that the prosecutor Philippe Bilger demanded gradated sentences in terms of the individual responsibility of each of the 27 co-defendants, ranging from life, 22 years of which would be without parole, to acquittal. In between these two extremes were sentences with parole or suspended sentences. The article points out this important fact: in French law it is not possible to go beyond 22 years in prison. It also notes that the new Minister of Justice Michèle Alliot-Marie decided to appeal 14 of the 25 convictions on grounds they were inadequate because they did not match the prosecution's demands.

The real scandal of this trial is not that some got off with 18 years where the prosecutor had demanded 20; it is that the maximum sentence that can be inflicted on this madman is 22 years. In France "life" means in fact 22 "incompressible" years maximum. Beyond that, "life" can be "compressed" in a temporal and semantic distortion. Which means that Fofana, incarcerated since 2006, could be set free in the spring of 2028! And at the age of 48, he would still have the full strength of the wild animal he boasted of being the day he killed Ilan Halimi: "It is better to live one day like a lion than a hundred days like a sheep," he said on the last day of the trial.

Both Salon Beige articles are followed by discussions on the death penalty.
 
An English-language article at Front Page Magazine, written by someone who has some difficulty with English, presents in a rather incoherent way more details about the case, with a strong emphasis on the importance of anti-Semitism in this case. While this is unquestionably a case of Jew-hatred on the part of a hate-consumed egomaniacal black Muslim supremacist, to regard it only as a case of anti-Semitism, to increase the gravity of the crime BECAUSE of the anti-Semitic element, is actually to DIMINISH the gravity of the crime, since it is then reduced to the politically correct, hence fallacious, level of a so-called "hate crime". But, in fact, that is what is happening in France today. Racism is the worst crime; all others are secondary.
 
I see no evidence, however, that the sentence was increased because of the ethnic/racial element, especially since Fofana was given the maximum penalty for the murder. But in the media, it will come to be regarded as an anti-Semitic act, not as an act of murder by an individual who should never have been allowed in France. Nor will it ever be analyzed as a symbol of what France is enduring and will continue to endure so long as black and Muslim invaders are allowed to swarm in, bringing with them violent cultures inimical to everything France has ever stood for.
 
Ilan's ethnicity served as a magnet, that is true. But what about a French girl with blond hair and no head scarf who tries to walk down the street, or a Catholic girl trapped in a subway car by a Turk armed with a knife, or a man on a bus who tries to prevent his wallet from being stolen, etc... They are all magnets for these barbarians. The impotent French Republic, concerned only with not being racist, could not care less about these innocent people.
 
Below, Ilan Halimi.

Addendum:

Here is a list of articles I posted from February and March 2006, on the murder and related topics. The interesting thing to me as I reviewed these 3-year-old articles is the emphasis placed back then on the threat posed by Islam, as opposed to the anti-racism propaganda that clogs so much of today's media output. Back then, the murder of Ilan was seen not just as an anti-Semitic act but as an omen of the consequences of the Islamization of France. We also see how solidly behind Philippe de Villiers were the Jews of France, and how promising he appeared as a potential candidate.

Things have not gotten better in the intervening years. Sarkozy's relentless campaign to Islamize his country, to pursue his immigration policy, to hunt down anyone who commits an act, however innocuous, of "discrimination", to build mosques, etc... has taken a dreadful toll. The people of France are further, not closer, to a solution to their crisis than they were a mere 36 months ago. Not to mention the steady rise in crime, the discouragement and resignation felt by so many and the relative invisibility of people like Philippe de Villiers, or the fact that CRIF, the umbrella organization of Jewish groups, is now openly advocating métissage while its leader Richard Prasquier cultivates friendship with Muslim religious leaders. Back then CRIF supported Philippe de Villiers in his attempt to demonstrate in the rally. CRIF, being both left-wing and Jewish oscillates between accusations of anti-Semitism on the one hand, and "I am a friend of Muslims" attitude on the other. But never does CRIF advocate closing the borders to immigration.

1. Comments from a web forum on the murder.

2. A press release from Philippe de Villiers.

3. Three demonstrations.

4. Villiers removed forcibly from demonstration.

5. The arrest of Fofana.

6. A warning to the Jews – provides a link to a Jerusalem Post article published at FPM.