Marc Weitzmann - Hate - the rising tide of anti-semitism in France

Copyright 2019 by Marc Weitzmann

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Weitzmann, Marc, author.

Title: Hate : the rising tide of anti-Semitism in France (and what it means for us) / Marc Weitzmann.

Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019] |Identifiers: LCCN 2018042559 (print) | LCCN 2018042805 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544791343 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544649644 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: AntisemitismFranceHistory21st century. |MuslimsFranceSocial conditions21st century. | JewsFranceSocial conditions21st century. | MuslimsCultural assimilationFrance. | JudaismRelationsIslam. | IslamRelationsJudaism. | Social integrationFrance. | FranceEthnic relations. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / France. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Violence in Society. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Jewish Studies.

Classification: LCC DS 146.F8 (ebook) | LCC DS 146. F 8 W 45 2019 (print) | DDC 305.892/4044dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042559

Jacket design by Mark R. Robinson

Author photograph Olivier Roller

eISBN 978-0-544-79134-3
v1.0219

, from the article Satisfaction, at Last, is from the August 18, 2010, print issue of the New York Times. Copyright 2010 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

For Philip Roth

R.I.P.

The trap that led to the abduction, torture, and murder of Ilan Halimi, in January 2006, had been set on the Boulevard Voltaire, in Paris, months earlier by a twenty-seven-year-old first offender named Youssouf Fofana.

Fofana was the fifth child of Ivory Coast immigrants living in the southwest Paris suburb of Bagneux, in one of the derelict projects there that the French call cits. He had gathered around him a bunch of ethnically diverse kids aged sixteen to twenty-six, faithful members of a group he had christened the Gang of Barbarians.

Under Fofanas leadership, the gang had set itself the task of making money by going after the one community that controlled everything everywhere. Jews were kings. Everybody knew they swallowed the money of the state, while he, being black, was a slave to that same state and therefore to them as well.

Fofanas first plan consisted of sending anonymous threat letters or Molotov cocktails sent to public figures such as the president of Doctors Without Borders, Rony Brauman, the then director of the French cultural channel Arte, Jrme Clment, a lawyer by the name of Joseph Cohen-Saban, and others who were (or appeared to be) Jewish. As this came to nothing, Fofana concocted another idea, which consisted of randomly abducting Jews. But that plan failed, too, largely, it seems, because of the fury of the gang members themselves. In one of the rare nearly successful attempts, the abducted man, Mickal Doueb, fifty, was found by police, handcuffed and swimming in his own blood after the gang beat him to cries of kike and dirty Jew before running away.

Finally, in January 2006, they started to pace the Boulevard Voltaire looking for Jewish stores and potential victims there. The groups methods, meanwhile, had somewhat gained in sophistication, as Fofana had encountered his improbable muse. She was a seventeen-year-old called Emma the Bait, a.k.a. Yalda. Her real name was Sorour Arbabzadeh, and she remains by far the most arresting character of this grim story. Although obviously smart, she still was in the tenth grade. She had been raised in Iran, where her mother, a nurse by trade, had been in an arranged marriage with a violent man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, who beat Sorour throughout much her childhood. After he died, in 1999, the family had ended up in France, with political refugee status; Sorour was ten. When she was fourteen, three teenagersfrom her own suburb, it seemsraped her. (A complaint filed by her mother against the boys was soon withdrawn, possibly under pressure from the neighborhood.) The battalion of juvenile court judges, trained caregivers, and social workers whod followed the girl since then had been unable to prevent her from making multiple suicide attempts.

Plan number four, as elaborated by Fofana, was this: A girl, carefully selected by him for her sex appeal, would flirt with one of those loaded Jewish guys; she would get a date with him; and, at the end of the evening, she would ask to be brought back home to Bagneux, where the rest of the gang would be waiting. When a signal was given, the youngest members of the gang would set a car on fire as a diversion for any cops patrolling around while the rest would jump on the guy and lock him up in the trunk of a car. Then they would send their ransom demand.

Fofana had confided his idea to Tiffen, a semi-homeless twenty-year-old woman born in Brittany to a Catholic family. Tiffen had converted to Islam at fifteen. She had responded by suggesting to Fofana several possible targets for kidnappings in the cit, among them some of her own friends. But, either because none were Jewish or because Tiffen thought she lacked the necessary confidence to play the vamp part in the abduction plan, none had been acted upon. Then Tiffen came up with Sorour, a high school girlfriend, whom she introduced to the gang. Sorours sex appeal was not lost on Fofana. I can work wonders with you, he is reported to have told Sorour when they met.

According to what Sorour Arbabzadeh later confessed, she accepted Fofanas proposal to be used as a honey trap as a favor to him, and with the promise of a payment of three to five thousand euros once the ransom was paid. She denied having become involved sexually with Fofana or any of the other gang members.

On January 16, 2006, Sorour entered a cell phone store on the Boulevard Voltaire, where she chatted up Ilan Halimi, a twenty-two-year-old clerk. They set a date for a drink four days later at 10 p.m. Hes nice, she confided to Tiffen afterwards, hes cute. The twentieth was a Friday, and, as he did every week, Halimi spent the Shabbat dinner at his mother Ruths house, along with his sistersbut without his Chinese, non-Jewish, girlfriend. Then he went to meet his new acquaintance for a drink at the Paris Orlans, a caf shed chosen because it was close to the south beltway of the capital, leading to Bagneux.

Twenty-four days later, Halimi was found in the southern suburb, walking on the tracks of the regional train line, naked, handcuffed, and in a state of deep exhaustion. He had three knife wounds and was covered with third-degree burns on two-thirds of his body. He was taken to the emergency room but died a few hours later.

Sorour Arbabzadeh had had no trouble getting Halimi to drive her to Bagneux, or giving the proper signalsearching in her purse for her keysright after theyd arrived and gotten out of the car. In her testimony, she said that shed heard Halimi crying out for two whole minutes as he resisted the gang members, who had lifted him up from the ground and, carrying him by his arms and legs, were trying to lock him up in a car trunk. Students on an adjacent street also saw him struggling from afar, but, because of the high pitch of his voice, they took him for a girl and thoughtor preferred to believethat the whole thing was a joke.

After the car took off, Sorour was in tears. She found comfort in the kind words of one of the gang members who had stayed behind with her. Maurice was a computer engineer by trade, from Martinique, in the French West Indies, who had converted to Islam.