The "Barbarians"

In February 2006, a gang of 27 young French "barbarians" kidnapped a 26 year old Jewish student, Ilan Halimi, near Paris, and after torturing him for several days in an appartment, murdered him. The cause of this rampage? The leader of the gang, Youssouf Fofana, a young French Moslem of African origin, wanted to avenge the killing of palestinian kids he saw every night on French television. Today Fofana went on trial. He entered the court insulting the judges, and the public and yelling Alahu Akbar, Allah is great!
The French are right when they say that the Israeli-palestinian conflict is a domestic problem for them. Most French media is biased against Israel and readily displays the "crimes" of the Israeli military in Gaza and West bank. For the young, mostly unemployed young French moslems, parked in soulless high rises in grey suburbs, the constant viewing of dead Palestinians on French, Algerian, Morroccan or AlJazeera TV (they all have satellite dishes) acts as a red rag on a bull. Seen from the US one could think that it is a resurgence of French anti-semitism . Far from me to say his scourge has fully disappeared, but in this case it is wrong. True, the murderers are French nationals. But they are also second generation of an immigration that has never adapted. They are moslem first and last. Worse, they have scapegoated the French Jewish population (second largest in the world) for what they perceive as prsecution of Islam.
The Middle-East conflict has entered our courts. But France knew it had a problem, when, several years ago, at the opening of a soccer game that opposed Algeria to France, the young French-Moslems booed the French national anthem.
Fofana's gang of the barbarians is only the beginning.