Reacting to the sentencing of more than twenty gang members convicted for the kidnapping, torture and murder of her 23 year-old son, Ilan, Ruth Halimi declared herself to be “frightened” at the relatively lenient terms received by all the defendants other than the ringleader. The trial of Ilan’s murderers was not public, she noted, because two of the defendants were minors when the crime was committed. As a result, French society was denied a vital insight into the violent, delinquent antisemitism which festers in its banlieues. Had the horrific details of Ilan’s ordeal been recounted in the public eye, these prison terms, one as light as six months suspended, would have been much tougher.

As of this afternoon, the French Justice Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, apparently agrees with Ruth Halimi. Fourteen members of the gang, known as “The Barbarians,” now face a retrial, on the grounds that their original sentences were too lenient.

Mme. Alliot-Marie has done the right thing. Her decision should be welcomed by anyone who understands the depths to which human beings can sink when they are poisoned by racism.

Every so often, you come across a hate crime possessed of the most breathtaking depravity. Just recently, there was the murder of Egyptian immigrant Marwa El Sherbini in a German courtroom, at the moment that she was giving evidence against a man who had verbally abused her for the offense of being a Muslim. Three months pregnant, she was stabbed 18 times by the very man whom she was testifying against, while her three year-old son watched helplessly. Her husband, who tried to intervene, was himself shot by the court security guards.

Or remember the case of Matthew Shepard. In October 1998, Shepard, a young gay man, accepted the offer of a lift home from two men he met in a bar near Laramie, Wyoming. Eighteen hours later, he was found, barely alive, tied to a fence in a remote rural area, having been pistol-whipped and tortured. The man who discovered Shepard initially thought he’d come across a scarecrow.

Ilan Halimi belongs in that category of hate crime victims whose stories leave you wrecked by anger and sorrow. Like Matthew Shepard, Halimi was alive - just - when his body was discovered. And like Shepard, Halimi died a few hours later, having suffered more than three weeks of the most gruesome torture at the hands of the gang that kidnapped him. Suffering, moreover, that was rooted in one simple, immutable fact. Ilan Halimi was a Jew.

The facts of what happened bear recalling. On the evening of 20 January 2006, Halimi met up with an attractive girl in her late teens, known as “Yalda,” who’d first approached him in the cellular phone shop where he worked. She lured him into the clutches of The Barbarians, who kidnapped and imprisoned him. The following day, Halimi’s family received a note demanding a ransom of more than half a million dollars.

No matter that the Halimis were a family who lived modestly, on a small income, alongside other working class Jewish and Muslim families in their suburban Paris neighborhood. The Barbarians kidnapped a Jew because, they were certain, all Jews are rich. Youssef Fofana, an Ivorian Muslim in his late 20s and the gang’s leader, told Halimi’s family that if they couldn’t afford the ransom, they should “go and get it from the synagogue.”

Out of all the defendants, Fofana is the only one to have received the maximum sentence under French law: life, with no prospect of parole for 22 years. That is a fitting sentence for a man who directed and participated in the beating of Halimi, who burned him with cigarettes and acid, who photographed him, his face and hands bound with masking tape, in a Daniel Pearl pose, and who dumped him after twenty-four days outside a Parisian train station with - said the police - 80 per cent of his body butchered.

But what about those who played an enabling role, like “Yalda,” aka Sorour Arbabzadeh, who received nine years for her role as honey-trap? What about the acquittal of two of Fofana’s accomplices? There is good cause to believe, as Minister Alliot-Marie says, that these verdicts are too lenient. France’s legal system must now define what punishment, in a case as grotesque and as disturbing as this one, actually means.

The French courts also now have an opportunity to right another wrong: the refusal, despite persistent pleas from Ruth Halimi, to hold the trial in public. There are difficult, painful questions to be asked about, for example, the relationship between the tropes of antisemitism and the furious, bestial cruelty they unleashed in this case; about the prevalence of casual antisemitism among young people in France, many of them - but, like the Barbarians themselves, by no means all - Muslims; about the way in which Fofana portrayed his irredeemably reactionary crime as an act of resistance, in language that conjures up the image of a clenched fist (”Mon nom, c’est ARABS, Africain révolte armée barbare salafiste;”) about much else besides. And they should be asked in public.

Above all, those on the left and the right who insist that Israel’s actions are responsible for today’s antisemitic outrages would do well to reflect that Ilan Halimi - the victim of toxic notions about Jews which predate the existence of a Jewish state - is finally at peace in the country where, had he lived there, he would now still be alive. One day soon, perhaps, Ilan’s relatives will be able to recite Kaddish for him in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul cemetery in the knowledge that justice has at last been served.

Here is the Palestinian writer and literary critic Hassan Khader on the “Nakba Narrative.”

Despite the fact that the signed agreements shook the foundations of accepted Palestinian norms and expectations, the PLO did not fail to develop rhetoric that emphasized the extent of its continued commitment to, and perhaps even conformity with, the traditional Narrative, despite obvious contradictions.

He goes on to say:

There is a unique set of dynamics to this ring of contradiction, most which involve attempts to compensate for secretly deviating from the Narrative by engaging in more eloquent rhetoric that invokes the themes of the constants, the conjuring of memory and the supposed optimism of the will. All these compensatory gestures are effective only in preventing any accumulation of political wisdom, and lead us time and again to the same errors. Therefore, the Palestinians continuously return to square one, as if the sixty years of Nakba and a hundred years of conflict in and over Palestine, could not yield a moment of reflection or a single lesson learned.

Khader’s entire piece, thoughtfully translated by the American Task Force on Palestine, can be read here.

This is not the first time that Khader has characterized the Nakba as a form of ideological cage. An article he wrote for Al Ahram in 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Israel, offered the following observation:

Palestine, in reality, was never a paradise; nor was it lost. It was a remote part of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by poor peasant-farmers. The West Bank and Gaza, which were in and of Palestine, possessed the constituent elements for the perpetuity of Palestinian existence that might have stemmed the deterioration resulting from the annihilation of the larger entity.

However, for the idea of nakba to be complete, the idea of entity could not exist. Consequently, ‘refugee’ became the catchword for identity, which in turn required ignoring the existence of approximately 180,000 Palestinians who remained in that portion of Palestine that was lost. Their continued presence in their country was not viewed as proof of the impossibility of uprooting a people from their land, or as proof of their attachment to their land. Rather it was viewed as cause for embarrassment due to the certain contamination engendered by their daily contact with the usurpers of the land.

Those who read the entire piece will note that Khader is hardly generous when it comes to Zionist readings of Middle Eastern history. He also leaves his reader unsure as to precisely what his political conclusions are (commenters who might be tempted to explain this in terms of “traditional” Arab “duplicity” or “slipperiness” really shouldn’t bother).

But none of this should mask the significance of either his piece from 1998 or today’s offering, which appeared in the leading Arabic daily Al Hayat. Actually, those anti-Zionists who jump up and down with glee whenever an Israeli academic questions, say, the justice of the 1948 War of Independence might want to ponder Khader’s implicit challenge to the kind of historical representations contained, for example, in the opening paragraphs of PACBI’s call to boycott Israel. And, as this account of Palestinian intellectual responses to the 1998 Nakba commemorations shows, Khader is not alone in arguing against the “levelling, nationalist” explanation of the events of 1948.

Ultimately, to puncture the narrative of the Nakba, and to expose the political imperatives which underlie its pretensions to absolute truth, is to simultaneously dispense with the “original sin” theory of Israel’s creation. As Khader writes, the Palestinian leadership has wanted to preserve and deepen the Nakba narrative at the same time as pursuing negotiations with Israel. As a result, the past subsumes the present, so that the “collapse of the Palestinian national movement, and the disasters in education, health and human suffering in Gaza, are thus all rendered merely temporary problems that will pass and are not deserving of any attention.”

It’s an approach - or, as Khader puts it, a “contradiction” - that is no longer sustainable. Those who style themselves as “friends of Palestine” should stop perpetuating it. They might even want to think about how to move beyond it.

Antisemitism was a prominent focus of the American Jewish Committee’s Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Among the speakers were John Mann, the British MP who has spearheaded the global parliamentary fight against antisemitism, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French author and philosopher who has never lost sight of the centrality of antisemitism in his dissection of Islamism and its related ills.

Mindful of his audience, Mann declared: “Let me quote from Rosa Parks: ‘As I got up on the bus I saw that there was only one vacancy, so this was the seat that I took.’ This world and past generations are full of Rosa Parkses. People going about their everyday business quietly and with dignity. But people not prepared to be bullied and cowered and intimidated. No doubt a little scared, but those who do their bit by doing what is right.”

You can read the entire speech here and watch highlights of it on YouTube here.

And here are some highlights of what BHL had to say, again on YouTube.