The martyr of the veil (Hijab) Marwa Sharbini was stabbed to death with a child in her womb in a German court of law before the eyes of her three-year old son, Mustafa. Also, her husband was wounded. Her extremist German-Russian murderer will be tried by the end of this year or early next year. The crime was perpetrated in front of three judges and in the presence of tens of witnesses. Therefore, the details of the incident are not the subject of disagreement. The murderer was condemned for assaulting the victim after he had tried to remove her scarf and accused her of being a terrorist, and was condemned for his act. He then went with her to the Court of Appeal, where he killed her and wounded her husband. A few days ago, a sentence was pronounced on another crime whose victim was Jewish-French Ilan Halimi. He was killed after being kidnapped and brutally tortured. A French court announced its verdict regarding the murderer and 26 other defendants in the evening of Friday, July 10. The following day, The New York Times published a news item on the verdict, while I read another news item on the same case in a pro-Likudist American website that ceaselessly attacks Islam and Muslims. The website said in the first line of the news item that Halimi was the “victim of the most atrocious anti-Semitic crime committed in France since World War II.” It also criticized the announcement of the verdict on Shabbat's eve, the Jewish weekly holiday, and before the celebrations of the French National Day on July 14, which made the French focus on other issues such as the vacation and crowded traffic. The website also commented on the French court's refusal to consider the crime anti-Semitic, as Halimi's mother had demanded, with a view to make the punishment heavier. It only referred to the killer by his name, Youssef Foufana, whom it said has the “brain of Barbarians,” and accused the French police of all sorts of failure and “bungled negotiations for unrealistic ransom demands”. It claimed that “the whole thing has been hushed up and tucked away under the public's interest in the Tour de France”, and concluded by saying that the verdict was lenient. The website added saying that Jewish-French groups would protest before the Justice Ministry at Place Vendôme, where enraged Islamists demonstrated last January and shouted “Death to Israel, Death to the Jews”. I start from the end. The murderer was sentenced to life imprisonment, which is the maximum sentence in French law, while 26 other defendants were sentenced to imprisonment ranging between 18, 15, 13, and 11 years, and even 6 months with stay of execution, and 2 were acquitted; thus, 25 defendants were convicted of the crime. As for Shabbat's eve, the National Day holiday, or the Tour de France, they are all utter absurdity, as if the Likudists wanted France to suspend its entire life only to focus on trying Halimi's muderers. But was the crime anti-Semitic as the website claims? It incidentally referred to the high ransom that was demanded. According to my information, the crime was committed in view of demanding such a ransom, i.e. it was an ordinary crime which had nothing to do with race or religion. Yet, I only rely on The New York Times in the lines below since it cannot be accused, unlike an Arab writer. According to the website, Fofana has the “brain of Barbarians”, but the daily made it clear that Fofana is an ordinary criminal who had been jailed, and after he left prison, he created a gang named the “Barbarians”. The website does not say much about the murderer, but the daily says that he was born in France to parents from the Ivory Coast, and that both parents were nominally Muslims, i.e. non-practitioners. Torturing the kidnapped Jewish-French is a brutal crime, but it was not “anti-Semitic” as claimed by the Likudist website (I cannot subject anyone to a worse humiliation than describing them as Likudists, i.e. radicals and the enemies of humanity and peace), as the ransom referred to in the news item in a couple of words is explained in the daily. The latter says that the kidnappers started with demanding a $500,000 ransom then gradually reduced the sum to the extent that Fofana ended up demanding $5,000 to be sent to the Ivory Coast where he had escaped and had been arrested in 2006. While the news item in the website focuses on Halimi's Judaism, the kidnappers' racism and anti-Semitism, the daily quotes the kidnapper as saying that he wanted to kidnap a Jew because “Jews are loaded.” Other sources of information I have access to totally deny Fofana and his gang's practice of Islam, and assert that behind the crime is greed for the Jew's money, not any anti-Semitism. Yet, I have relied on a news item in another leading US daily owned by Jews, to deny any personal motive on my part in this issue. Likudists, be they Benjamin Netanyahu or a radical American covering up Israel's crimes, are the enemies of peace, humanity, and Israel itself for instigating the adoption of policies that cannot lead to peace. The website news item that started with an exaggeration like “the most atrocious anti-Semitic crime” concluded with the shouts of Muslims before the Justice Ministry in Paris, without saying of course that they were demonstrating in protest against Israel's killing of hundreds of women and children in Gaza. If there were a racist and anti-Semitic crime, the victim would be the martyr of the Hijab, Marwa Sharbini, not any other person. http://www.j-khazen.blogspot.com/
