On February 13th, a young man was found naked, handcuffed and severely injured, left to die by some railway lines. He died in the ambulance of his wounds. Halimi had burns and cuts on 80% of his body - the result of 24 days of torture by the gang who had kidnapped him and brought him to the Bagneux cité, north of Paris. He had been beaten repeatedly, had cigarettes stubbed out on his face and body, and even had toxic fluids poured on him.

Halimi - like at least four others before him - had found he had attracted the attentions of a pretty young lady while at work. He sold mobile phones in a small shop; she was a customer. They agreed to go out on January 20th, the night he found himself in the hands of the gang.

The gang itself was led by one Yousef Fofana, a small-time criminal who has been arrested for assaulting police officers and armed robbery. He was nicknamed 'Mohammed'. The press has described him as having a Muslim name, though not as a Muslim. Several members of the gang are Muslim, but they reportedly used at least two European girls to attract potential targets.

Halimi's family told the press that the gang had read Koranic tracts to them on the phone with Ilan's screams in the background. Initially the gang demanded a ransom of 450,000 euros, which they dropped to 50,000 and later to 3,000 when Halimi's family told them they were not wealthy.

Now, based on the comments from the arrested gang members, it is clear the perpetrators were antisemitic. As a police officer told Libération , “It’s simply that, for those criminals, Jew equals money.”

But where does this murder fit in, in the context of these heated times?

Consider this:

"They mix everything together; they are against Jews, Americans, France, the West," said Sammy Ghozlan, a retired police chief and activist who tries to combat anti-Semitism. "If they could have gotten their hands on a French cop in the same way, they probably would have done the same thing…. I don't think the violence in this case was the original purpose, it developed progressively."

And this:

"There are only two idols in the projects today: [French NBA star] Tony Parker and Abu Musab Zarqawi," the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, said author Stephane Bartome, a former anti-terrorism detective. "And unless you're a really good basketball player, it's easier to emulate Zarqawi."

Excluded from claiming a French identity, or even a French Muslim identity, the cités have developed their own violent subculture. This culture lacks any coherent belief structure that could be broadly considered 'Islamism', let alone categorised under the ideology of - say - the Muslim Brotherhood. But their treatment of Halimi was influenced by the treatment of Muslims in Iraq. It is difficult to see why the Barbarians could see justice in treating a French Jewish salesman as (if anything, worse than) U.S. soldiers had treated inmates at Abu Ghraib, unless one considers the quasi-Muslim identity of the cités.

Dr. Anat Peri in Yediot Aharanot:

The Iraqi connection is also clear from the photographs Halimi's captors sent the family, in which the victim is shown bound with a gun to his head, just like in films coming out of Iraq. Ilan Halimi was murdered not just because his abductors believed that Jews had money. He was tortured for three weeks and was killed because French Jews have been blamed for the war in Iraq.

Peri also notes that, like al-Qaeda showing captured Westerners wearing the orange jumpsuits worn by the Guantanamo detainees:

Halimi was held naked and tortured, head covered, just like photos of prisoners tortured by U.S. and British soldiers in Iraqi jails published in the media, the internet and even movie theaters.

In the often-quoted article, The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, Theodore Dalrymple described the social disintegration in the cités (or la Zone). Just before his conclusion, he made this important point:

But among the third of the population of the cités that is of North African Muslim descent, there is an option that the French, and not only the French, fear. For imagine yourself a youth in Les Tarterets or Les Musiciens, intellectually alert but not well educated, believing yourself to be despised because of your origins by the larger society that you were born into, permanently condemned to unemployment by the system that contemptuously feeds and clothes you, and surrounded by a contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence, and crime. Is it not possible that you would seek a doctrine that would simultaneously explain your predicament, justify your wrath, point the way toward your revenge, and guarantee your salvation, especially if you were imprisoned? Would you not seek a “worthwhile” direction for the energy, hatred, and violence seething within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil in the name of ultimate good? It would require only a relatively few of like mind to cause havoc. Islamist proselytism flourishes in the prisons of France (where 60 percent of the inmates are of immigrant origin), as it does in British prisons; and it takes only a handful of Zacharias Moussaouis to start a conflagration.

Dalrymple is correct, up to a point. Many French prisoners are being radicalised by Salafi imams, and it isn't just lapsed Muslims but also Europeans.

And yet the conflagration of October-Novemeber 2005 almost certainly wasn't crafted by al-Qaeda or a similar group. The IRIS blog has a series of links which I personally believe fails to prove that the riots were planned by radical Muslims, but also demonstrates the heightened sense of Muslim identity felt in the cités.

Back in November 2005, Dan Darling linked to this remarkable analysis of Islam in France (written in May 2004). The author, Jean-Yves Camus, noted:

It is to be noted that so far, among those arrested for anti-Jewish acts, no one belongs to an established Moslem fundamentalist or Islamist group, a fact which corroborates our own findings when attending the pro-Palestine and anti-war demonstrations, in which the most stridently anti-Jewish slogans are uttered either by supporters of Arab pan-nationalism, or by non-Moslem activists of the Palestinian cause.

While going on to show that most of the antisemitic attacks were committed by Muslims, Camus also makes this point:

Although the wave of anti-Semitic incidents, which took place here since the beginning of the Intifada Al Aqsa, marked an all-time high since the Second World War—and although many of the identified perpetrators are Moslems—the overwhelming majority of the community rejects violence, even among the fundamentalists.

France, and to varying extents most of Western Europe, have two problems when considering potential threats from their Islamic communities. The first is the obvious one, in the form of al-Qaeda, its affiliates and imitators carrying out terrorist attacks, while Muslim Brotherhood and aligned groups wage war on Western culture. The second is the violent, quasi-Muslim culture prevalent in the cités outlined above.

To make matters worse, these two different cultures feed off of each other. As mentioned above, radical imams are converting criminals both in and outside prisons across Europe (not to mention the United States). Estimates at the number of Europeans converting to Islam vary (IslamOnline suggests 100,000 in France alone), but there are no statistics on the number of Muslims who have adopted Salafi or other radical Islamic lifestyles.

So while Islamic radicals are encouraged to proselytize due to the areligious lifestyles of so many Muslim youth, the same youths commit acts of violence and urban terrorism based in part on a violent Islamic supremacism. It may be weak on doctrine, but - in terms of the danger posed to France - it is made up for by the ready embrace of Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as cultural icons.

Interestingly, the Danish cartoons have failed to ignite much of a stir in France, which has been spared the violent outbursts you might have expected if there were really an a largezealous Islamic community beholden to Salafism. There isn't a single radical Islamic group that hasn't come out with a statement, usually accompanied by a threat, due to the cartoons.

The only public protest I found to have taken place in France was composed of 1,000 people in Paris. No Pasaran's translation:

The procession runs from Nation to Bastille and lasts almost 4 hours. When it is all over, the Paris police admit that they do not know who organized the spontaneous mass demonstration (advance notices are normally required for all manifs).

Given how obviously the offensive mounted by radical Muslim states and groups was organised, if the individuals who organised the October-November riots were really jihadis of the sort we're used to, it wouldn't just be French flags burning.

But are they jihadists nonetheless?

No, but.

No. To my knowledge, there were no claims of responsibility or even praise from any terror group. The only Islamist political comment from the cités was this one:

A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out.

"All we demand is to be left alone," said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local "emirs" engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

While there is an element of truth in describing the jihadism practiced by al-Qaeda, et al, as 'nihilism', the groups often release explanations by imams as to how the butchering of innocents is Islamic. As far as I know, there has been no such explanation from the rioters, and the Barbarians' reading of the Koran down the phone to Halimi's family is about as close it gets to the sorts of religious explanations released by al-Qaeda.

That's how I'd answer comparisons between the fish-and-chips-loving, cricket-playing, fluent-English speaking 7/7 bombers and the cité culture.

Is this splitting hairs? In terms of fighting terrorism, no. It is well-established that the cités are fertile ground for radical Muslims to recruit more 'martyrs', so understanding the thinking of its inhabitants is important. And if a strategic relationship were to develop between Islamic extremists and the criminal leaders in the cités, understanding the dynamics of that would also be helpful.

But, for the rest of us, what difference does it make whether these guys are good Muslims? That's not rhetorical, by the way. I'm interested in what people have to say on that.

This may well be academic, but the problems are very real, and unless the French have some new ideas up their sleeve, it will only get worse. In Clichy-sous-Bois, the 'suburb' where last autumn's rioting started, 50% of the population is under 25'm+loving+it.

The Clichy-sous-Bois council have a few ideas:

• linking the town to the rest of Paris by train

• build a police station within the town

• an urban renewal project

And there are more along those lines. The website confirms that the French government has agreed to build a police station in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The page with the council's ideas include what reads to me like a veiled threat:

The origin of the violence is related to the désespérance inhabitants of our cities and we cannot be satisfied, as a return to a state of calm, d’un return to the former situation.

Intentional or not, that comment is accurate. Unless France makes a real effort to integrate the cités, they will be dealing with an insurrection while they're trying to combat Islamic terrorism. Worst case scenario, al-Qaeda strikes some sort of an accord with the criminal lords who run the 'suburbs'.

That, I suppose, is where this fits in with these heated times.

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It's not all that surprising. While the political and media classes of the two nations may be embittered at one another, the spooks and the lower-level diplomats have a good working relationship. Read between the lines of the reports on pre-Iraq War intelligence, and you'll see, for instance, how helpful France was in discovering Saddam's uranium overtures to Niger and alerting the U.S. agencies (which promptly screwed the pooch).

Look, we can work with France. So long as the U.N. remains, and it's not going anywhere, we have to work with France. It's the difficult but indispensible team member. It is one of the few nations left willing to use force, when it suits it to do so; more importantly, it has contacts around the world that America is too isolated, or too lazy, to cultivate.

I think we've mostly played them wrong for the past two generations. France doesn't ask that much: she asks that you treat her like a serious figure, and that you say it like you mean it.

The whole modern (post-1944) history of France is incomprehensible without reference to honor, specifically to the French need to maintain the fiction that their country remains in the first tier of world powers. And this is understandable; to accept demotion would be an irrecoverable slight to honor and a consequent reduction in France's power to protect itself, or influence world affairs.

France will in one moment taunt the United States, and the next turn around and waggle its nuclear fig leaf in the direction of the Tehran mullahs. As de Gaulle once put it, "France cannot be France without grandeur." What but honor, and fear of losing it, is at the root of that? "The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority," John C. Calhoun once wrote. De Gaulle, if he had read that, would have nodded in agreement.

Pricking the French ego may be amusing for a while, but where does it get us in terms of our world goals? Suffering the snubs of their insufferable media-philosophes may be grating, but if that's the price of their cooperation, I'll take it.

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Consider: After the first few days of rioting, the French press had hardly begun to cover the violence, and none of the major dailies – Le Monde, Le Figaro or Libération – had given serious first page treatment (in particular, above the fold) to events that were of clear social, political and historical importance from the outset. All three papers were far too busy covering the allegations of secret CIA detention centers, first revealed in the Washington Post, and the continuing public transportation strike in Marseille. Both of these topics – the CIA and the labor strikes – fit in neatly with a French establishment obsession with defense of the "modèle français" – in both economic policy as well as foreign policy – that has dominated the recent political debate (and thus the establishment media debate) in the recent past, most notably in connection with economic reform proposals and the European constitution.

By contrast, race riots by unassimilated minorities do not fit well with the terms on which the defense of the French model as the centerpiece of virtually all recent French policy debate has been conducted, in particular the supposition that there is a universal societal interest in defending the entrenched rights of major labor unions, big state controlled companies, protected public service sector employees, early retirees with fat severance packages, as well as the interests of all of the other soon-to-retire boomers whose worldview defines the current establishment in power , and who have delusions of living off future generations (including presumably "immigrants") while continuing to point their fingers at the capitalists, imperialist Americans, occupying Jews, etc. as the cause of all of the world's ills.

By the fourth day of riots, the local French media establishment were devoting a great part of their "coverage" to attacking foreign (in particular American) media for supposedly exaggerating the gravity of the events in France: the main private broadcast channel TF1 (and its cable affiliate LCI) attacked CNN for comparisons with the 1992 L.A. riots – how ridiculous! Barely a hundred cars had been torched (we are now counting towards 8,000). The other major networks and newspapers were busy attacking the U.S. print media as well as Fox News for supposed hyperbole and unjustified meddling. More recently, the French Minister of Tourism has been making the rounds on French television and radio shows to discuss the "unwarranted" misrepresentation of the French disturbances by foreign – in particular American – media with the supposed aim of maliciously wooing away foreign tourists by slandering La République.

This concern of the French media for the protection of the national image – unmatched in any other major Western democracy – corresponds to both the recent practice of the French media as well as a long-term pattern dating back to the post-WWII "Vichy Syndrome". What characterizes this syndrome is a concerted effort on the part of the major social and political institutions – government, the main political parties, the press, academia –to ignore, deny, downplay, rationalize or excuse reprehensible behaviour, often collective, that reflects poorly on the Nation. The syndrome supposes a tacit agreement between all of these social actors, with the active complicity of a pliant population, aimed at protecting a national image at the expense of the truth or rectification of past injustices. (I have written about these relationships in the past in relation to French foreign policy generally.)

Some recent examples:

Even as of this date, the French media has devoted more space to the supposed injustices to African Americans revealed by "Katrina" – a natural disaster in a foreign country – as the riots in its own back yard.

In September and October, as numerous present and former French government officials and diplomats were being charged with receiving oil allocations in the Oil-For-Food scandal, the major papers had not publish a lead article on the scandal, and devoted as much attention to Bush's woes with Harriet Miers' nomination (completely misrepresented, by the way, in the French press).

Last month, as hundreds of French companies were revealed in the Volcker Report to have paid bribes to the Iraqi regime, the French media was paying more attention to charges against the U.S. Vice President's chief of staff for "illegally exposing" a CIA agent in violation of U.S. national security laws (again reflecting the distortions in the French establishment presentation). As dozens of Chirac's cronies in the governing party were being sentenced to prison terms earlier this month for corruption – including Chirac's former chief of staff – this received scant coverage in the French media, which were again far more concerned with Katrina, Lewis Libby, and George Bush's other woes.

A few days ago was the anniversary of the massacre by the French army of over a dozen unarmed civilians assembled in front of the Hotel Ivoire in Abidjan. This massacre had followed other incidents in which the French army gunned down unarmed Ivory Coast civilians. Even though these incidents were captured by live television cameras, none of the footage was broadcast on French TV. As a result, the French citizenry is blissfully ignorant of these event. By contrast, U.S. malfeasance at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has received several hundred times more coverage in Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération and French television news channels. As a result, the French citizenry is entirely ignorant of these events. (It should also be noted that several French policeman caught on film this week mercilessly beating defenseless adolescents in the banlieux have been detained and charged. Unlike in the case of Rodney King or the fabricated incident of Mohammed Al-Dura, you will never see this tape on French TV.)

In April of this year, Amnesty International published a damning report criticizing the French police for its abusive treatment of Arab and African minorities, including murder and torture. This report received virtually no coverage in the French press, left, right or center. Too damaging to the national image. Again, the plight of black victims of hurricane Katrina or the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib or the horrors of Guantanamo have received several hundred times more coverage in France. The same applies to recent reports describing French prison conditions as among the worst in Europe: nary a word in the local French press. Again, the French citizenry is completely in the dark about these reports.

The role of the press as an key participant in what is described as the Vichy Syndrome goes much further in explaining the initial hesitation, the subsequent defensiveness, and now the outright censorship of the French media in covering the current ethnic unrest.

For reasons that I will come back to in a later piece, this does not bode well for France's ability to deal with the social, political, security and economic problem of assimilation of its ethnic underclass without effective political representation within the terms of the current framework of debate – shared by all of the political parties, from the Communists and Socialists to the Gaullists and rightist Nationalists – centered around the idea of a unique French "modèle social" in which there is no room for the demands of that underclass.

Post Script: The best synopsis I have read on the events in France is John Vinocur's recent article in the International Herald Tribune.

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