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.