Earlier today, tens of thousands of Frenchmen, including prominent politicians of all stripes, participated in demonstrations in Paris and other cities commemorating the murder of Ilan Halimi and demonstrating against anti-Semitism. The crowd in Paris was estimated at 33,000 by police; other estimates were higher:

The next two photos are also from the Paris demonstration:

This one is from Marseilles, where the demonstration also appears to have been sizable:

The Associated Press has a report on the Paris demonstration. The account of the demonstration is straightforward, but then we have this:

The march was in memory of a 23- year-old cellphone salesman, Ilan Halimi, who was kidnapped on Jan. 21 and allegedly tortured by a gang in the southern Paris suburb of Bagneux.

What is the point of that completely gratuitous "allegedly"? The very next sentence says:

He was found naked, handcuffed and covered with burn marks on Feb. 13 near some railroad tracks south of Paris.

And this kind of thing is a staple of reporting on Halimi's murder:

It remains unclear whether anti- Semitism was the motive for the grisly killing, which may have been part of an extortion racket.   Sarkozy said last Tuesday that Halimi's attackers had been primarily motivated by greed.

It's hard to excuse this level of obtuseness. I don't doubt that Halimi's murderers wanted money. The fact that they abducted him might have been "primarily motivated by greed." But greed doesn't explain anything that they did over the ensuing three weeks. Greed doesn't explain why Halimi was tortured to death. The world wasn't shocked by this crime because of the abduction; it was shocked by what followed. So I wish the media would stop trying to tell us that the vicious animals who murdered Ilan Halimi were just hoping to get rich.

Posted by John at 06:03 PM  |    |