Bernard-Henri Lévy

A few days from now, on July 11, the verdict in the trial of the murderers of Ilan Halimi will be rendered.
We will recall, for the record, that Ilan Halimi is the French youth who was kidnapped on January 21, 2006 in the area around Paris, and found on February 13 along some railroad tracks, tortured to death, burned alive, his body like an open sore, thrown there like a dog, dying, and soon thereafter dead.
We will recall, for the record, that France is a country where, like Daniel Pearl in Karachi—yes, like Daniel Pearl, and yes, in Karachi—a man can be openly and publicly in front of an entire neighborhood, held captive, transported from one place to another, starved and fed, dying a slow death, tortured, passed around when the executioners got tired, and then moved again—all over the course of twenty-four days.
We will recall, for the record, that the accomplices of this atrocious act, the janitor of the Bagneux apartment building that lent his boiler room, the young woman modestly nicknamed the bait, the pizza delivery man, the jailer for whom Ilan’s cries made it impossible to smoke in peace, and who, to make him be quiet, put out a burning cigarette butt on his forehead, the others, all the others, had twenty-four days—yes, twenty-four days, an eternity—to be moved by his cries, to bother with his broken, bleeding body, mutilated by knives, to pull themselves together, to break the pact of silence that they had made with a telephone call, one solitary call, to put an end to his Calvary—we will recall, for the record, that none of them had this basic reflex of humanity.
We will recall, for the record, that Youssef Fofana, the leader of the gang, is an anti-Semite of the simplest, the purest, most savage and brutish of the species: the kind that, knowing nothing and not wanting to know anything, not knowing that the Jewish destiny across the ages has first of all meant and often still means humiliation, destitution, and misery, feeds the monstrously stupid cliché—but stupidity, in this kind of matter, is not an attenuating circumstance, but an aggravating one—of the rich Jew, as is said today “rolling in it,” and because of that, become an object of this cold, calculated cruelty that only death could stop.
We will recall, for the record, that there were at the time good souls, not exactly to justify this murder, but to explain it, excuse it, situate it in its context, which was that of the well-known crisis in the Parisian suburbs and of its cortege of other miseries—as if poverty were a reason! As if there were a misery in the world that excused taking hold of a man in order to torment his body and desecrate his face! As if it weren’t an insult to poverty itself to dare make a link, any kind of link, between it and these slaughterhouse boys and girls who strived, over the course of twenty-four days, to humiliate, to mutilate, to brand as an animal, to set on fire, to bleed—ultimately, the most innocent of men, again, because of the simple reason that he was Jewish.
We will recall, for the record, that there were others, unless it was the same ones, in the days that followed the discovery near the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois train station of this tortured, bled out body, in which was left only a small breath of life, to hesitate on the qualification of the act, to speculate learnedly about the true motive and then drone: “Careful! Careful! Villainous crime, yes, but not necessarily a hate crime!”—as if the two didn’t go hand in hand; as if anti-Semitism wasn’t also always of a villainous order; as if Nazism, for example, historical Nazism itself, hadn’t also been, first and foremost, an enterprise of financial extortion, of despoliation, a massive fraud on the European scale!
We will recall, for the record, the number of good apostles, from the ranks of the police, all the way to the pinnacle of judicial hierarchy, and also in the best-intentioned press, who told Jews: “For the good of Jews, yes, for their own good, in order not to cry wolf and find yourself, when the wolf comes, without means like the cicada, we exhort you to be prudent, to exercise semantic restraint, not to beat the drums about the return of the Beast and of Nazism”—as if that weren’t enough, to cry wolf, about this man-lamb with a slit throat! As if we needed to wait, in order to name the Thing, for it to deign to slip into words, codes, and the agreed-upon definitions!
We would have liked to see the public prosecutor, in the mouth of the attorney general, remind everyone of these truths.
We would have liked if he, that is to say society, had been the one to take advantage of the trial to fulfill this duty and, along with us, to turn his back on this bunch of false—and, if we’re not careful, fatal—ideas for the future.
Unfortunately, there was nothing of the sort. And we were only entitled, in the guise of a closing statement, to an exercise in casuistry whose confusion, carefulness, incoherence, and barely disguised embarrassment about this exceptional crime committed in concert surprised observers. As for Ilan’s family, they were stunned. They lost everything. Everything. Even the strength to cry. The only thing left, it should be known, is the humble but firm hope to see justice done. It is time.

Translated from French by Sara Phenix.