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City-Journal – Jew Tortured, Times Fiddles: Paper puts peaceful imam on page one.

Alas, despite honorable sympathies for victims in Uganda, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the same evasions and willful myopia still afflict the [New York Times] when it comes to crimes against Jews. On January 21st of this year, for example, a gang of mostly Islamic youths abducted a 23-year-old cell phone salesman, Ilan Halimi, a French Jew. They held him prisoner in the rundown Paris suburb of Bagneux, a Muslim ghetto. From time to time neighbors entered the apartment where the young man was captive, either to watch him being tortured or to participate in his mutilation. Many in the area knew of the crime; no one said a word to the gendarmes.

Sporadically, Halimi’s family got calls demanding a high ransom. They could not make the payment. A voice on the phone barked, “Then go to the synagogue and get it.” Three weeks later, passers-by found Halimi slumped near a train station, naked, his ears and fingers amputated, his body covered with burns and stab wounds and eaten away with acid to remove all traces of the perpetrators’ DNA. He died en route to the hospital.

At first, the French government refused to recognize the mutilation-murder as a hate crime. Giving an excellent imitation of a foreign minister looking over his shoulder at some 5 million French Muslims, Dominique de Villepin reportedly reprimanded Justice Minister Pascal Clément, who made the mistake of quoting one of the accused kidnappers: Halimi had been abducted “because he was Jewish and Jews are rich.”

But after a large outcry from horrified and frightened Jewish groups, and from other French citizens concerned with justice, French officials went into reverse gear. … The story wound up all over the European papers: Agence France-Presse mentioned it on February 17th; so did the London Times. The Net and the blogs did not neglect the horror and its aftermath.

But readers would have difficulty finding any mention of Halibi in the Times. The paper first mentioned the story, briefly, on February 23rd, a full ten days after the victim’s death. It did not run a lengthy piece until March 5, when an account (on page four) went over the ground long trod days before by competing reporters. Yet over the same period, the Times found a lot of space—on page one—for a deeply sympathetic, cloyingly sentimental three-part series on a Brooklyn imam, Sheik Rada Shata, and his congregation of young people in search of love and understanding.