(JEWISH GROUP) If an antisemite chops down a memorial tree in Paris, how do we know it makes a sound?

Ilan Halimi, a young man who worked at a Paris boutique selling cell phones, was kidnapped nearly 20 years ago, on Jan. 20, 2006, by a crime ring calling itself the “Gang of Barbarians,” led by a thug named Youssuf Fofana, the son of immigrants from the Ivory Coast.

Shackled and naked, Halimi was held captive in the Paris suburb of Bagneux. For more than three weeks, Fofana and his crew tortured their captive, repeatedly beating and lacerating his body with knife cuts and burning his face with cigarettes while they demanded a ransom of 450,000 euros from his family. On Feb. 13, when the ransom still had not materialized, Fofana abandoned the dying Halimi near a train track. He was found hours later and died while being transported to a hospital.

How could the family of this young man, who sold cell phones for his meager living, scrape together this amount? For Fofana, the answer was simple. When he was asked to identify himself at his subsequent trial, Fofana replied, “I am Arab, African, Islamist, Salafist.” It is hardly worth the effort to wonder what that jumble of labels meant to him. This is especially true because these various labels obscure a simple fact: First and foremost, Fofana was an antisemite who, in his fevered and warped imagination, believed all Jews, by virtue of being Jewish, were rich.

The story of this horrifying affair came back to me last week because of a fait divers. This is the French phrase for an incident, minor and ordinary, that is usually tucked into the back pages of a newspaper. Last Friday, one such fait divers could be found in the Agence France Presse, which reported that an olive tree planted in a public garden in the suburb of Épinay-sur-Seine had been cut down. The tree had been planted in 2011 to honor the life of Ilan Halimi.

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