[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Ilan Halimi was the young Jewish man in France who was kidnapped by a gang of Muslims who, over a period of three weeks in 2006, tortured him and demanded a ransom from his family — because they thought “all Jews are rich.” Halimi’s family was not, and Ilan, who lived with his divorced mother and two sisters, had a modest job in a phone store. His mother could not satisfy the kidnappers’ demands. When he was finally found, handcuffed and gagged by some railway tracks, he had been so severely tortured that he died on the way to the hospital. “Tunisian Brothers to Face Trial for Cutting Down Olive Tree Honoring Murdered Jew Ilan Halimi in France,” by Ailin Vilches Arguello, Algemeiner, August 29, 2025:
Two Tunisian twin brothers have been arrested in France after allegedly cutting down an olive tree that had been planted to honor Ilan Halimi, a young French Jewish man tortured to death nearly a decade ago.
“Allegedly”? For god’s sake, the Tunisian twins’ DNA was found on watermelon slices they had left at the base of the tree they cut down.
According to the Bobigny prosecutor’s office, two 19-year-old undocumented men with prior convictions for theft and violence were arrested for vandalizing Halimi’s memorial in the northern Paris suburb of Épinay-sur-Seine.
Note that the Tunisians were both “undocumented” — a mild way of saying they were in France illegally. But they had not been deported, not even after they had been convicted for several crimes, both of theft and of violent assault. Why were they still in France? That’s what the French public deserves to be told by its pusillanimous government. What conceivable reason was there to let them stay in France? Or did the government simply not want to start deporting Muslim criminals, for fear of the Muslim reaction?
Both brothers appeared in criminal court on Wednesday and were remanded in custody pending their trial, scheduled for Oct. 22.
They will face trial on charges of “aggravated destruction of property” and “desecration of a monument dedicated to the memory of the dead on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion,” offenses that, according to prosecutors, carry a sentence of up to two years in prison.
“Two years”? For such profanation of the dead? They cut down the tree that had been planted in tribute to the martyred Halimi, murdered by people very much like themselves — Muslims who were happy to kill a Jew. Does two years sound right to you?
Both suspects were taken into custody around noon on Monday while returning to the crime scene, French media reported.
They were picked up just as they were returning to the scene of their crime. Apparently they were so pleased with their ghoulish handiwork that they wanted to see it again. It was at that point that they were taken into custody.
Investigators tracked them down after discovering two slices of watermelon left by the perpetrators at the base of the olive tree, which contained their DNA.
Halimi was abducted, held captive, and tortured in January 2006 by a gang of about 20 people in a low-income housing estate in the Paris suburb of Bagneux.
A gang of 20 torturers, 20 murderers, not one of whom tried to stop the torture, not a single one who left in disgust, or afterwards ever expressed the slightest remorse.
Three weeks later, Halimi was found in Essonne, south of Paris, naked, gagged, and handcuffed, with clear signs of torture and burns. The 23-year-old died on the way to the hospital.
In 2011, an olive tree was planted in Halimi’s memory. Earlier this month, the memorial was found felled — probably with a chainsaw — in the northern Paris suburb of Epinay-sur-Seine.
Halimi’s memory has faced attacks before, with two other trees planted in his honor vandalized in 2019 in Essonne, where he was found dying near a railway track….
So this piles horror upon horror: first, the three weeks of torture and Halimi’s death itself; then twice before, trees planted in his memory had been cut down; and finally, this latest chainsaw destruction of the third tree planted in Ilan Halimi’s memory. And do you doubt that without a police guard, the next tree planted will also be cut down, by other Muslims, full of the same hate for Jews as the Tunisian twins, and so will the next after that, and the next…
After the attack, French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the incident, vowing that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.
Macron’s expression of outrage rings hollow. Why did his government, during the last eight years, make no move to deport the Tunisian twins? And Macron, we should remember, is the Western leader who has led the way for the recognition, by countries in the Western world, of a “state of Palestine” that if created, would surely leave the Jewish state as vulnerable to attack by Muslims as was Ilan Halimi.
Macron claims to want a “just and lasting peace.” And that is why he is prepared to have Israel surrender territory — Judea and Samaria — where Jews have lived for the past 3500 years. He is wiling to ignore — or does he not know about? — the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, which assigned all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to the future Jewish state. Is Macron unaware of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which recognized Israel’s right to retain territory won in the Six-Day War that it needed in order to have “secure and defensible borders”? Does Macron not see the link, as Ilan Halimi’s sister does, between Macron’s embrace of the Palestinians and the increase in antisemitism in France, and the feelings of insecurity and dread now felt by many, possibly most, French Jews?
No, he does not. He thinks there is nothing wrong with forcing tiny embattled Israel to be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines, with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, leaving the country hopelessly vulnerable to an invasion from the east, that could cut the country in two within hours. He sees nothing wrong, this Frenchman so sure of himself, in forcing the tiny Jewish state made tinier still in order to create a 23rd Arab state, when those 22 Arab states already contain five hundred times the territory of Israel.
Plant another tree in honor of Ilan Halimi, at the same place, but this time with an iron fence several feet high around its base, with security cameras and a round-the-clock security detail. The honor of France demands it. The Jews of France need it. And stop this insensate refusal to deport convicted Muslim criminals back to their wretched countries of origin.