Last modified on August 22, 2025, at 15:30

Antisemitic Murder of Ilan Halimi

The Antisemitic Murder of Ilan Halimi (Hebrew: אילן חלימי)

In 2006, Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French French Jew of Moroccan descent, was brutally kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in an appalling act of antisemitic violence that shocked France and the world. On January 21, Halimi was lured and abducted by a gang calling themselves the "Gang of Barbarians"—a group, mostly of Muslims, motivated by antisemitic hatred and the dangerous stereotype that "all Jews [supposedly] have money."

Over the course of three horrific weeks, Ilan was held captive in a Paris suburb, where he was systematically tortured and abused. Despite his family's modest means, the kidnappers demanded exorbitant ransoms, driven not by logic, but by deep-seated antisemitic beliefs. French authorities later confirmed that the gang had specifically targeted Halimi because he was Jewish.

Ilan Halimi ultimately succumbed to his injuries on February 13, 2006, shortly after he was found naked and handcuffed near railroad tracks. His murder became a rallying point against antisemitism in France and across Europe. It exposed the persistent and violent antisemitic undercurrents that continue to threaten Jewish communities in the 21st century.

The case remains a painful reminder of the deadly consequences of hate and the urgent need to combat antisemitism in all its forms.

In August 2025, as part of "pro palestine activism" by Arabs, the olive tree planted on to Halimi's memory was cut down. “Cutting down the olive tree that pays tribute to Ilan Halimi is an attempt to kill him a second time,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote.

The Murder of Ilan Halimi: France’s Shameful Wake-Up Call to Islamic Antisemitism

In 2006, Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew, became the victim of one of the most horrifying antisemitic crimes in modern French history—abducted, tortured, and murdered by a jihadist-inspired gang operating in the Paris suburbs. His murder should have shaken the nation and the world into recognizing the brutal convergence of Islamic radicalism and antisemitism, but instead, it was met with denial, whitewashing, and cowardice from many French authorities and institutions.


A Premeditated Anti-Jewish Plot

The gang that killed Ilan Halimi called themselves “The Barbarians”—an apt name for their savagery. Led by Youssouf Fofana, a radicalized Muslim of Ivorian descent who openly proclaimed allegiance to Salafist jihadist ideology, the gang believed in a grotesque antisemitic stereotype: “All Jews are rich.” That stereotype was their justification for selecting Halimi, a modest working-class Jewish man of North African descent, as a kidnap target.

Fofana’s hatred was visceral, personal, and ideological. He recruited teenagers and young adults of various ethnic backgrounds, manipulated a vulnerable girl named Sorour Arbabzadeh to act as bait, and specifically targeted Jews for extortion and harm. He left a trail of antisemitic threats to Jewish doctors, public figures, and potential victims—many of whom the authorities failed to protect.


Islamic Extremism at the Core

Throughout the ordeal, Halimi’s captors recited Quranic verses and screamed antisemitic slurs during ransom calls. Fofana referred to himself as the “Arab, armed African rebellion Salafist barbarian army” and chillingly declared he was “born the day Ilan died.” These were not isolated criminal acts; they were acts of jihad—carried out by individuals inspired by the ideology behind ISIS, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

French police originally refused to classify the kidnapping as antisemitic, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Despite repeated references to Halimi being a “dirty [sic] Jew,” despite Quranic recitations during torture, and despite the gang’s clear targeting of Jewish victims in earlier failed attempts, authorities treated the case as “ordinary criminal extortion.” That negligence was deadly.

Police found propaganda published by the Palestinian Charity Committee at the home of one of the suspects. The organization is a front group for Palestinian terrorists and that in August 2003 the United States government froze the organization’s U.S. bank accounts, accusing it of links with Hamas.


The Tragic Outcome and Institutional Failure

Ilan Halimi was held in a filthy basement in the suburb of Bagneux for 24 days, where he was burned with cigarettes and acid, mutilated, and finally set on fire before being dumped near a train track. He died shortly after being found—his body so ravaged by abuse that his mother was only informed of his death via the newspaper.

More tragically, it later emerged that over 50 people—gang members, neighbors, even parents—knew of the crime. No one called the police. Why? Because antisemitism in these Muslim-majority suburbs is normalized, tolerated, and encouraged.


Deliberate Whitewashing by Institutions

Even after the truth came out, France’s elite institutions and many Jewish advocacy groups refused to fully confront the Islamic ideological motive behind the crime. Public memorials sanitized the facts. Statements from the European Jewish Congress, CRIF, and even the ADL omitted any mention of radical Islam. This willful blindness is more than an oversight—it is a betrayal.

The refusal to speak truthfully about Islamic antisemitism—even in the face of undeniable jihadist influence—is what enables future attacks. And they came: Toulouse (2012), HyperCacher (2015), the brutal murder of Sarah Halimi (2017)—all carried out by Muslim extremists, all fueled by the same ideology that murdered Ilan.


The Real “Root Causes”

Excuses made for this violence—“alienation,” “integration failure,” or “economic hardship”—are moral evasions. The real driver is Islamic antisemitism, jihadist indoctrination, and the incitement of hatred against Jews in mosques, media, and online spaces. As Simone Rodan-Benzaquen noted, this includes radical imams, Hamas-linked charities, satellite channels, and propaganda masquerading as “pro-Palestinian activism.”


Conclusion: No Justice Without Truth

Ilan Halimi’s murder was not just a crime—it was a modern-day blood libel, carried out by Islamic extremists in the heart of Europe. It stands as a warning to Jews everywhere: silence and appeasement are not strategies for survival.

France—and the West—will never defeat antisemitism until they confront the truth: that jihadist ideology, left unchecked, seeks not coexistence but domination, and that Jew-hatred is central to its mission.

Ilan Halimi’s memory must not be whitewashed. It must be a rallying cry: to speak truth, demand justice, and protect Jewish life at all costs.

Notes

The story of Ilan Halimi’s murder at the hands of a terrorist gang of French Muslims brings to the surface the various pathologies now converging to make the prospect of annihilating all Jews seem possible to our enemies. First, there are the murderers who took such apparent pleasure and felt such pride in the fact that for 20 days they tortured their Jewish hostage to death.

This makes sense. Anti-Semitism in the Muslim-dominated suburbs of Paris and other French cities is all-encompassing. As Nidra Poller related in the Feb. 23 Wall Street Journal, “One of the most troubling aspects of this affair is the probable involvement of relatives and neighbors, beyond the immediate circle of the gang [of kidnappers], who were told about the Jewish hostage and dropped in to participate in the torture.”

It appears that Ilan Halimi’s murderers had some connection to Hamas. On Tuesday, Feb. 21, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that police found propaganda published by the Palestinian Charity Committee at the home of one of the suspects. The European Jewish Press reported that Israel has alleged that the organization is a front group for Palestinian terrorists and that in August 2003 the United States government froze the organization’s U.S. bank accounts, accusing it of links with Hamas.

by Marc Weitzmann September 02, 2014

The trap that would lead to the abduction, torture, and murder of Ilan Halimi was set in the winter of 2006 on Boulevard Voltaire in Paris, a few blocks from where I live. In the months prior, kids from one of the toughest cités, Bagneux—who called themselves, Clockwork Orange-style, “the gang of the Barbarians”—had repeatedly tried to abduct people for ransom. Led by a 27-year-old first offender named Youssouf Fofana, the fifth child of Ivory Cost migrants, the gang members were between 16 to 26 years old and ethnically diverse. They set up their prospective victims in a particular way: A girl, selected by Fofana, would get in touch with some man for a date and ask him to bring her back into the suburb after their appointment. As a diversion for the cops, the youngest members of the gang would set fire to a car, while the others would jump on the potential victim.

So far, though, their method had spectacularly failed: All the targets, most of whom had Jewish names, had either foreseen the trap or escaped. In one almost successful attempt—which ended after the gang apparently panicked—the victim, Mickaël D., was found handcuffed and swimming in his own blood and told the police that his aggressors had called him “ki#e” and “dirty [sic] Jew.” Fofana had also tried to blackmail doctors by sending his pawns to ask for fraudulent sick leave. All those doctors were also Jews. And he had sent anonymous threat letters or Molotov cocktails to public figures—the president of Doctors Without Borders, Rony Brauman; Jérôme Clément, director of the French cultural channel Arte; lawyer Joseph Cohen-Saban among others, all of whom were Jewish. All these plots had failed, too.

But persistence is the key to success. In January 2006, under the assumption that had driven Fofana from the start, and that he repeatedly stated at his trial three years later—namely, that “all Jews are rich”—he and some of his gang started to pace the Boulevard Voltaire, looking for “Jewish stores.”

It came down to “Emma the bait,” a k a Yalda, to pick up the victim. The daughter of an Iranian nurse and political refugee, Sorour Arbabzadeh was 17, beautiful, and fleshy. Although obviously smart, she also was still in the 10th grade. In France since 1999, after the death of her father—a violent man, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, who had married her mother by force and reportedly beat Sorour during most of her childhood—she was raped two years later, at 14, by three teenagers of the cité. (A complaint filed by the mother against the boys at the time was soon withdrawn, possibly under pressure of the neighborhood.) The battalion of juvenile court judges, trained caregivers, and social workers who’d followed the girl since then had been unable to prevent her from multiple suicidal attempts.

Sorour, the trial showed, was brought into the gang by Tiffen, a semi-homeless young woman of 20, who was born in Brittany to a Catholic family and then converted to Islam at 15. Out of her devotion to Fofana, Tiffen had found some targets for the kidnappings in the cité for him—some of them among her own friends—but she lacked confidence to play the vamp part and had suggested Sorour instead. In a blink, Fofana was convinced. “I can do marvels with you,” he is reported to have said to Sorour the minute they met....

It soon emerged that the total of 29 defendants was, in fact, a low number. If one added the friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, and sometimes parents of the accused, the total figure of the people who had known, as a journalist noticed, was closer to 50. Given the national attention to the case, just one anonymous phone call to the police during those fatal three weeks would’ve been enough to stop everything...

Youssouf Fofana’s obsessive anti-Jewish hatred was as genuine as it was unexplainable. His parents, his brother, who appeared as witnesses, seemed as flabbergasted by it as anyone else.


March 2, 2016

Last week marked the 10th anniversary of the gruesome killing of Ilan Halimi. All over France, pictures of a good-looking and happy 23-year-old covered the front pages of Jewish publications. A number of large-circulation newspapers in the French capital followed suit and dedicated a page or two to the memory of the first victim of a new type of violence. Events and memorials, some distinguished by the presence of high government officials such as the interior minister, were held to commemorate his murder. The movie “24 Days,” which chronicles his abduction and brutal end, was screened free of charge for the benefit of those unfamiliar with Halimi’s story. After 10 years, the significance of his murder is only now obvious to everyone. Or, I should say, everyone in France.

It started on Jan. 20, 2006, when a pretty, young, Iranian-born woman entered the phone shop where Halimi worked. She wore a necklace bearing the word “Yalda,” a Persian name that also happens to have a Hebrew meaning. Did Halimi take her to be Jewish? We will never know. She pretended to be shopping for a cellphone and asked Halimi many questions about his merchandise, made small talk, smiled, batted her eyes and, finally, suggested they should get coffee some time. She left with Halimi’s phone number.

That night, after Halimi and his family had concluded their Shabbat dinner around 9 p.m., his phone rang. It was Yalda. She asked him to meet up at a popular location and she suggested he bring his car. She then directed him to a quiet alley in a deserted neighborhood where she pretended she lived. She stopped in front of a door in the middle of a dark alley and fumbled in her bag, as if she were looking for her keys, killing time. Three men arrived. Halimi was captured. It was a trap.

In reality, the girl’s name was not Yalda, but Sorour Arbabzadeh. She was not shopping for phones or men; she was there on a mission. She had been ordered to seduce a Jewish guy and facilitate his abduction for her gang, Les Barbares (the Barbarians). The chief gangster, Parisian Youssef Fofana, who was born to immigrants from the Ivory Coast, was her sugar daddy. He had commissioned her for this job. Arbabzadeh was promised 5,000 euros and a piece of heaven in the afterlife if she could trap a Jew. And so she did.

Halimi’s family learned of the situation the next day. They received an email with a photo of him in bondage. They received phone calls — ghastly, dreadful phone calls — and, somewhere between the anti-Semitic profanity and verses of the Quran, they were conveyed the message that to see their son alive again, they should pay his keepers a ransom of 450,000 euros. The family did not have that kind of money. Going to the police was the only solution they could think of. This is when a second tragedy began.

“Madam,” an officer asked as the investigation began in the Halimi family’s living room, “is your son involved with drugs?” Halimi’s mother couldn’t believe it. “Of course not!” she replied. The family recounted the anti-Semitic nature of the messages they had received. They assured the investigators that Halimi would not have been tangled up in anything remotely sinister.

But the police insisted on continuing their investigation as if it were a common crime. The family was ordered not to take any more calls from the kidnappers. The police explained: “We do not want the kidnappers to be emboldened by observing the family’s agony and despair.” Trusting the police and their competence was the family’s only hope. Law enforcement officials, as well as the interior minister at the time, assumed that the kidnappers would not harm the merchandise they wanted to trade for ransom money, and, as a result, they did not believe Halimi was in real danger. They assumed there was little likelihood that the kidnappers would live up to their word and hurt Halimi.

This might have been the case had it not been for the anti-Semitic and religious component of the situation. Consequently, the kidnapping was not publicized. There were no public calls for information, no hotlines to dial. No sketches of the kidnappers appeared in the newspapers or on television. Complete silence. When the mutilated, charred, stabbed, half-alive body of Halimi showed up near a railway 24 days after his kidnapping, it was too late. Halimi would die on his way to the hospital. His mother would find out the morning after by reading the newspaper. The police had failed...


In 2006, Ilan Halimi was kidnapped and tortured to death by a violent group known as the “Gang of Barbarians.” Ellie Krasne. March 5, 2023 / JNS.

Feb. 13, 2023 marked the anniversary of Ilan Halimi’s death. Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew, was captured, tortured and held for ransom by a French gang appropriately named The Barbarians, led by a self-professed Islamic radical.

As a Jew living in Paris, I have been disappointed by the memorials and attempts to honor the victim of one of France’s most vicious antisemitic hate crimes, as they all ignore the role radical Islam played in Halimi’s murder.

In Jan. 2006, Halimi was kidnapped and burned with cigarettes and acid while his captors repeatedly called his family, read Quranic verses and demanded a 450,000 euro ransom.

The gang members later confessed that they believed “all Jews to be rich,” which is why they demanded the money. Little did they know that Halimi lived in the same suburbs as some of his captors and, like many French Jews, belonged to a working-class family of North African Jews.

After three weeks of torture, Halimi’s captors burned him alive and dumped his body on a roadside. He was found alive, with his body disfigured by acid burns, an ear and toe cut off and his genitals mutilated. Halimi died in the hospital on Feb. 13, 2006.

The French authorities initially neglected to explore the antisemitic nature of the crime, but after a three-week search, they finally caught the gang’s leader, Youssef Fofana.

When the case went to trial, Fofana wore a t-shirt that said, “Allahu Akbar” and when asked to state his identity, said, “My name is Arab, armed African rebellion Salafist barbarian army, and I was born on Feb. 13, 2006 in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.” In other words, Fofana boasted of his allegiance to Salafism, a political-religious movement within Islam that seeks to establish a global caliphate. It is the ideology behind the antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS. Fofana was also saying that he was “born” the moment Ilan Halimi died.

Fofana was sentenced to life in prison and the other gang members to 12-15 years. But violent antisemitic attacks have not slowed down since.

In 2012, a Jewish preschool in Toulouse was the target of a series of Islamic terror attacks. In 2015, Amedy Coulibaly, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, murdered four innocent Jews in the kosher supermarket HyperCacher. In 2017, Sarah Halimi (no relation to Ilan Halimi), an elderly doctor, was shoved off a balcony while her murderer shouted “Allahu Akbar.”

To be clear, Muslims are not solely responsible for French antisemitism, nor is every Muslim an antisemite. However, radical Islam’s role in French antisemitism must not be overlooked. Yet many organizations do just that.

French and American organizations that purport to advocate for Jews seem to shy away from confronting the radical Islamic theology behind these attacks, particularly when commemorating Ilan Halimi’s murder.

For example, to mark the anniversary of Halimi’s death, the European Jewish Congress tweeted, “Today marks 17 years since the horrific murder of 23-year-old French Jew, Ilan Halimi. He was tortured for three weeks and ultimately killed simply for being Jewish. May his memory be a blessing.”

The tweet omitted the fact that his killers were Islamic extremists, even though Islamic antisemitism was clearly a significant factor in Halimi’s murder.

Similarly, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France tweeted, “17 years later, we remember. Abducted and tortured for more than three weeks, Ilan Halimi was found on February 13, 2006. He died while in the hospital. Murdered for being a Jew, Ilan will forever be remembered.”

Again, no mention of the killers’ allegiance to radical Islam.

Americans are no better. The Anti-Defamation League’s description of Ilan’s mother Ruth Halimi’s book does not mention radical Islam, nor does ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s letter on Aish, a Jewish educational website.

Confronting modern-day antisemitism in France means confronting the ideology behind it. France is home to 450,000 Jews and a growing community of over three million Muslims. Simone Rodan Benzaquen, the American Jewish Committee’s Director in France, wrote in 2017 that Islamic antisemitism in France is a result of a variety of factors, “including manipulation of the Palestinian cause, failure of integration into French society, radical preachers and the funding of mosques, and satellite television stations broadcasting a steady stream of antisemitic discourse.”

Unfortunately, Benzaquen is correct, and other organizations must join her in facing the reality of Islamic antisemitism in France.

Nearly 20 years after Ilan Halimi’s gruesome murder, it is unclear what progress France has made in confronting contemporary antisemitism with intellectual honesty and courage. But as with all problems, the solution begins with telling the truth.

Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli wrote: "Mr. Macron, you have cut down the tree with your own hands and through your actions." By Mathilda Heller, The Jerusalem Post, August 17, 2025.

“Cutting down the olive tree that pays tribute to Ilan Halimi is an attempt to kill him a second time,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Friday after it was revealed that the memorial to the murdered French Jewish man in Épinay-Sur-Seine had been desecrated.

Halimi was 23 years old when he was kidnapped in 2006 by a group called the Gang of Barbarians. The group falsely believed that all Jews are wealthy and demanded large sums from his family. Halimi was tortured in captivity for three weeks, and left naked and handcuffed to a tree on the side of a road with 80% of his body burned. He died in an ambulance en route to the hospital.