No one knows what would have happened if the police had grasped the nature of the criminals. How many hostages have been beheaded by jihadis in recent years? Governments, armies and investigators have been stumped by this new type of violence. Maybe the Barbarians would have murdered Ilan immediately had they sensed the police hot on their trail. Nevertheless, the failure to understand the anti-Semitism behind the crime, and the inexplicable bungling of repeated opportunities to flush out the criminals, locate their hideout, trace communications and connect Ilan's abduction to previous attempts with the same target — Jews — and the same operating method cannot be dismissed. 

In a riveting, heart-rending book published in April, 24 jours, la vérité sur la mort d'Ilan Halimi (24 days, The truth about the death of Ilan Halimi), Ilan's mother, Ruth, recounts her ordeal and explores the larger issues with dignity and fairness. Expressing gratitude and respect for the detectives who stood by her, she nevertheless deplores their failure to trust her intuition about the psychology of the Barbarians who transformed her beloved son into a filthy object to be tormented to death. Unable to understand the Jew-hatred spewing from the mouth of Fofana, says Ruth, agents misled Ilan's father in his communications with the kidnapper. 

Shortly after the discovery of the atrocious crime, then President Jacques Chirac dispatched his personal counsel, Maître Francis Szpiner, to represent the Halimi family. But Szpiner is not known as a great friend of the Jews, having been part of the defence team of TV station France 2, which lost an appeal against a libel verdict it had won over a report about the killing of a Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Dura, in 2000. Al-Dura, who was seen cowering behind his  father, became the poster boy of the second intifada.

Media critic Philippe Karsenty had been convicted of libel for writing that France 2's report of the death of al-Dura was a hoax. The Paris court ruled that the extensive evidence produced by Karsenty, including a ballistics report and a detailed analysis of the raw footage, was sufficient cause for suspicion that the scene had been staged. 

In his aggressive closing argument, playing on the definition of a Zionist, Szpiner compared Karsenty to "a Jew who pays another Jew to send a third Jew to go to war against the Palestinians."