There have been two grisly murders in the last two weeks that have
left me stunned and caused much heartache. The first was the brutal massacre of
a young French Jew in the suburbs of Paris by a gang calling themselves, appropriately,
the Barbarians. The
NY Times description
of the slaying of Ilam Halimi, a 23 year old working at a mobile phone
store,
will send chills through your spine: "He
was naked and bleeding from at least four stab wounds to his throat,
his hands bound and adhesive tape covering his mouth and eyes.
According to the initial autopsy report, burns, apparently from the
acid, covered 60 percent of his body." Ilam was found in a
train station after he had crawled out of the wooded area where he was
dumped; I cringe just trying to envision if somehow I had been one of
the first pedestrians who first laid eye on this mutiliated human lying
there helpess, on the last throes of life. His captors had
lured Ilan Halimi by using a young (French-Iranian)
girl as bait and proceeded to inflict the worse physical torture on him
in an effort to extract a measly ransom from his family. As the details
of the last days of Ilam's life become unravelled, I am more appauled by
the indignity of his suffering. I've tried to come to terms with how
human beings can be capable of such indecency. Some are quick to claim
this an act of
anti-semitism, yet I don't believe this since
his killers came from a variety of backgrounds and have
confessed that they chose Ilam because Jews tend to be affluent.
The second appauling murder was that of a graduate student from Boston,
Imette
St.
Guillen, who was found raped and strangled in New York after a night in
Manhatten with a friend a couple of weeks ago. She and her friend had
separated after 2am when both had left a bar, and Imette had decided
she wanted to make one last stop at another place before going home.
That would be the final mistake she would ever make in this world. Her
naked body was found in a dumpster the next morning, hands and feet
bound with her mouth gagged with tape. She was probably alive for most
of the humiliation her killers made her suffer through, and, unable to
scream, had to cry away the pain in silence. The
associated press said about Imette she "wrote in her high school yearbook that she wanted the
strength of her mother, the intelligence of her sister and the heart of
her father, but that she wanted to be her own
person." We lost you Imette, God help us all. What has the world come to? The
reason I am so moved by these two deaths is that both victims were
doing nothing extraordinary, something we all do in everyday lives. And
it is the tragedy of the unordinary that beseeches me most. We seem to
live in the comfort of the known world we call our neighbourhood, our
schools and our place of work. Our naivety can manifest itself at any
given hour, and what will we do? Will the victim's families ever be able to
reconcile these gruesome deaths, the sheer brutality would seem to
leave an indelible mark that the march of time would never exhume. If
only the cause of death were a car accident, a health condition or
something so mundane as a gunshot. How does one deal with seeing a
brother or a daughter's body defiled and desecrated, only to think of
the abhorrent cruelty someone so close to you must have endured before
their life had been abruptly terminated. And for what? So the
impecunious robber or the sexual predator could have one more sense of
fulfillment? I think about these two murders and feel so enraged and
yet so utterly helpless. God help us all.