How accurate is Mark Steyn’s summary of the magnitude of anti-Semitism in France? Also, can it indeed be true that the Sebastian Selam murder went unreported in the major French media? Here’s what Steyn writes:
In five years’ time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents’ apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam’s throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, “I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven.”
Is that an gripping story? You’d think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You’ve got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.
Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.
A quick NEXIS search indeed found no references to Sebastian Selam in the French media (though I might have chosen the wrong database, or perhaps the NEXIS coverage is too spotty to be really telling). It did find references in French newspapers to the James Byrd and Matthew Shepard hate crimes in the U.S. If indeed the Selam murder wasn’t reported, is there some reasonable explanation for that?
UPDATE: Sorry — misspelled Sebastien in the paragraph above, but not in my NEXIS search, in which I searched both for Sebastien Selam (the name Steyn gave) and Sebastien Sellam (an alternate spelling I’ve seen).