Why France Refuses to Prosecute an Antisemitic Murderer

Sarah Halimi was beaten and thrown from her window. Her killer will go free because he smoked weed.

  Bari Weiss April 15, 2021

In a normal world, everyone would know the name Sarah Halimi.  It’s understandable if you don’t. The press didn’t obsessively cover her murder the way they cover other hate crimes — for reasons I will explain.  Sarah Halimi was a retired French physician and schoolteacher. She was also an Orthodox Jew. 

On April 4, 2017, Halimi was in her Paris apartment where she lived alone. In the middle of the night, a 27-year-old Muslim man of Malian origin named Kobili Traoré, who lived in the building, broke into her apartment. Traoré tortured Ms. Halimi, who was in her 60s, beating her and kicking her. According to neighbors, who called the police after hearing Halimi’s cries, Traoré called her a “shaitan” (satan) and a dirty Jew. Ultimately, he threw Ms. Halimi’s battered body out of her third-story apartment window shouting “Allahu akbar.”

There are other gruesome details, but that is the basic story. It’s hard to imagine a set of facts more damning and more clear.   So in December 2019, when I read that French prosecutors had decided to drop murder charges against Traoré, a man with nearly two dozen prior convictions, on the grounds that he had smoked pot, I felt sick.   It spurred me to write a column called “Inconvenient Murders” about the case — and about the moral calamity sweeping the West of which this was only the clearest (and at the time most recent) example.

Here’s the relevant bit:

We are suffering from a widespread social health epidemic and it is rooted in the cheapening of Jewish blood. If hatred of Jews can be justified as a misunderstanding or ignored as a mistake or played down as a slip of the tongue or waved away as “just anti-Zionism,” you can all but guarantee it will be.

The column offered a round-up of various attacks against Jews in the great cities of Europe and North America — places like London, Brooklyn, Montreal and Washington, D.C. — and noted the strange silence on the part of those who claim to care deeply about justice, silence from those who can detect the most subtle microaggression.............To Read More.....