On April 3, a twenty-seven-year-old Parisian of Muslim African origin entered the apartment of a neighbor, beat her severely, and threw her out a window to her death while shouting “Allahu akbar!” Police arrived at the scene while the victim—a sixty-six-year-old Jew named Lucie Sarah Halimi—was still alive, but prevented bystanders from aiding her as they awaited backup. Since then, French officials have claimed that the murderer was mentally ill and had no ties to Islamist groups and that therefore the crime was not anti-Semitic. Examining the facts of the case, Marc Weitzmann sees the French government’s response as part of a pattern, extending back to a similar murder in 2003, of insisting that Muslims who murder Jews or commit other acts of terrorism are “deranged” and motivated by neither religion nor politics:

Even the members of the commando teams who synchronized the attacks of November 13, 2015 on a French soccer stadium and the Bataclan Theater were labeled sociopathic and irrational. (That the Bataclan had been on a hit list as a Jewish target since 2009 was forgotten.) The medicalized rhetoric of “the deranged,” in other words, was the necessary prelude to the “lone-wolf theory” that for fifteen years would forbid France to look at the Islamist groups at work in the country.

Even after the Jews stopped being the sole victims of violence, and Islamist-inspired terror started targeting the rest of the country, obvious contradictions in the killers’ behavior helped keep alive the notion that they were simply “deranged”—as opposed to being Islamist militants. . . . Despite the claiming of the [2016 Bastille day massacre in Nice] by Islamic State two days after it occurred, [its perpetrator] was presented in the press as a crazy person; the IS claim, [it was argued], could be seen as an opportunistic move. . . .

This incapacity on the part of French authorities to differentiate the insane impulse from the intentional act and the subjective design from the collective slogan goes deep. Although the death toll has reached almost 300 today, it seems France hasn’t learned anything. We’re back to 2003, back to normal, when Jews were the sole target of violence. This partly explains the panic among the Jews of France. . . .

It appears that the murder [of Sarah Halimi] was the result of a spiral of chance events, engineered by psychosis as much as by drug abuse, but with an anti-Semitic impulse in the background, which a significant portion of the French media and judicial apparatus is determined to edit out of the story, partly because it is confusing and partly for what might politely be termed “social hygiene.” [But] France is not convinced by its own reassuring rhetoric about “the deranged.” The country has become so nervous and paranoid about terrorism that here is what, according to sources, apparently happened: the policemen hearing the killer shouting “Allahu akbar” thought they were dealing with a terror attack. They, therefore, backed off and waited for instructions and backup when they could have—and should have—intervened to save Halimi’s life.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.