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.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/230893/terror-anti-semitism-france