In 2017, a Muslim man named Kobili Traoré broke into the Paris apartment of a Jewish woman named Sarah Halimi, tortured her for several hours, and then killed her by throwing her off a balcony—while police patiently waited on the street for backup to arrive. A French judge dropped the murder charges last week, ruling that Traoré was temporarily insane since he had smoked marijuana prior to committing his crimes. Annabelle Azade writes:

In Paris, where Kobili Traoré’s trial took place last week, anti-Semitism has been dramatically increasing, prompting an exodus of French Jews. Anti-Semitic incidents rose by 74 percent in one year, reaching 541 in 2018, from 311 in 2017, according to the French Interior Ministry. In July 2018 the New York Times found that, despite Jews making up less than 1 percent of the French population, “nearly 40 percent of violent acts classified as racially or religiously motivated were committed against Jews in 2017.”

On the night of the murder, [Traoré] had first broken into another family’s apartment before breaking into Halimi’s in Paris’ 11th arrondissement—reportedly the only Jewish person in her . . . apartment building. Claiming not to have recognized Halimi, Traoré told the French court: “I felt persecuted. When I saw the Torah and a chandelier in her home, I felt oppressed. I saw her face transforming.”

In addition to screaming “Allahu akbar” during his crime, Traoré was heard calling Halimi a shaitan—Arabic for Satan—before killing her. According to Halimi’s daughter, Traoré had called her a “dirty Jewess” two years before murdering her mother. Traoré had also attended the Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud mosque in Paris, a known hangout for Islamist radicals.

Yet, despite all of that evidence and the brutality of Traoré’s crime, French authorities and the French media effectively suppressed reports of the crime; . . . details of the crime that pointed to its anti-Semitic motive were initially not reported in the French press.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”