In Paris on April 4, 2017, Kobili Traoré broke into the apartment of a neighbor, a retired Jewish physician named Sarah Halimi, and proceeded to beat her viciously while shouting anti-Semitic slurs. He then threw her out the window, and to her death, with a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” On Wednesday, a French high court upheld a previous decision that Traoré could not be held accountable for Halimi’s murder because he was under the influence of marijuana. Bari Weiss comments:

The rule of thumb, as the British writer and comedian David Baddiel has noted in his new book [of that name], is that Jews don’t count. But there is a more sophisticated version of this bloody arithmetic. When a Jew is harassed by a neo-Nazi, he counts. When a Jew is harassed by a person from another minority group, not so much. When a secular Jew is attacked, he counts. But when a Jew with a black hat is attacked, that’s ignored. If the story suits the narrative, it counts. If it undermines it, it doesn’t.

And so it is the case with the four-year saga of Sarah Halimi. . . . As Francis Szpiner, one of the Halimi family’s lawyers, asked of the court’s strange logic: “Will this also apply to drunk drivers who kill children on the road?” The question answers itself. The madness here does not belong to Traoré. It belongs to France.

[A] survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee last year found that 70 percent of French Jews say they have been victims of at least one anti-Semitic incident in their lifetime. . . . The French Jewish community, which is the largest Jewish community in all of Europe, has seen which way the wind is blowing for a while now. French Jews are heading for the exits, mostly to Israel.

Previous reports on the predicament of French Jewry can be read here, here, and here.

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.