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.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.