The Exoneration of Sarah Halimi’s Murderer Is about Blindness to Anti-Semitism, Not Marijuana https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2021/04/the-exoneration-of-sarah-halimis-murderer-is-about-blindness-to-anti-semitism-not-marijuana/

April 27, 2021 | Melanie Phillips
About the author:

Two weeks ago, a French high court upheld a decision not to try Kobili Traoré for beating and then murdering Sarah Halimi, a sixty-five-year-old Jewish woman, on the grounds that he was suffering from marijuana-induced insanity. That Traoré had shouted Allahu Akbar as he threw her from her window, that he had previously called Halimi’s daughter a “dirty Jew,” and other evidence that he was motivated by religious fervor and anti-Semitism did not figure into the court’s ruling. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has responded by calling for changes to the country’s laws regarding drug-use and criminal insanity. While doing so might be salutary, Melanie Phillips argues that it won’t make French Jews safer:

For the problem is not French law but France itself, where paralysis over dealing with Muslim violence against non-Muslims has made the authorities terrified of acknowledging its full nature and extent. For years, French Jews have been subjected to repeated anti-Semitic attacks and murders overwhelmingly perpetrated by Muslims.

Yet . . . French authorities and commentators have repeatedly sought to obscure the anti-Jewish nature of these crimes, ascribing them instead to “lone-wolf” attacks or the outcome of psychotic episodes. Mohammed Merah, for example, [who shot three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in 2012], has been widely portrayed in French media as a victim of prejudice, with his murders blamed on neo-colonial, anti-Muslim racism and discrimination. . . . When Sarah Halimi was murdered, the French authorities initially refused to classify this as an anti-Jewish attack. Indeed, it took two days before it was reported by the media at all.

And now the ruling by the [French high court] has also been barely reported outside the Jewish press and French media. . . . The reason for this indifference is obvious. The murder of Sarah Halimi and the attacks on other French Jews over the past few years tread heavily on some neuralgic left-wing toes. To acknowledge that people in France are being repeatedly attacked and murdered simply because they are Jews destroys the all-important fiction that attacks on Jews are motivated principally by hostility to Israel.

Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/anti-semitism-is-a-form-of-delirium-especially-in-france/