Silent No More!

 

"The recent legal ruling in France sets a dangerous precedent that murderous anti–Semitism can go unpunished. It is a shocking blow not only to the family of Sarah Halimi and to French Jews, but to anyone who cares deeply about combating racism, anti–Semitism and intolerance. It must not go unchallenged."

"By bringing our voices together and speaking in one unified voice, we can make a powerful statement to the world that anti–Semitism will not be excused or tolerated."

Sacha Roytman-Dratwa, director, Combat Anti–Semitism Movement

 

"Sarah Halimi was murdered for clearly anti-Semitic motivations, for the sole reason that she was a Jew."

"This was a despicable murder that harmed not only the victim herself and her family, but also the entire Jewish community’s sense of security."

"The way to confront anti-Semitism is through education, zero tolerance, and heavy punishment.This is not the message that the court’s ruling conveys."

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Hayat

 

"It’s not for me to comment on a court ecision, but I would like to express to the family, to the relatives of the victim, and to all our Jewish citizens who were waiting for a trial, my warm support and the Republic’s determination to protect them."

"[France] does not judge citizens who are sick, we treat them… But deciding to take drugs and then ‘going crazy’ should not, in my opinion, take away your criminal responsibility."

"I would like Justice Minister [Eric Dupond-Moretti] to present a change in the law as soon as possible."

French President Emmanuel Macron

Justice for Sarah Halimi placards, April 2021 (Crédit : Consistoire israélite du Haut-Rhin)

"It comes from a very good, honourable place of not wanting to overgeneralize, but sometimes it can go too far."

"What’s a fair critique is that mainstream politicians have not figured out a genuine way to address, aside from security measures, the legitimate problem of anti-Semitism in France today – including in certain areas of France’s Muslim population."

Ethan Katz, history of Jewish-Muslim relations in France, professor of history, University of Cincinnati

There has always been an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in France, the European country that has hosted Jews for over a thousand years. Until recently, French Jews lived in a country that claimed to value its Jewish population, where fifty percent of Europe's Jews lived, a half-million, after the Holocaust years. The current atmosphere is of a growing narrative and reality of a “nouvelle antisémitisme” emanating from within the nation’s Arabo-Muslim population (~5.7 million, or 8.8% of the total French population), characterized by hostility at best, violent, public attacks in the worst-case scenarios.  

Tensions between Muslim and Jewish groups in France are not of Jewish making, but arise from a deep sense of Islamist hostility to the presence of Jews -- anywhere, overlapping the rage over the presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. The situation is historically problematic. Traoré’s murder of Sarah Halimi results from this history.  The French court and court-appointed psychiatrists saw fit to overlook this history, the vicious antagonism emanating from some portions of the Muslim-French community toward French Jews. 

The court preferred, in its secular wisdom, to make use of a centuries-old idea in France linking cannabis consumption to high rates of insanity and violent criminality among Muslims to 'understand' and excuse the anti-Semitic criminality of the torture and murder of Sarah Halimi, a defenceless, elderly Jewish woman who lived alone and was vulnerable to the religion-inspired hatred of her 27-year-old neighbour, a man who had a violent criminal record, and was intent on satisfying his urge to kill a Jew, and chose the most convenient one available to him.

Years after her suffering through a vicious beating that broke every bone in her face, before her assailant threw her over the balcony of her appartment to her death, the French court rendered its official opinions on Traoré’s sanity and deliberately perceived criminal culpability. Originally, François Molins, prosecutor in Paris’s second district, had stated the attack did not constitute an anti-Semitic hate crime, declaring Traoré unfit for trial as a result of an acute episode of cannabis-induced psychosis; the die was cast.

What is the value of a human life? A gentle, elderly Orthodox Jewish woman who is also a physician and a teacher is murdered by an inveterate criminal addicted to a huge daily intake of a psychotropic substance further fuelling his hatred of a religion and ethnicity that has been the occasion in the past of his issuing threats against her. When he was finally realizing his cherished goal of murdering her, he exulted "Allahu Akbar!", and as he beat her mercilessly he chanted chapters from the Koran.

An initial psychiatric evaluation by psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Zagury reported: “Today, it is common to observe, during delusional outbreaks…in subjects of the Muslim religion, an anti-Semitic theme: The Jew is on the side of evil, of the devil. What is usually a prejudice turns into delusional hatred.” He concluded that Traoré’s murder of Sarah Halimi "constituted a delusional if anti-Semitic act." In the years since then, nothing much has changed; the original conclusions remained and fed the response of the court.

People gather to ask justice for late Sarah Halimi on Trocadero plaza in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris [Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/AFP]

Since Sarah Halimi's murder, quite a few French Jews decided France no longer afforded them the security it guaranteed for its citizens, and have moved elsewhere, many to Israel. France no longer ranks as the country with the third-largest Jewish population in the world after Israel and the United States. A recent report of a survey of eleven European countries found France to be identified as the most dangerous place in Europe for Jews. 

"The derailment inflicted by the high court is revolting."

"Indeed, we live in a country, France, where a man who throws his dog from his fourth floor is sentenced to a year in prison, whereas if he murders an old Jewish woman, he may face no consequences whatever."

Jewish French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy