French police are refusing to call a self-evidently anti-Jewish attack a hate crime, raising questions about France’s disturbing tolerance of Muslim violence. Indeed, the French media appears complicit in a coordinated campaign to downplay the anti-Semitic hallmarks of an April 4 attack, in which a young Muslim man, praising Allah, threw an elderly Jewish woman out of her apartment window.
“Before he threw Sarah Halimi to her death from a window of her third-story apartment in Paris, 27-year-old Kobili Traore called his Jewish neighbor ‘Satan’ and cried out for Allah,” reports The Jerusalem Post. “Years before the attack, Traore called a daughter of his 65-year-old victim, whom he beat savagely before killing, ‘a dirty Jewess,’ the daughter said.”
All evidence points to the fact that Halimi’s brutal murder was motivated by Islamist-inspired anti-Semitism. This was a hate crime against Jews, pure and simple. But French authorities have shied away from labeling the crime as such.
“Prosecutors presented a draft indictment against [Traore] for voluntary manslaughter that contains no mention of the aggravated element of a hate crime,” notes The Jerusalem Post.
The state’s unwillingness to acknowledge the anti-Semitic overtones of the attack has rattled France’s Jewish community, a minority group that has long felt under by the rising tide of anti-Semitic hate crimes carried out by second-generation and immigrant Muslim populations as well as far-right ethno-nationalist groups.
Halimi’s murder, and France’s collective shrug, underlines the forgotten plight of the French Republic’s marginalized Jewry.
With documentaries about the strong correlation between anti-Semitism and Muslim migration into Europe canceled over concerns about the topic being “very sensitive,” the concerted effort to suppress the reality of Jewish life in Paris and other supposedly enlightened metropolitan meccas is amplifying voices calling for Jews to leave France for greener, less hostile pastures in Israel or the United States.
Most Jews have stayed put, though, fortifying their very existence with security precautions and major lifestyle changes.
From the exodus of Jewish students leaving public schools due to discrimination and hostility to the employment of robust private security forces patrolling Jewish schools and synagogues, France’s Jewry is under assault and nobody seems to care.