Illustration by Mashik Gulst
Sarah Halimi was French, Parisian.
She was an observant, Orthodox Jew.
She was a doctor, a family practitioner.
She was the director of an acclaimed government-funded preschool.
She was the mother of two daughters and one son.
Sarah Halimi lived in a third floor apartment of a building in which she was the only Jewish resident.
She was 65 years old.
Kobili Traoré, age 27, lived with his parents in a second floor apartment in the same building as Sarah Halimi. He had cycled from his family’s apartment to prison back to the apartment several times, following arrests for a variety of offenses including aggravated violence.
Traoré didn’t know Halimi, but he hated Jews. He knew that Halimi was a Jew, and he knew the apartment where she lived, on the floor above, by the mezuzah affixed on her door, a Jewish symbol that enraged him.
He didn’t get up the nerve to take action against Halimi until after midnight on April 4, 2017, as he smoked a marijuana blunt and watched the John Travolta movie “Punisher,” in which people are murdered by beatings, torture and defenestration.
At 4am, he broke into Halimi’s third-floor apartment, dragged her from her bed, and beat her savagely, crushing her skull. To cries of “Allahu Ackbar!” (“God is Great”), Traoré he threw his victim from the window into the street below. Looking at her bloody body on the street below, he yelled “I killed the Shaitan” (an Arabic word for devil or demon).
In July 2019, an examining magistrate ruled that Traoré should not be held criminally responsible for the murder. A blood test following his arrest had revealed the presence of cannabis in his blood. The magistrate ruled that the cannabis had rendered him “temporarily psychotic” (bouffée délirante); as a result, as a matter of French law, he was deemed not responsible for his actions, and unable to participate in a criminal trial for the violence he perpetrated. Instead of standing trial, the court ordered that Traoré receive psychiatric treatment in a hospital setting on a temporary basis.
The magistrates ruling was affirmed later in 2019 by the Paris Court of Appeal and, just a few days ago (April 17, 2021), by the Court of Cassation, the highest court of appeal in France.
In a statement published in Tablet Magazine on April 21, the Jewish French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy reflected on the final court judgment:
[W]e live in a country, France, where a man who throws his dog from his fourth floor is sentenced to a year in prison [a recent sentence] whereas if he murders an old Jewish woman, he may face no consequences whatsoever. Indeed, it is worrisome to know that the murderer, who had no history of psychiatric problems, who suffered and suffers from no pathology, and who, since his hospitalization, has received no medication, will soon regain his freedom.
As Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center observed, the verdict “potentially creates a precedent for all hate criminals to simply claim insanity or decide to smoke, snort or inject drugs or even get drunk before committing their crimes.”
Yesterday, thousands of people joined together to protest the Court of Cassation decision to absolve the 2017 murderer of Sarah Halimi of criminal responsibility because he took cannabis before he killed her. Protestors filled Trocadero Plaza in Paris. Other protests took place in Marseille, Lyon, Strasbourg, Bordeaux and elsewhere in France and throughout the world (The New York Times).
We stand with the protestors, and the family of Sarah Halimi, to mourn her death, remember her life, and honor her blessed memory; to call attention to the resurgence of virulent anti-Semitism and to resolve never to respond with silence; to bear moral witness against all forms of hated based on race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality or gender; to call for justice for the victims of hate crimes, including torture and murder; to affirm the humanity and dignity of all persons, and to fight anti-Semitism and all forms of racism with nonviolence and radical love.
