Sarah Halimi was murdered for being a religious Jew. Why has her own community ignored her fate?
Photos: Menachem Kalish; Flash90
A few days before Pesach 2017, Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish preschool director, had come home from work when an intruder entered through the balcony doors of her third-floor apartment in Paris’s 11th arrondissement.
It was her downstairs neighbor Kobili Traoré, a towering, fanatically religious Muslim originally from Mali, and he’d come to kill her.
Within seconds, Sarah was fighting desperately for her life, as Traoré, high on cannabis, screamed “Allahu Akbar” and beat the frail religious woman savagely. Alerted by the terrified neighbors, police arrived but stood outside the locked apartment door, waiting for an anti-terror unit to arrive.
Two years later, the unspeakable was compounded by the un-understandable: a French cour d’appel, or appeals court, ruled that the accused, who claimed to have been in the throes of a cannabis-induced psychotic episode at the time was “criminally irresponsible” and consigned him to a psychiatric hospital. In a dismal marking of the fourth anniversary of Sarah Halimi’s death earlier this month, France’s final appeals court, the cour de cassation, reaffirmed the lower court ruling.
This series of unfortunate events is as familiar as the series of righteous protests that has accompanied them. In France, pundits across the political spectrum have denounced the rulings. In his column at the conservative