"As France is shocked by authorities’ inability to deliver justice, the Halimi family will fight on"
That question is being asked by some in the country’s Jewish community in the wake of last week’s shock decision by the Supreme Court of Appeals that the killer of Sarah Halimi shouldn’t stand trial because he was too high on marijuana at the time of the 2017 murder to be responsible for his actions.
“Both in the Jewish community and on French media, people can’t understand the ruling,” says Deputy Chief Rabbi Moche Lewin. “In a recent case in Marseille, a man who threw his dog from the fourth floor under the influence of cocaine was jailed for two years. So people ask, what’s the difference? And what if a person wants to kill his wife — can he just take cocaine and get away with it?!”
Sarah Halimi’s murder, in which Kobili Traore burst into her third-floor apartment and then threw her out of the window while shouting “Allah!” shocked the country’s Jewish community. But although the ruling is very troubling, Lewin says that there’s no anti-Semitism involved.
“The result would have been the same had the victim not been Jewish. There’s a loophole in the law that President Macron has said he wants to close.”
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