Justice for My Mother  

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.

And in the long minutes that passed, Sarah Halimi paid with her life. Muttering Koranic verses and shouting, “I’ve killed the shaitan,” Traoré threw his victim’s body to the street below.