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Parliamentary report on Halimi killing enrages French Jews

PARIS — A new parliamentary report on the 2017 killing of a Jewish woman by a Muslim attacker was meant to restore French Jews’ faith in their country’s police and justice systems.

Demonstrators affiliated with the Jewish Community of Rome protest the ‘Halimi affair near the French Embassy in Rome, April 25, 2021. (Andrea Ronchini/NurPhoto/Getty)

Instead, the report released earlier this month has added fuel to the fire, enraging French Jewish leaders.

Last year, a judge ruled that Sarah Halimi’s professed killer was not responsible for his actions because his consumption of marijuana had induced a psychotic episode. This was despite the fact that the court concluded he was motivated to kill Halimi because she was Jewish.

In the aftermath of the ruling, French Jews led a wave of infuriated protests.

In September, 2021, a parliamentary committee led by French Jewish lawmaker Meyer Habib began investigating, in his words, “any dysfunctions” in the case on the part of French police.

Critics say that the investigators drew conclusions about the scene of the crime without visiting it, but had they visited it they would have seen that police lied when they said they did not hear the victim’s cries — though they awakened the entire building where she was killed.

The committee’s new 67,000-word report found that police officers arrived on the scene before the murder occurred — but did not stop it.

Despite that finding, the committee exonerated not only the police and the killer, but the judges, psychiatrists and anyone else involved in the case.

Habib and other non-Jewish committee members railed against the final recommendations, but it passed by a vote of 7-5.

Meanwhile, the French senate passed a law nullifying temporary insanity defenses related to the voluntary ingestion of drugs, in an apparent, direct reaction to the judicial ruling in the Halimi affair.

The findings

The report revealed many new details to the public. These are the key findings, from the committee’s point of view:

• Kobili Traore, a 31-year-old French-Muslim man of Malian descent, forced his way into the 65-year-old Halimi’s Paris apartment and killed her — brutally, as was previously known, by beating her and throwing her out of a window — because she was Jewish. Prosecutors also already knew that Traore recited verses from the Koran and shouted anti-Semitic statements during the murder.

• Police had arrived on the scene in response to calls by Halimi’s neighbors, who heard her cries.

The report adds that the officers were given keys to Halimi’s apartment when they arrived, long before her death. But they waited outside as Traore beat her — the report says they “could not prevent” her death and followed all relevant procedures.

• The medical evaluation that led to Traore’s admission into a psychiatry hospital — before he could be given a trial — was “of good quality,” the report says, despite challenging circumstances. He may be released from the psychiatric facility where he is held pending a recommendation by his doctors, if approved by a police commissioner.

• In the chain of events that led to the decision not to try Traore, “the judiciary followed perfectly the procedure” determined by the law, the report reads. The police’s handling of the case “does not represent a failure.”

The criticism

Habib and two other members of the committee — lawmakers Constance Le Grip and François Pupponi, who are not Jewish — strongly objected to each of the key findings, arguing that they defy common sense.
Habib, a member of the centrist UDI party, wrote a scathing criticism that was included in the final version of the report.

He noted the recent testimony given to the committee by the neighboring Diarra family, who said they gave police keys to the building and to Halimi’s apartment and claimed that the police did not intervene when Halimi could have been saved.

In a radio interview, Habib compared the ordeal to the infamous 19th-century Dreyfus Affair, which involved a wrongful espionage conviction of a French Jewish soldier.

“It’s a tragic case. It’s a second Dreyfus Affair. It’s a denial. It’s a disgrace. There was no trial, the murderer is on his way to freedom,” said Habib, a former leader of the CRIF umbrella group of Jewish communities.

He told Radio J, a Jewish community broadcaster, that fellow lawmakers “refused to tell the truth, refused to come with us to the site to see the conditions, to see whether the 10 police officers who were there lied when they said they didn’t hear a single cry of a woman whose death cries, uttered for 14 minutes, had woken up the whole building.

“And yes, they lied.”

Florence Morlighem, a lawmaker in Macron’s centrist Republic on the March party, compiled the report’s final wording.

She criticized Habib in the report, alleging that under his leadership, the committee “heard unacceptable remarks that feed the idea of a conspiracy on the part of authorities and the judiciary to silence this affair.”

Leaders of French Jewry reacted critically to the report, and especially to a statement Morlighem made during a committee meeting. According to minutes from the session, Morlighem said that police likely didn’t hear Halimi scream because, “in light of the dimensions of Traore, and the photos of Sarah Halimi’s cadaver, I think she did not scream for a long time.”

Critics called her language callous and her reasoning flawed.

“Inacceptable remarks by the rapporteur,” Francis Kalifat, the president of CRIF, wrote on Twitter earlier this month.

“Florence Morlighem is exacerbating the denial of justice to Sarah Halimi by adding to it the denial of her suffering.”

Le Monde Juif, a communal news site, called her remarks “filthy” in an unusually harsh editorial.

Morlighem said some of her remarks had been “twisted and pulled out of context,” giving the impression that she had downplayed Halimi’s suffering. She added on Twitter that she regrets this false impression.

Why it matters, and what’s next

Last month, the French senate passed a law nullifying temporary insanity defenses related to the voluntary ingestion of drugs.

That has not satisfied French Jewry, whose protests last year were the largest against their government in decades. They feel betrayed and abandoned by a state whose support they view as crucial for enduring an increase of anti-Semitic violence since the early 2000s.

The last decade saw a surge in French Jewish immigration to Israel — about 50,000 of them have made the move since 2010, a major increase over the previous decade.

Macron has made inroads with the French Jewish electorate. He declared at a Holocaust commemoration ceremony in 2017, shortly after his election, that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism — an unprecedented assertion by a sitting French president.

Many Jews and non-Jews support his relatively tough stance on what he deems radicalized Islamists,

But the Halimi affair could emerge as a major political issue as France nears new presidential elections in April.

Macron’s foremost challengers are Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, who will both likely seize the opportunity to criticize the incumbent as weak on combating anti-Semitism.

Zemmour, who is Jewish, has not yet commented on the report. But he has written about the case in the months preceding the recent launch of his campaign in a column for Le Figaro, titled, “You’re in France. Welcome to the crazies!”

“Is it a crime? No! An anti-Semitic murder? Nonsense! An Islamist murder? Let’s not generalize! The experts have evaluated, studied, decided. The experts exerted their expertise and their word is holy. Kobili Traore is crazy.”




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