Published: 8 February 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Malian-born Kobili Traoré brutally attacked the sleeping woman before throwing her from the window of her third-floor apartment. Witnesses heard him cry, “Allahu akbar” as he pushed her body onto the balcony, and then, “I killed the devil” as she fell.
The police, who had been called earlier by another family in the building, did not attempt to enter the apartment; afraid that this was a terrorist attack they waited outside the building for reinforcements. By the time reinforcements arrived, Halimi was dead. She had been tortured for an hour before she was killed; the living room was covered in blood.
Almost as shocking as the murder itself was the fact that it went barely mentioned in the media, giving rise to overt speculation that it was being covered up. In June the CRIF, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France put out a furious press release: “The murder of Sarah Halimi was 85 days ago already and the investigation is not advancing. Why this silence? Why this omerta? What is being hidden? Why this denial of anti-Semitism?”
There is little doubt that one of the reasons the murder was virtually ignored in the media at the time – just weeks before the presidential elections, with Marine Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigration, far-right National Front, a frontrunner – was a reflection of a barely articulated fear that focusing on the fact that the victim was Jewish and the murderer a Muslim immigrant would encourage vilification of both Muslims and immigrants, thereby only fuelling Le Pen’s campaign for the presidency.
President Macron’s decision to speak out at a ceremony that recalls French complicity in the Holocaust was highly symbolic, suggesting that both the murder itself and the silence that surrounded it were part of the same culture
But though the election is long since over, disputes over the murder continue. When, on July 10, Traoré was indicted for unpremeditated murder, there was no mention in the suit of anti-Semitic motivation. In December, the Halimi family’s lawyer put in a formal request that the murder be re-qualified as murder with anti-Semitic intentions, but at the end of January the presiding judge, Anne Ihuellou, rejected the request, in spite of a psychiatric report that considered that Traoré’s behaviour was both “delusional and anti-Semitic”.
The judge’s decision has given rise to further outcry from the Jewish community. “This is an insult to (the) memory of Sarah Halimi” and “an additional pain for her children and her family,” Francis Kalifat, president of the CRIF tweeted on Monday.
Sarah Halimi’s murder has several disturbing echoes. By cruel coincidence she shares a name (though there is no family relationship) with another Parisian Jew, Ilan Halimi, who was kidnapped and murdered in 2006 by a gang led by the Ivory Coast- born Muslim Youssouf Fofana.
Ilan Halimi was deliberately targeted by a gang because he was Jewish – yet the police also refused during the weeks between the kidnap and the murder to consider that there was an anti-Semitic element to the crime.
[gallery columns="1" size="large" ids="16899"]
Three years earlier, a 23-year-old DJ, Sebastien Sellam, was brutally murdered by a childhood friend, who announced to his mother immediately afterwards that “I have killed a Jew. Now I will go to heaven.” Yet Sellam’s killer, Adel Amastaibou, claimed diminished responsibility; the claim was accepted and thus according to French law he could not be sent to trial. He has been held ever since in a psychiatric institution.
Again, the uncomfortable echoes: Sarah Halimi’s killer has been determined by a psychiatrist to have been in an “acute delirium” and “not himself” on the day of her murder, as a result of heavy cannabis use.
The ambiguities of the way the case is being handled on both a political and legal level are striking. Last year President Macron himself, at the annual commemoration of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, the notorious second world war mass arrest of Jews on July 16, 1942, used the opportunity to speak out against Halimi’s murder and the silence that surrounded it.
“We said nothing, we didn’t want to see …. In spite of the murderer’s denials, the justice system must do all it can to shed light on Sarah Halimi’s death.”
While his comments were extremely vague, Macron’s decision to speak out at a ceremony that recalls French complicity in the Holocaust was highly symbolic, drawing attention to the historical element of anti-Semitism in French culture, and suggesting that both the murder itself and the silence that surrounded it were part of the same culture.
Seen in this light, the judge’s rejection last week of Macron’s implicit interpretation of the facts becomes highly problematic, perhaps a part of the continued tortuous French relationship to its own history. Is she right to imply that Macron was overly hasty in seeking to cast the crime as part of the historical continuum of modern French anti-Semitism?
Was the murder indeed committed by a drug-addled hoodlum who had no idea of his victim’s background? Or was Halimi yet another victim of a profound and institutional anti-Semitism that according to some remains very much alive in French society?
Perhaps only the trial, for which a date has yet to be set, will eventually provide some kind of answer.
