In France, murder of a Jewish woman ignites debate over the word terrorism

[Mosby]

PARIS — What happened to Sarah Halimi resembles the plot of a horror film.

In the early hours of April 4, the 65-year-old retired doctor and schoolteacher, an Orthodox Jew, was asleep in the modest apartment in northeastern Paris where she lived alone. Shortly after 4 a.m., a neighbor from the floor below, 27-year-old Kobili Traoré, a Franco-Malian Muslim, is accused of having broken into her flat. Traoré allegedly beat her to death and hurled her body off the balcony into the courtyard below.

In the days that followed, French authorities treated Halimi’s killing as an isolated incident. But Jewish leaders immediately protested, especially after other neighbors testified that they heard Traoré scream “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” while allegedly attacking Halimi, who was the only Jew residing in the building, her family said. Ever since, the “Halimi Affair” has simmered on the margins of public discourse, boiling over last week when President Emmanuel Macron promised — after months of saying nothing — “clarity on the death of Sarah Halimi.”

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"The simple fact that someone killed someone else because of confession or religion is not enough,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, director of the French Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based think tank. “It needs to have a certain degree of willingness to disrupt the French public order.”

For Sarah Halimi’s family, however, that she was thrown off a balcony into a public space presented a dark spectacle meant to be seen — and to pose a clear threat to other Jews. In an interview, Halimi’s brother, William Attal, 62, said that the family’s principal objective was securing public recognition of the anti-Semitism that, in their eyes, killed their mother, sister and grandmother.

As Attal put it: “I want you to understand that the fight of this family is that people recognize the Islamist, anti-Semitic nature of the assassin, who massacred and killed a Jewish woman, whom he knew was a Jew and whom he knew was alone.”

In the French Jewish community, the Halimi Affair provides what many consider yet another example of the French state refusing to acknowledge the realities of contemporary anti-Semitism in France.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-france-the-murder-of-a-jewish-woman-ignites-a-debate-over-terrorism/2017/07/23/4c79fe28-6bb9-11e7-abbc-a53480672286_story.html

[EllieBC]

1. This quote says it all:

“The simple fact that someone killed someone else because of confession or religion is not enough,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, director of the French Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based think tank. “It needs to have a certain degree of willingness to disrupt the French public order.”.

French public order is secular. They have no love for religion and probably fear of radical Islam which is leading them to try to be as inoffensive as possible. A growing demographic hates a smaller demographic that the secular French also dislike. So they'll err on the side of not angering their growing demographic.

And all of this being discussed in the Nine Days. Just another reminder we will never be safe or welcome while in galus.