Faced with Anti-Semitism, Official France Insists on Seeing Mental Illness, with Deadly Results

On April 3, a twenty-seven-year-old Parisian of Muslim African origin entered the apartment of a neighbor, beat her severely, and threw her out a window to her death while shouting “Allahu akbar!” Police arrived at the scene while the victim—a sixty-six-year-old Jew named Lucie Sarah Halimi—was still alive, but prevented bystanders from aiding her as they awaited backup. Since then, French officials have claimed that the murderer was mentally ill and had no ties to Islamist groups and that therefore the crime was not anti-Semitic. Examining the facts of the case, Marc Weitzmann sees the French government’s response as part of a pattern, extending back to a similar murder in 2003, of insisting that Muslims who murder Jews or commit other acts of terrorism are “deranged” and motivated by neither religion nor politics: