How Political Correctness Led Official France to Attempt a Cover-Up of Sarah Halimi’s Murder

In Paris in 2017, Kobili Traore murdered his sixty-five-year-old Jewish neighbor, Sarah Halimi, after beating her for at least 30 minutes while reciting Quranic verses and shouting anti-Semitic epithets. This was not the first time anti-Semitic violence, now frequent, turned deadly in 21st-century Paris; it wasn’t even the first such incident in the 11th arrondissement. But what shocked French Jews, and eventually a wider segment of the French public, was the way the media and then the courts treated the case. Michel Gurfinkiel writes: