Je Suis Sarah: 82-year old French Jewish Judge Resigns In Protest of Disgusting Decision in Halimi Murder Case

All good people should be outraged by this unjust decision.

Beleaguered’ French Jewry ‘Dealt an Incredible Injustice’ With Sarah Halimi Verdict.

Je Suis Sarah

Sarah Halimi was a Jewish woman who lived in the 11th district of Paris. She was a retired doctor and schoolteacher. She had three children and grandchildren too. She was 65 years old when, on 4 April 2017, a male Muslim neighbour, Kobili Traoré, broke into her apartment and killed her. He tortured her and defenestrated her, throwing her from her balcony to her death three storeys below. As he committed this barbaric act he continually shouted ‘Allahu akbar’. He recited passages from the Koran. When he was done he said: ‘I have killed the devil.’

To most people this would appear to be a chilling and bloody act of anti-Semitic hate. Halimi’s family sees it that way. Sarah’s brother believes it was an Islamist terror attack. Many French Jews see the slaughter of Halimi as yet another anti-Jewish hate crime, of which there have been a disturbing number in France in recent years. The massacre of a teacher and children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; the murder of four Jews in the kosher supermarket siege in Paris in 2015; the murder of 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll in her apartment in Paris in 2018…. The Jews of France have been rocked by many sickening acts of racist violence in recent years, and the killing of Halimi by a disturbed Muslim screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ seemed to have been another.

Yet the French authorities viewed it a little differently. In December 2020 the court of appeals decreed that Kobili Traoré could not be held responsible for his actions. Traoré is a criminal with more than 20 convictions. He was a drug dealer and drug-taker. The courts ruled that on the night of 4 April 2017 he was high on cannabis and was experiencing a ‘delirious episode’. Last week the high court upheld that decision. It confirmed that there was an anti-Semitic element in the attack but ruled that Traoré is mentally unfit to stand trial. No one will be convicted for killing this 65-year-old Jewish grandmother.

The court’s decisions have caused a storm in France. Even President Macron has called for ‘clarity’ over the killing. Three months after Halimi was killed, Macron accused France of being too quiet about this barbaric act. ‘We were silent because we did not want to see’, he said. At the weekend, thousands of people took to the streets of Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille, Lyon and Nice – as well as Tel Aviv, Rome, London and New York – to demand ‘Justice pour Sarah’.

People’s sense of shock and betrayal was captured well by Bernard-Henri Lévy. ‘A man who savagely beat and murdered an old Jewish woman while screaming “Allahu akbar” is set free because he was high. Another man in France recently received a prison sentence for killing a dog’, he wrote. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has expressed concern about the message that might be sent to other violent-minded anti-Semites – namely, that you can potentially get away with racist murder if you take some drugs beforehand. ‘Snort drugs to kill a Jew’, said the Center’s director for international relations, Shimon Samuels.

It isn’t only the legal rulings that are discomfiting. There’s also the silence. Yes, thousands of people valiantly demonstrated for justice for Sarah Halimi. But where is the broader global outrage? Where is the social-media campaigning? Where is the knee-taking? Where are the corporations insisting that Jewish Lives Matter? Where, even, are the women’s rights campaigners? As Lévy says, there has been ‘silence’ from feminist groups in France: ‘[They] typically do such remarkable work in support of battered women, but had nothing to say about this case.’

The dearth of global concern about what is happening to Jews in France, the absence of progressive agitation in defence of this minority group, is a grim sign of the times. It confirms that anti-Semitism is not taken as seriously as other forms of racial hatred. We see this in the US and the UK too. Violent attacks on Jews in New York, many of them carried out by African-American males, rarely make waves in the way that police assaults on black men do. The left in the UK suffers from a bizarre tic in relation to anti-Semitism – mention it to them and watch them instantly spout the words, ‘And what about Islamophobia? What about anti-black hatred?’

One reason the woke elites are so unwilling to grapple with the new anti-Semitism in France and other parts of Europe is because of who the perpetrators often are – Muslims.

The Halimi ruling is a Get-Out-of-Jail- Free card for Muslims who slaughter Jews.

Halimi’s killer tormented her for months until the day he beat her to death screaming Allahu Akbar!”, “Dirty Jew,” while reciting verses from Quran.

“In April 2017, Kobili Traoré, a 27-year-old Muslim man, violently beat Halimi, his 65-year-old Jewish neighbor, while screaming “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) along with antisemitic slogans, before throwing her out of the window of her third-floor apartment to her death.

82-year old French Jewish judge resigns in protest of decision in Halimi murder case

In interview with French media, Jack Broda asks what has happened to justice and calls Halimi’s murder “an anti-Semitic assassination.”

By: Israel National News, April 28, 2021:

An 82-year old French judge who has been on the bench for over 25 years resigned on Monday in protest of the decision earlier in the month by France’s highest court that the murderer of Sarah Halimi would not have to stand trial.

Sarah Halimi, a 65-year old Jewish woman, was murdered by 31-year old Kobili Traore who claimed as his defense that marijuana usage had caused him to become temporary insane on the night of the murder.

In an interview in Le Figaro entitled “To protest against the judgment of Kobili Traore, I returned my judge’s robe!” Judge Jack Broda, who was a judge at the commercial court of Nancy, explained why he resigned in protest of the high court’s ruling.

Broda, who is Jewish, told the French newspaper that his first reaction as a judge was to say to himself, “I’m dreaming!”

“To protest, I decided to resign from my post. My resignation was accepted and… regretted,” he said.

He went on to explain that using legal experts, in this case to judge whether someone’s intoxication with drugs could amount to temporary insanity, is in itself problematic because the conclusion is one person’s opinion.

“I will say that there is the law and the spirit of the law. There is no automatic response to a legal problem through an expertise, because the expert expresses an opinion which must be corroborated by all the documents in the file.”

He said that he “strongly hopes for a new trial.”

“It would be useful to institute a new university degree in judicial ethics comparable to that of medicine,” said Broda, who was a pharmacist before becoming a judge.

He added that as a Jew he was troubled by the court’s decision. “What is this justice that takes up the cause of what appears to be an anti-Semitic assassination? Yet I want to continue to believe in the institution I have served for over 25 years.”

Broda hopes that the “discernment” rule that allowed Traore to plead temporary insanity by way of drugs will be amended.

“If the person wanted to put himself in this position of delirium: if he drinks, takes drugs, he therefore seeks a state which should allow him to break the law,” said Broda. “In this case clearly Kobili Traoré is criminally responsible according to the Latin axiom: Nemo auditur propriam turpitudinem allegans (‘No one is admissible to invoke his own turpitude’).”