Israel blasts French ruling keeping Sarah Halimi’s killer from trial
Israel blasted on Tuesday the ruling by France’s highest court that the murderer of Sarah Halimi was not criminally responsible because he had smoked marijuana before the crime.Anger Outside French Consulate, NY Activists Hold Bigil for #SarahHalimi
“Sarah Halimi was murdered for clearly anti-Semitic motivations, for the sole reason that she was a Jew, ” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Hayat to the Times of Israel. “This was a despicable murder that harmed not only the victim herself and her family, but also the entire Jewish community’s sense of security.”
“The way to confront anti-Semitism is through education, zero tolerance, and heavy punishment,” Hayat continued. “This is not the message that the court’s ruling conveys.”
Halimi, an Orthodox Jewish woman in her sixties, died in 2017 after being pushed out of the window of her Paris flat by neighbor Kobili Traore, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic).
But in a decision last Wednesday, the Court of Cassation’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld rulings by lower tribunals that Traore cannot stand trial because he was too high on marijuana to be criminally responsible for his actions.
Traore, a heavy pot smoker, has been in psychiatric care since Halimi’s death. The court said he committed the killing after succumbing to a “delirious fit” and was thus not responsible for his actions.
French President Emanuel Macron expressed support on Sunday for the country’s Jewish community and its efforts to bring Halimi’s killer to trial. He said he would seek a change to laws to prevent such a case from happening again.
In a rare and controversial critique of France’s justice system, Macron said that taking drugs and “going crazy” should not take away criminal responsibility.
Thankful to everyone who came out to send a loud message to the French government:
— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) April 20, 2021
J’ACCUSE!
We demand #justiceforSarahHalimi pic.twitter.com/E0gVVo6VzI
Biden’s anti-Israel ‘point man’ is behind plan to fund Palestinians
“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr wrote a year after September 11 while working with an anti-Israel group.
A few years later, the Beirut-born Amr had become an adviser on Muslim relations to the World Economic Forum, before heading up Brookings’ Doha Center for Qatar. The tiny Islamic tyranny is allied with Iran, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a backer of Hamas.
The Obama administration appointed Amr deputy head of USAID’s Middle East Bureau, which put him in a key position to direct taxpayer money via an organization already notorious for funding pro-terrorist and anti-Israel groups.
A decade after Amr had responded to the death of a Hamas leader by ranting that “there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents,” the Obama administration made him a deputy to its Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Amr decamped back to Brookings during the Trump administration, becoming one of Biden’s big bundlers, joining his transition team and getting picked as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Within two decades of praising the intifada against Israel and a decade of working for a think-tank deeply compromised by its pro-Hamas regime sponsor, the foreign radical had climbed to a pole position in setting the Biden administration’s policy on Israel.
Politico described Amr as “the key U.S. official dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.” The Times of Israel called him “Biden’s point-man on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Biden’s point man didn’t waste much time.