France: The French won’t see antisemitism for what it is

Via The Algemeiner (Ben Cohen):

Flush from his victory over far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the French elections last July, President Emmanuel Macron decided to address head-on the horrific murder of a Jewish pensioner in Paris three months earlier.

“Despite the denials of the murderer, our judiciary must bring total clarity around the death of Sarah Halimi,” Macron declared at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the deportation of the Jews of Paris by the Nazis. “We were silent because we did not want to see.” This remark can be taken on one level as an observation concerning recent French history, and on another, concerning the appalling silence on the part of the French media and political class, who feared that public discussion of Halimi’s ordeal at the hands of a rabidly antisemitic, Muslim immigrant drug-fiend would boost Le Pen’s election campaign.

With that speech, Macron left little doubt that he regarded Halimi’s murder as a hate crime — a determination that was emphatically not shared by the local police or by the judicial authorities examining the murder. Sure enough, by September, the Paris public prosecutor’s office announced that it was now treating the murder as a hate crime, a decision based on interviews that a court-appointed psychiatrist conducted with the accused murderer, 27-year-old Kobili Traore.

Pitifully, that is no longer the case. The examining magistrate in the trial of Traore, Anne Ihuellou, whose job is to prepare the indictments, announced at the end of January that based on the same interviews, the assailant would no longer face a hate crime charge. Her decision is now, in turn, being appealed by the public prosecutor’s office. The entire French judiciary is aware that a final decision that leaves the hate-crime element out of Traore’s trial will have profoundly negative implications for the declared intention of the French government to combat antisemitism.

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