Not Guilty of Murder : Allahu Akbar!

"No element of the information file indicates that the consumption of cannabis by the person concerned was carried out with the awareness that this use of narcotics could lead to such a manifestation [of psychiatric disorder]."

"[The defendant committed the killing after succumbing to a] delirious fit [and was thus not responsible for his actions]." 

Court of Cassation’s Supreme Court of Appeals, France

 

"Today we can smoke, snort, prick ourselves in high doses to the point of causing ourselves an acute deliriousness, which has led to an abolition of discernment and we will benefit from criminal irresponsibility."

Attorney Oudy Bloch

"[The decision represents a] devastating blow [which] potentially creates a precedent for all hate criminals to simply claim insanity or decide to smoke, snort or inject drugs or even get drunk before committing their crimes."

Shimon Samuels, director for international relations, Simon Wiesenthal Centre

Sarah Halimi was beaten before she was thrown off her Paris apartment building's roof in April 2017. (Courtesy of the Halimi family)

 

"In 2017, Kabili Traoré, a Muslim of Malian origin, who had no previous psychiatric history but a long criminal record, with 22 convictions—including for robbery, attempted robbery, drug-dealing, and possession of illegal arms—climbed over the balcony of the flat of Sarah Halimi, a Jewish woman age 66, tortured her, and then threw her over the balcony to her death. Traoré appeared to be in a state of religious excitation, for he was heard to shout “Allahu Akbar” and “I have killed Shaitan” (Satan). There is no doubt that he was psychotic at the time, or that his psychotic state was precipitated by his use of cannabis."

Theodore Dalrymple, contributing editor, City Journal

  

"The body landed in the courtyard, not far from the building’s bins. Shortly before 5am on 4 April 2017, a 65-year-old woman was hurled from the third-floor balcony of a social housing project in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, a rapidly gentrifying area on the eastern side of the French capital. An hour earlier, that same woman – a retired doctor and kindergarten teacher – had been asleep in the small apartment where she had lived for the past 30 years. When she woke up, she saw the face of her 27-year-old neighbour in the darkness. The man, who still lived with his family on the building’s second floor, had first stormed into another apartment, whose tenants had locked themselves in a bedroom and called the police. By the time he climbed up the fire escape into his victim’s apartment, three officers were present in the building."

"The autopsy would later reveal that the woman’s skull had been crushed, most likely with the telephone on her bedside table. Before and after his victim lost consciousness, the assailant beat her until the nightgown she was wearing – white, with a blue floral pattern – was soaked with her blood. He then dragged her body to the balcony of the apartment, and threw her over the railing."

James McAuley, The Guardian

The 65-year-old orthodox Jewish woman who had a medical degree, who worked as a primary school teacher, who was a mother of three, had experienced verbal abuse and threats expressed by a young man whose family lived in the same apartment building in the Belleville area of Paris, had reason to be concerned, and she was worried about her safety. She lived on the third floor of a social-housing apartment complex, the only Jew in her block. 

 

The young man who accosted her in the elevator, in the apartment's public spaces with his anti-Semitic smears was a felon who lived with his family in the same apartment block she lived in and had lived in for many years. He had a criminal record for violence, he was a drug dealer, and in total an utterly unsavoury character. She feared for her security. On the other hand, no doubt felt it would be too difficult to move, and why should she, this was her home?

 

Until it no longer was, when the man who was a steady marijuana-user, accustomed to smoking 14, 15 marijuana joints in a day, barged into the apartment of a family on the second floor. His violent entrance and his manner frightened the family, and they barricaded themselves in a room. They could hear their uninvited visitor praying, citing verses from the Koran. They desperately called for police through an emergency line, and waited. Before police arrived, the man exited the apartment onto its balcony, to climb to the balcony above.

 

The man, a French-Malian, was reputed not to have been a devout Muslim. He had no mastery of Arabic, the language in which the Koran is written. But he knew some Arabic words, like the name of Satan, and the commonly-used !Allahu Akbar! attesting that God is Great, and voiced frequently by Islamists engaged in terrorist activity. It's what he proclaimed when he mercilessly beat the 65-year-old

woman when he entered her apartment. And he shouted in triumph that he had killed the devil that she never realized she was.

After he had beaten her, tortured her, he threw her from the balcony to her death, assuming she wasn't dead by the time he threw her off the balcony. In French law it appears that if someone commits murder while in the throes of an alcohol- or drug-induced psychosis, they cannot be held to be guilty of the crime committed while in that state, as this psychopath was. That of his own volition and choice induced that state of psychotic paranoia, claiming that some force outside himself led him to kill the woman, appears not to have influenced the decision to find him not guilty of murder.

Since Sarah Hallimi's 'involuntary' demise otherwise known as murder at the hands of a hate-demented religious zealot, her killer was been held in a psychiatric institution. And it would appear that sanity has been restored to this vile creature in the interim, with many people knowledgeable in French law and criminality suggesting that it should not be too long before he is released, once more free to stalk and threaten another elderly Jewish woman. Interestingly, French authorities have been reluctant to characterize the vicious murder as having been led by anti-Semitism.

 

On the other hand, since these criminal psychopathic anti-Semites usually target the most vulnerable, it might very well be children who will be next threatened, as has been done before in France. To present as Jewish through tell-tale visibility that identifies Orthodox Jewry, is to become a target of vicious Jew-haters. And if Jews in France where they have lived for a thousand years feel it is their home, it has become a different place over the course of years with immigration from Islamic nations importing their venomous Jew-hatred with their arrival.

 

A march against anti-Semitism in Paris     Photograph Yoan Yalat