Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) has organized a vigil Tuesday to protest a decision by French courts not to try a man who killed a Jewish woman while shouting “Allahu Akbar” because of his use of marijuana at the time.
Hikind, a conservative Democrat who is also the founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, will hold the vigil outside the French consulate in New York City to honor the life of Sarah Halimi and to protest against the French judiciary’s decision.
As Breitbart News reported last week:
A top French court has upheld a decision not to charge an “Allahu Akbar” yelling man accused of murdering a Jewish woman, claiming he was not criminally responsible because he was in a drugs-related “delirious episode” at the time.
France’s Court of Cassation ruled that Kobili Traoré would not be charged in the death of an Orthodox Jewish woman named Sarah Halimi. Halimi died in 2017 after Traoré, who was her neighbour, allegedly beat and pushed her out of the window of her Paris apartment while praying and shouting.
…
“We do not understand the determination and procrastination that consistently seeks to turn this killer into a demented person, when he is a murderer whose presumed detention doesn’t even hide his hateful anti-Semitism,” Francis Kalifat of the Jewish group CRIF said at the time.
Kalifat reacted to the new ruling, saying on Twitter, “Now in our country, we can torture and kill Jews with impunity,” while tagging France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti.
France has seen an increased number of antisemitic incidents in the past two decades, particularly after the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, which provoked anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric in the elite media and in the streets. Past attacks on Jews in France have included the torture and murder of a Jewish teenager, Ilan Halimi (no relation), in 2006, and the murder of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll in 2018.
Many French Jews have moved to Israel as a result.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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