Mick Hartley

A tale of antisemitism, drug abuse, and psychotic derangement in the Paris suburbs, from Marc Weitzmann:

Lucie Sarah Halimi, 66, was murdered on the night of April 3, thrown out of her window after having been beaten in her own apartment on the Rue de Vaucouleurs in the hip Parisian neighborhood of Belleville. While attacked, she had the time to cry for help, and to throw plates and dishes—either at her attacker in an attempt to defend herself, or on the floor to make noise and alert people nearby.

Halimi was a religious woman who, albeit Sephardic, worked for the Orthodox synagogue of the Rue Pavée in the ancient Pletzel—the traditional Ashkenazi neighborhood of Paris. Her attacker was a 27-year-old African Muslim whose name has not been disclosed, and who lived with his mother, his stepfather, and his brother down the street from Halimi’s apartment. A drug addict and a drug dealer, he had an argument at home with his own family earlier, and in an emotional state, had first knocked at several doors before entering No. 30 and asking one of the residents there to shelter him for the night. When the man refused, he threatened him. He then reached the balcony’s apartment and, from there, climbed up to Halimi’s apartment, which was upstairs. Several people, including his own family, called the police.

As Sarah Halimi was being beaten by her attacker, she began to shout for help and her neighbors gathered to intervene. They were stopped short by three policemen, who were either arriving on the scene or already present, and who refused to act until backup arrived. Powerless, like the neighbors, the policemen remained in the street and watched Sarah Halimi’s body fall to the pavement. The subsequent autopsy report assessed that she was still alive and probably conscious when she was propelled out the window of her apartment, and that she died from the impact of the fall rather than from the blows she’d received. At some point during the course of the incident, her killer was distinctly heard shouting “Allahu akbar,” a phrase he repeated several times. The police investigation is still unfolding, and Halimi’s killer has been placed under psychiatric care.

These are facts.

From then on, things got blurry.

[…]

It appears that the murder was the result of a spiral of chance events, engineered by psychosis as much as by drug abuse, but with an anti-Semitic impulse in the background, which a significant portion of the French media and judicial apparatus is determined to edit out of the story, partly because it is confusing and partly for what might politely be termed “social hygiene.” What is clear is the reason the three police officer on the scene not only did nothing to stop what was unfolding but even prevented the neighbors from intervening.

France is not convinced by its own reassuring rhetoric about “the deranged.” The country has become so nervous and paranoid about terrorism that here is what, according to sources, apparently happened: Although the man was indeed deranged, the policemen hearing the killer shouting“Allahu akbar” thought they were dealing with a terror attack. They, therefore, backed off and waited for instructions and backup when they could have — and should have — intervened to save Halimi’s life.

A few days after her statement, and in a completely unrelated intervention, Marine Le Pen abruptly denied that France had anything to do with the deportation of Jews during World War II.