Jewish community in disbelief that investigators ruled out an antisemitic motive so quickly.

By Ben Cohen, The Algemeiner

France’s Jewish community has called on the authorities in the city of Lyon to retain the possibility of an antisemitic motive in the investigation of the chilling murder last Tuesday of an 89-year-old Jewish man.

René Hadjaj was pushed to his death on May 17 from the balcony on the 17th floor of the apartment building where he lived in the Duchère district of Lyon. Hadjaj’s murder brought to mind the similar fate met in April 2017 by Sarah Halimi, a Jewish woman who was beaten and tortured in her apartment by an Islamist intruder who then ejected her from her third-floor window. The accused assailant, Kobili Traore, was excused from trial in April 2021, on the grounds that he could not be held criminally responsible, as his intake of marijuana on the night of Halimi’s killing had rendered him temporarily insane.

Police have arrested a 51-year-old man in connection with the killing of Hadjaj, described as a gentle man who was known as “Tonton René” (“Uncle René”) and had lived the Duchère district for over 20 years. However, critical details of the crime have yet to be made public — among them how Hadjaj, whose apartment was located on the second floor, ended up being pushed to his death from the 17th floor.

Local news outlet Le Progrès reported that the police in Lyon had examined and then discarded the possibility of an antisemitic motive, claiming that the killing was the result of a dispute between neighbors. The accused killer has not been named and no biographical details have been released. However, the BNCVA — a Paris-based antisemitism watchdog — has claimed that Hadjaj was acquainted with the man, and that he is a Muslim of Arab origin.

In a statement, the local chapter of Crif — the umbrella organization representing French Jews — said it would pay close attention “to the smooth running of the investigation and trusts the police and judicial authorities to ensure that the legal disaster in the Sarah Halimi case does not happen again.”

The statement added that “pending additional information and at the express request of the family whose mourning must be respected, no hasty conclusions should be reached or circulated as it stands.”

Francis Kalifat, Crif’s president, urged on Twitter that the police investigation into Hadjaj’s death be “as complete as possible and that the aggravating character of antisemitism retained even if it is later withdrawn.”

In a hard-hitting editorial, the French Jewish news outlet Tribune Juive asked pointedly how “the police, after having arrested the murderer … could have declared in the hours that followed that there was no antisemitic motive?”

The paper continued: “Why do we hide the identity of the murderer placed in pre-trial detention? Why did the prosecution, the investigating judge and the prefect remain silent, or in any case not hold a press conference, when this murder is out of the ordinary and is particularly heinous given the circumstances and the age of the victim?”

The rise of violent antisemitism in France over the last 20 years has featured several incidents of Jews being held captive and beaten in their own homes by antisemitic intruders. One year after Sarah Halimi’s murder, 85-year-old Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, was stabbed and burned to death by two men, one of who she had known since childhood, while in Sept. 2017, three members of the Pinto family were subjected to a vicious assault and robbery by an antisemitic gang who broke into their Paris home.

Earlier this year, the Jewish community in Paris was stunned by the death of 31-year-old Jérémy Cohen, who was fatally struck by a moving tram in the Paris suburb of Bobigny as he fled from a gang assault. Cohen’s mother later urged “caution” in ascribing an antisemitic motive behind the attack on her son, whose kippah, which could have identified him as a Jew, was discovered at the scene.

Separately, a study published in January by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Paris-based Fondapol think-tank revealed that the vast majority of French Jews — 74 percent — had experienced some form of “antisemitic behavior during their lives, from mockery to physical aggression, including insults or verbal threats.”

The study found common agreement that antisemitism in France is on an upward trajectory, with 64 percent of non-Jewish and 73 percent of Jewish respondents acknowledging the steep rise in prejudice targeting Jews over the last decade.

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Former French prime minister says commemoration was a ‘necessary tribute’ to the ‘victims of Islamist terrorism.’

By The Algemeiner

Jewish community leaders and French officials gathered on Sunday to mark the seventh anniversary of a terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, paying tribute and expressing solidarity against antisemitic violence.

Organized by the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), the main communal body of French Jewry, the ceremony took place in front of the Hyper Cacher where an Islamist gunman shot dead four Jewish hostages on Jan. 9, 2015 — Yohan Cohen, 20; Yoav Hattab, 21; Philippe Braham, 45; and François-Michel Saada, 63. A couple of days before the attack, two Islamist gunmen killed a dozen people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Multiple French politicians were present at the commemoration, among them former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who described it on social media as a “necessary tribute” to the “victims of Islamist terrorism.” Also in attendance were Marlène Schiappa, minister for citizenship; Sophie Cluzel, secretary of state for people with disabilities; Jean-Michel Blanquer, minister of education, youth, and sports; and Aurore Bergé, a lawmaker from French President Emmanuel Macron’s party.

“Murdered because they were Jews,” wrote Equality Minister Élisabeth Moreno. “Remember, always.”

Remembrance candles were also lit during the ceremony for other French Jews killed in antisemitic violence, including Sarah Halimi, a retired doctor who was beaten and thrown from her third-story Paris apartment in 2017, and Mireille Knoll, an elderly Holocaust survivor who was stabbed and set ablaze in her Paris apartment in 2018.

After a recitation from Psalms and the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the deceased, the ceremony concluded with a prayer for France, a minute of silence, and the playing of the French national anthem.

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“Justice has been done.”

By Ben Cohen, The Algemeiner

The murder trial that compelled France to confront the violent antisemitism in its midst came to a dramatic close on Wednesday, as a court in Paris sentenced one of the two men accused of the brutal killing of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, to life imprisonment.

Following almost ten hours of deliberation by the jury, 32-year-old Yacine Mihoub, a former neighbor of Knoll’s, was found guilty of murder aggravated by antisemitic hatred. The terms of Mihoub’s life sentence require that he serve a minimum of 22 years.

The second accused man, Alex Carrimbacus, Mihoub’s 25-year-old associate, was acquitted on the murder charge but found guilty of aggravated theft. The court sentenced him to a 15-year prison term.

Mihoub’s mother, Zoulikha Khellaf, separately received a three year prison sentence, with two years suspended, for having cleaned the knife used in the murder of Knoll — who was stabbed eleven times by Mihoub before her body was set on fire. Firefighters who arrived at her apartment in a Paris public housing project shortly after her murder on March 23, 2018 discovered her badly burned remains sprawled on the floor.

Throughout the trial, which began on Oct. 26, lawyers for the Knoll family stressed the antisemitic element behind the killing. A police investigation following Knoll’s death established that Mihoub was a regular visitor to Islamist and antisemitic websites, and was already known to the authorities for having praised the Kouachi brothers, Islamist terrorists who carried out the deadly attack against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Jan. 2015.

A grandmother who lived alone in an apartment in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, Knoll had known Mihoub, who lived with his family in the same building, since his childhood. A petty criminal and alcoholic with previous convictions for drug dealing and violence, Mihoub had received his most recent prison sentence for a sexually assaulting a minor in Mireille Knoll’s apartment — the 11-year-old daughter of her caregiver, who gave evidence against Mihoub at the trial on Monday.

Following that assault, Mihoub had been banned from visiting the building where Knoll lived, but continued to do so. According to his testimony to the court, Mihoub had been visiting Knoll in the hours before her murder, drinking and having what he described as a “good time.” He called Carrimbacus, a drug addict whom he befriended while in prison, and invited him to join them at Knoll’s apartment, where Mihoub had already consumed nearly an entire bottle of port.

The accounts of the two accused men as to what then transpired in Knoll’s apartment diverged sharply at this point. Mihoub tried to blame the killing on Carrimbacus, claiming that he had left his friend alone with Knoll for five minutes, during which time she was stabbed repeatedly and then robbed. But according to Carrimbacus, it was Mihoub who murdered Knoll during an argument in which he angrily insisted that Jews “have financial means and a good situation,” shouting the words “Allahu Akhbar” (“God is great’) as he plunged the knife into his victim.

Prosecuting lawyers had argued throughout the trial that it was Mihoub who bore “sole responsibility for the particularly savage killing of Mrs. Knoll,” an act aggravated by his antisemitic prejudices. During his testimony, Mihoub did little to undermine this depiction. “I think if it had been a ‘Geraldine’ or a ‘Fatima,’ there wouldn’t have been so much noise,” he responded when questioned about antisemitism as a motive for the killing. On another occasion, he challenged the facts of the Holocaust, declaring, “One or two million dead, we don’t know. We can’t prove it. We weren’t there, neither you nor me. ”

The court also heard how soon after the killing, Mihoub and Carrimbacus had visited a bar where, in the earshot of witnesses, Mihoub praised Amedy Coulibaly, the Islamist gunman who murdered four Jews at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris in Jan. 2015, as a “good guy.” When this remark was raised at the trial, Mihoub doubled down, answering: “We are not born as terrorists. He was probably a good person before.”

In the wake of Wednesday’s verdict, Daniel and Alain Knoll — Mireille Knoll’s two sons — declared themselves “relieved” by the jury’s decision.

Earlier on Wednesday, the brothers announced that they had written to France’s education minister urging that March 23 — the day of their mother’s death — be named officially as “Mireille Knoll Day.” The letter pointed out that such a commemorative day would also be an opportunity to honor other French victims of political and religious extremism, such as Father Jacques Hamel, a Catholic priest murdered by two Islamists while in his church in July 2016; Lt. Col Arnaud Beltrame, a police officer murdered during a terrorist hostage seizure just one day after Knoll’s killing in March 2018; and Samuel Paty, a Paris secondary school teacher who was decapitated by an Islamist assailant in Oct. 2020.

The hefty sentences handed down in the case of the Knoll murder contrasted acutely with the shock decision of France’s highest court last April to excuse another accused antisemitic murderer from a criminal trial.

The Court of Cassation decided that Kobili Traore — accused of killing 65-year-old Sarah Halimi during an antisemitic assault in her Paris apartment in April 2017 — could not be held as criminally responsible because of his heavy intake of cannabis in the hours before the murder. That decision led France’s main Jewish communal body, Crif, to state that “now in our country, we can torture and kill Jews with impunity.”

Jewish groups reacted positively to the sentencing of Mihoub and Carrimbacus. France’s Jewish student organization, the UEJF, said on Twitter that “the antisemitic murderer of Mireille Knoll was sentenced to life imprisonment,” adding that “in France, when you kill a Jewish grandmother, justice sentences her murderer to life.”

The American Jewish Committee tweeted that “nothing can bring [Mireille Knoll] back, but at the very least justice has been served. Our thoughts are with her family today.”

Gilles-William Goldnadel, the leading lawyer for the Knoll family, reflected on Twitter that “justice has been done and done well.”

“Yacine, the murderer with the knife, the antisemite, the admirer of Coulibaly, who had a map of Algeria [tattooed] on his chest but referred to France as ‘that f******g country,’ was sentenced to the maximum penalty,” Goldnadel continued. “Tonight, I think of Mireille Knoll.”

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Elderly French Jewish woman left traumatized after ‘anti-Semitic’ assailants hurl block into her Paris home.

By The Algemeiner

An 84-year-old Jewish woman is suffering from severe trauma after a concrete slab was hurled through a ground-floor window of her home in a suburb of Paris.

The National Office for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism (BVNCA) — an independent Jewish communal agency that works with victims of anti-Semitism — reported that the outrage occurred on Monday.

The woman, who has not been named, was watching television in her living room when the object smashed through a glass window.

The woman was not physically hurt, but she was “deeply shocked and remains traumatized,” the BVNCA said.

The BVNCA identified the attack as anti-Semitic because the woman kept a visible mezuzah on the front door of her residence.

The agency added that the woman has filed a complaint with the police.

Without divulging details, the BVNCA said it had heard from a witness to the attack that the perpetrators were “European types … probably affiliated with the leftist movement and the anti-Israeli BDS.” The Algemeiner was not able to verify this claim independently.

The victim’s home is located in Gagny, a suburb to the east of Paris that contains both a Jewish community and a larger Muslim community. Many elderly Jews in Gagny and similar neighborhoods have faced anti-Semitism on a consistent basis, ranging from verbal abuse to physical violence.

In the last three years, two elderly Jewish women in Paris — Sarah Halimi in 2017 and Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll in 2018 — have been murdered in their own homes by intruders allegedly motivated by hatred of Jews.

Interior Ministry figures published in January showed that anti-Semitic acts in France increased by 27 percent in 2019, following a leap of 74 percent the previous year. While Jews make up less than one percent of the overall French population, they were nonetheless the target of more than 40 percent of hate crimes, according to data gathered by the community’s security agency.

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Hundreds of prominent French figures signed a manifesto demanding a national fight against anti-Semitism in the European nation.

By: JNS

More than 250 major French personalities including politicians and actors have signed a manifesto denouncing a “new anti-Semitism” in France marked by “Islamist radicalisation” after a string of murders of Jews. The text was published on Sunday in several newspapers.

“We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it’s too late. Before France is no longer France,” reads the manifesto co-signed by several politicians from the left and right including ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, former Prime Minister Manuel Valls and also celebrities like actor Gerard Depardieu and singer Charles Aznavour.

The signatories condemn what they called a “quiet ethnic purging” driven by rising Islamist radicalism particularly in working-class neighborhoods. They also accused the media of remaining silent on the matter.

The country’s half-a-million-plus Jewish community is the largest in Europe but has been hit by a wave of emigration to Israel in the past two decades, partly due to the emergence of virulent anti-Semitism in predominantly immigrant neighborhoods.

“In our recent history, 11 Jews have been assassinated – and some tortured – by radical Islamists because they were Jewish,’’ they say.

“French Jews are 25 times more at risk of being attacked than their fellow Muslim citizens,” adds the manifesto.

It notes that some 50,000 Jews had been “forced to move because they were no longer in safety in certain cities and because their children could no longer go to school.”

The murders referenced include the barbaric killing of Ilan Halimi in 2006, as well as the deadly shooting of three schoolchildren and a teacher at a Jewish school by Islamist gunman Mohammed Merah in the city of Toulouse in 2012.

Three years later, in 2015, an associate of the two brothers who massacred a group of cartoonists at satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo killed four people in a hostage-taking at a kosher supermarket in Paris.

In April 2017, a Jewish woman in her sixties, Sarah Halimi, was thrown out of the window of her Paris flat by a neighbor shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (God is greatest).

The latest attack to rock France took place last month when two perpetrators stabbed 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll eleven times, before setting her body on fire.

Her brutal death sent shockwaves through France and prompted 30,000 people to join a march in her memory.

Condemning the “dreadful” killing, President Emmanuel Macron reiterated his determination to fight anti-Semitism.

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Sadly, Jessica Knoll, who lives in Israel, refused to recognize the source of the evil that ended the life of her 85-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, in Paris.

By Daniel Krygier, World Israel News

Mireille Knoll, who survived the Nazi Jew-hatred during the Holocaust, was brutally murdered in Paris recently by Islamist Jew-hatred. Sadly, in a poem, her granddaughter, Jessica Knoll, who lives in Israel, refused to recognize the source of the evil that ended her grandmother’s life.

“No, I’m not like that, I don’t generalize. I don’t hate people. I hate fanatics!” While downplaying the Muslim background of the perpetrators, Jessica Knoll lashed out at Israel’s Prime Minister with the words, “I still hate Bibi,” and claimed that life is not better in Israel than in France. In other words, Israel’s prime minister, who is in charge of defending Jewish lives, is equaled with Islamist fanatics who are bent on ending Jewish lives.

Covering the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the late leftist Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the infamous phrase “the banality of evil.” According to Arendt, Eichmann was not a fanatic but an average person who was driven by personal interests rather than ideology. This Orwellian denial of reality was contradicted by Eichmann himself, who expressed no remorse over his role as a key architect of the Holocaust. Quite the contrary. Until the very end, Eichmann passionately embraced the Nazi ideology that was the driving force behind the annihilation of six million European Jews.

Today, Islamism has replaced Nazism as the main threat to the Jewish people. Unfortunately, instead of learning from history, too many Jewish and non-Jewish “liberals” follow in the footsteps of Hannah Arendt by refusing the recognize Islamist ideology as an evil genocidal threat to Israel and the Jewish people. While it is true that most Muslims are not terrorists, it is equally true that most terrorists today are Muslims, and Jew-hatred is far more prevalent among Muslims than among non-Muslims.

The elephant in the room

Today, like yesterday, genocidal ideologies exist not in a vacuum, but in an ecosystem that nourishes it. Most Germans were not active participants during the Holocaust. However, the Holocaust was made possible due to the silent majority that either supported or ignored the Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Islamist extremists who attack Jews constitute a small minority of the world’s Muslims. However, they are part of a wider Muslim ecosystem that nourishes and justifies this fanaticism that seeks the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. This includes political and religious leaders, media and school systems throughout the Islamic world as well as within the growing Muslim communities in Western societies.

The are several reasons for the refusal by many Western liberals to recognize radical Islam as the big elephant in the room. One important reason is that an increasingly nihilist West refuses to realize that the ideology remains a key force in the Muslim world. Another reason is the emergence of post-colonial identity politics, which judges individuals based on their religious and ethnic background rather than their ideology and deeds. According to this leftist worldview, Muslims are Third World people who are eternal “victims” incapable of being perpetrators and committing evil. As long as this theatre of the absurd continues, liberals will continue obsessing about fringe right wing Jew-hatred while ignoring mainstream Muslim Jew-hatred.

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