In France, murder of a Jewish woman ignites debate over the word ‘terrorism’

What happened to Sarah Halimi resembles the plot of a horror film

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s James McAuley.

On April 4, Sarah Halimi’s dead body was hurled off her apartment balcony in northeastern Paris.

She was a 65-year-old retired doctor and schoolteacher. She was a sister, mother and grandmother. She was also an Orthodox Jew.

The man accused of killing her is 27-year-old Kobili Traoré, a Franco-Malian Muslim. He allegedly broke into her flat and beat her to death before throwing her into the courtyard below her apartment.

In the days that followed, French authorities treated Halimi’s killing as an isolated incident. Jewish leaders — and Halimi’s family — took issue with that. To them, it was an act of terror.

Neighbors testified that they heard Traoré scream “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” while allegedly attacking Halimi. They also testified that they heard him recite verses from the Koran in her apartment.

She was the only Jew living in the building, her family said.

“I want you to understand that the fight of this family is that people recognize the Islamist, anti-Semitic nature of the assassin, who massacred and killed a Jewish woman, whom he knew was a Jew and whom he knew was alone,” Halimi’s brother, William Attal, said.

More than a week ago, French President Emmanuel Macron promised — after months of saying nothing — “clarity on the death of Sarah Halimi.”

In a country that has suffered a devastating slew of attacks in recent years, that “clarity” now means far more than the gruesome details of one particular case. At stake is a set of profound questions, as political as they are existential. What makes an act of violence a “terrorist” attack? And who decides what is terrorism and what is merely murder?

French law classifies terrorism as any grave act of violence whose individual or collective intent “is to seriously disturb public order through intimidation or terror.”

Legally, it is France’s chief public prosecutor for Paris who decides whether to launch a terrorism investigation. In the Halimi case, François Molins, who occupies that position, declined to consider it as terrorism — and, initially, as an act of anti-Semitic violence.

The decision sent shock waves through the French Jewish community, which cites the Halimi affair as an example of the French state refusing to acknowledge the realities of contemporary anti-Semitism in France.

For many, it evinces a political calculus that weighs certain attacks over others.

“It’s purely and simply ideological,” said Gilles-William Goldnadel, an attorney for the Halimi family and a well-known conservative commentator for France’s Le Figaro newspaper. Of Traoré, Goldnadel added:

“He had the profile of a radical Islamist, and yet somehow there is a resistance to call a spade a spade.”

In general, the definition of the term “radical Islamist” remains a major debate in France.

The office of François Molins did not return a request for comment.

In early June, Libération, a French newspaper, gained access to the police dossier on Traoré, which suggested he had a record of petty crime and violent tendencies almost identical to those that have characterized the profiles of other terrorist suspects.

On a different level, other small-scale incidents — even ones that experts see as comparably minor — have instantly been classified as terrorism, including:

• In June, a man attacked police officers near Notre Dame cathedral in Paris with a hammer. The assailant in this case yelled, “This is for Syria!” The incident — in which no one was killed — was considered terrorism.
• The killing of a police officer on the Champs Elysées on the eve of the French election in late April.
• An attempted shooting at Paris’s Orly Airport in March.

Some security analysts suggest Halimi’s murder did not fall under the category of a terrorist act because there was no discernible motivation of public disturbance like these cases, which targeted busy thoroughfares and transit hubs.

“The simple fact that someone killed someone else because of confession or religion is not enough,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, director of the French Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based think tank. “It needs to have a certain degree of willingness to disrupt the French public order.”

In general, the wave of terrorist violence that has struck this country in the past two years has not singled out Jews as targets. But scattered instances of anti-Semitic violence have continued to be reported, with victims often identifying their assailants as North African or West African.

France is also home to one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations, a group that is repeatedly criticized across the political spectrum, particularly by the staunchly anti-immigrant National Front. Anti-Muslim violence also has become a reality of modern French life. So as not to channel that rhetoric and to condone that violence, many elected officials are loath to accuse the entirety of a diverse and sprawling community of a blanket charge as severe as anti-Semitism, analysts say.

“It comes from a very good, honorable place of not wanting to overgeneralize, but sometimes it can go too far,” said Ethan Katz, the author of an acclaimed book on the history of Jewish-Muslim relations in France and a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati.

“What’s a fair critique is that mainstream politicians have not figured out a genuine way to address, aside from security measures, the legitimate problem of anti-Semitism in France today — including in certain areas of France’s Muslim population.”