No Justice, No Republic
3rd June 2021
The Sarah Halimi case—a brutal anti-Semitic assassination followed by an ongoing denial of justice—may be construed as the “original sin” of the current French centrist administration headed by President Emmanuel Macron.
Sarah Attal Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish retired physician and a mother of three, lived alone in a modest apartment on Vaucouleurs Street, in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, a middle- and lower-middle-class neighborhood stretching from Republic Square and Bastille Circle to Nation Circle in the center of the city. On April 4, 2017, she was attacked in the middle of the night, beaten to death, and defenestrated by a 27-year-old Malian Muslim neighbor, Kobili Traore.