‘License to kill Jews?’ France’s chief rabbi slams exoneration of drug-addled killer

Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia excoriated the French justice system for excusing from trial the man who confessed to beating and throwing Jewish woman Sarah Halimi from her window – because he’d smoked too much marijuana.

Demanding to know “how deliberately taking considerable quantities of drugs exonerates an individual from responsibility,” Korsia called on the justice department to reinstate charges against Halimi’s confessed killer, Kobili Traore. In an open letter to Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet in Le Figaro on Wednesday, the rabbi demanded the prosecutor repair the “grave breach of trust” in the system by affirming Traore’s guilt and impose a respective sentence.

“Should it be inferred from this decision that every drug-addicted individual is licensed to kill Jews?” Korsia asked, pointing out that if consuming vast quantities of cannabis “exacerbated [Traore’s] anti-Semitic impulses, it means these impulses already existed!”

Traore confessed during a preliminary hearing to brutalizing and defenestrating Halimi, who lived in the same housing project, after breaking into her apartment on April 4, 2017.

Neighbors who called the police on hearing her cries for help also heard Traore shouting “Allahu akbar” and “Shaitan” (Satan) as he pummeled the woman for nearly an hour.

And Halimi had told relatives she was afraid of him after he called her daughter a “dirty Jewess” when they passed on the building’s staircase just weeks before the murder.

But the Paris Appeals Court on December 19 upheld a ruling excusing the 29-year-old from trial after two psychiatric assessments found he had suffered a “delusional episode” from excessive cannabis consumption.

While the court maintained Traore had “voluntarily” ended Halimi’s life, and included anti-Semitism in its determination of motive, it nevertheless declined to proceed to trial. Instead of imprisonment, Traore will be sent to a drug rehab program or hospitalized for treatment of his psychotic lapses, according to AFP.

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