The Exoneration of Sarah Halimi’s Murderer Is about Blindness to Anti-Semitism, Not Marijuana

Two weeks ago, a French high court upheld a decision not to try Kobili Traoré for beating and then murdering Sarah Halimi, a sixty-five-year-old Jewish woman, on the grounds that he was suffering from marijuana-induced insanity. That Traoré had shouted Allahu Akbar as he threw her from her window, that he had previously called Halimi’s daughter a “dirty Jew,” and other evidence that he was motivated by religious fervor and anti-Semitism did not figure into the court’s ruling. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has responded by calling for changes to the country’s laws regarding drug-use and criminal insanity. While doing so might be salutary, Melanie Phillips argues that it won’t make French Jews safer: