France’s highest court has ruled that a man who savagely attacked and killed his Jewish neighbor by throwing her out of the window of her Paris flat was not criminally responsible as he had smoked a large amount of marijuana, and therefore will not stand on trial.
The decision sparked outrage and shock from the local and global Jewish community, with many Twitter and Facebook users taking to social media to express their disgust at the atrocious miscarriage of justice.
However, virtually the entire media has elected to turn a blind eye to this grave injustice, with the result being zero mainstream coverage. To date, only Jewish news outlets and French media have touched the story.
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On Wednesday, the Court of Cassation, the highest court in the French judiciary, upheld a 2019 Paris court decision that Kobili Traoré, who in 2017 broke into the home of his 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish neighbor, Sarah Halimi, before proceeding to beat and then kill her, was not fit to stand trial.
The police reports of the incident documents claims that Traoré shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic) before throwing her out of the balcony of her home in a clearly antisemitic crime. However, because Traoré had consumed a significant quantity of marijuana, the court ruled that he could not be held responsible for his actions.
The media serve the critical role of keeping our public officials honest, and exposing injustice where it occurs. It is HonestReporting’s role to keep the media honest, and ensure that the public can trust news coverage, safe in the knowledge that it fully, fairly and accurately reflects developments so that injustice is not allowed to occur unchecked.
The lack of coverage on a matter so serious constitutes a widespread media failure to take antisemitism seriously, and to pose hard questions of those in power. It also suggests that such a risible court decision is legitimate, and will embolden those who seek to attack Jews.
It's now been 24 hours. We've checked the following news outlets:@NYTimes@CNN@BBC@WashingtonPost @LATimes @BostonGlobe @Guardian @TheTimes
Not a single one of these news outlets has reported this story.
This is an outrageous, widespread failure of journalism. https://t.co/JSE0xc08dw
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) April 15, 2021
(Update, 18 April: A day after this media critique was published, the New York Times subsequently published an article covering this tragic story.)
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Featured image: Courtesy of Halimi family
