Excerpt:
Last April, Traore Kobili threw his Jewish neighbor to her death from her third-story home in Paris while calling her a demon and shouting about Allah. French authorities waited 170 days before they declared the killing of Sarah Halimi an anti-Semitic hate crime — and that was after unprecedented lobbying by French Jewish groups.
“We need to let the judiciary do its job,” Magali Lafourcade, president of the French government’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, said in an interview at the height of the campaign, which united Jewish organizations across the political spectrum.
Nearly a year after that incident, a similar case prompted authorities to do the job a lot faster. The murder of Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor who was stabbed and set on fire allegedly by a Muslim neighbor on March 23, swiftly led to an indictment against her neighbor and an alleged accomplice on murder and hate crime charges.