Connor Norton - The brutal killing of a Holocaust survivor raises anti-Semitism fears in France

A brutal murder last Friday has left France's Jewish community on edge after 85-year-old Mireille Knoll was stabbed 11 times and left to die in her burning apartment, likely the victim of a horrendous hate crime. Jewish advocacy groups have been quick to point out the very possible anti-Semitic motivations for such an attack especially in the changing political climate in Europe, now marked by historical revisionism and the rise of neo-Nazi or otherwise racist individuals in some countries. This has also been put into context with the April 2017 murder of 66-year-old Sarah Halimi, a Jewish schoolteacher beaten to death and thrown out her window, allegedly by a neighbor family recall as having used racial slurs and derogatory names/actions in the past when interacting with people of the Jewish faith. Jewish officials have seemed hesitant to suspect hate-crime motivations for both of these cases, to the outrage of Jewish leaders and advocacy groups and against growing public pressure to acknowledge such intentions as possible if not proven. This news comes a few years after the slaying of another Jewish man for clearly racist reasons and amid calls for reason in these times of heightened racial tension coming from Europe's most famous Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.

This ties in America to the Charleston Church shooting in 2015 in which white supremacist Dylan Roof murdered nine people during worship in hopes of starting a race war, carrying out the most deadly shooting at a place of worship from its occurrence until 2017 when it was surpassed by the shooting at Sutherland Springs. The obvious connection here is that both of these were crimes with very real and very terrifying racist motivations, racism held so passionately by these perpetrators that it led them to commit the most abhorrent, ultimate crime of taking the lives of other human beings. Dylan Roof may have been sentenced to capital punishment in federal court for his crimes, and French authorities are currently investigating the murders outlined above, but racial tensions still exist very prominently in both French and American society, and to expect the sentencing of our worst criminals to "cure" racism without the accompanying re-examination of the systemic issues giving them hate and giving them the power to kill another out of hate is a fool's errand.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/frances-jewish-leaders-raise-the-alarm-over-brutal-murder-of-holocaust-survivor/2018/03/26/28cf8686-30f4-11e8-8abc-22a366b72f2d_story.html?utm_term=.485f07c76917