Not great

More on the murder of Mireille Knoll:

An 85-year-old woman who as a child narrowly escaped France’s most notorious wartime roundup of Jews has been murdered in Paris, and the authorities are calling it a hate crime.

The body of the woman, Mireille Knoll, was found on Friday in her apartment in the city’s working-class 11th Arrondissement.

Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

That’s the building – an ordinary council block.

Ms. Knoll was a child in Paris when, in the summer of 1942, the French police, cooperating with the Germans, rounded up thousands of the city’s Jews, stuffing them into a cycling stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Virtually all were subsequently murdered at Auschwitz.

Ms. Knoll’s mother, summoned to the stadium like other Parisian Jews, was able to escape at the last minute with her daughter because she had a Brazilian passport, said Meyer Habib, a member of Parliament who has spoken with one of Ms. Knoll’s sons.

A number of anti-Semitic episodes have shaken France, including the murder last year of Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jewish woman, by a man of Malian origin who shouted, “God is great” before throwing her out a window.

If God were really great, God wouldn’t inspire people to murder elderly women while shouting about how great God is. The God in that sentence is evil.

Other anti-Semitic crimes that have rattled France include the 2015 attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris by Amedy Coulibaly, a heavily armed Frenchman, who killed four people, and the 2012 assault on a Jewish school in Toulouse by Mohammed Merah, who killed three children and a teacher after killing three soldiers.

Coulibaly was working with the Kouachi brothers, who slaughtered 12 people in and near the offices of Charlie Hebdo. There’s video of one of them shouting “Allahu akbar” in the street shortly before killing a cop…who happened to be Muslim.

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