(JTA) — A 69-year-old Jewish man wearing a kippah was assaulted in Paris by a young Arab man who shouted about Allah and Hitler.
In Tuesday’s incident, the alleged assailant hit the Jewish man, pushed him to the ground and dragged him by his hair while shouting “Alla hu akbar, long live Hitler, death to the Jews,” the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, or BNVCA, wrote in a statement Wednesday. The call in Arabic means “Allah is the greatest.”
Police apprehended the suspected assailant, the report said. A police physician recommended transferring the suspect to a psychiatric institution for observation because he was in a “state of over-excitement,” according to the information received by BNVCA.
It was the third time this year that French police sent a man who displayed violent behavior toward Jews for psychiatric evaluation.
BNVCA said it “again deplores that a violent anti-Semite citing Islamism evades judicial treatment because he presents himself as having mental problems which should not and cannot explain or excuse his actions.” Such treatment is “absurd,” the group said.
The victim suffered minor injuries to his head and filed a complaint for assault with police, BNVCA said. The assault came as the man was entering a kosher bakery.
In May, a man who shouted about Allah outside a Paris-region Jewish school and accused the people inside of killing children was sent for psychiatric observation. In April, a 20-year-old man who brandished a weapon at a Holocaust museum in western France also was hospitalized at a psychiatric institution.
Earlier this month, the suspect in the alleged murder of a Jewish physician in Paris was deemed not responsible for his actions in a second psychiatric evaluation ordered by a judge even though the defense did not request it. The suspect, Traore Kobili, is scheduled to have a third evaluation to determine his ability to stand trial for the murder of Sarah Halimi in April 2017. He is alleged to have beaten her to death while calling her a demon and shouting about Allah before throwing her body from the window of her third-story apartment.
“We do not understand the determination and procrastination that consistently seeks to turn this killer into a demented person, when he is a murderer whose presumed detention doesn’t even hide his hateful anti-Semitism,” Francis Kalifat, the president of the CRIF group of French Jewish communities, wrote about the ordering of the evaluations.
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