Tens of thousands of French people march in Paris to protest against antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot

A French court on Thursday tossed out antisemitism-motivated charges against a woman convicted of assaulting three Jewish students in a group attack in 2024, in what appears to be yet another instance of France’s legal system brushing aside antisemitism.

The Correctional Tribunal of Strasbourg, in eastern France, handed one defendant a four-month suspended prison sentence — meaning she will not serve the term unless she violates conditions set by the court — and ordered her to pay $2,000 in damages to the three Jewish students for her role in the brutal assault.

Instead, had the court recognized antisemitism as an aggravating circumstance, the maximum sentence could have reached three years in prison, although the judge would still have had discretion to impose a lesser penalty.

The court also acquitted another defendant of assault charges despite testimony from the victims describing her involvement, as well as an audio recording from the incident that appears to capture others telling her to calm down.

In 2024, the two defendants saw a group of Jewish students removing and painting over anti-Israel graffiti at the University of Strasbourg before allegedly texting a group of men and directing them to the scene to confront the students.

At that moment, a group of four men appeared at the scene wearing balaclavas before launching a brutal attack on the three friends — a Jewish man identified as Arthur and his twin sisters, Haya and Shterna — beating them to the ground and calling them “dirty Zionists” as the assault unfolded.

To this date, local police have been unable to identify or locate the four attackers.

The Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF) strongly condemned the court’s decision, calling it “scandalous” and warning that the ruling raises further questions about how antisemitic violence is treated by the French justice system.

“What else needs to happen so we can name antisemitism?” UEJF said in a statement.

This is far from the first case in France to spark such alarm, as courts have repeatedly overturned or reduced sentences for individuals accused of antisemitic crimes, fueling public outrage over what many see as excessive leniency.

In one of the latest cases, a French court tossed out antisemitism-motivated charges against 55-year-old Rachid Kheniche, who was convicted of murdering his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor in 2022, after rejecting the claim that the killing was motivated by the victim’s religion.

According to French media, the magistrate of the public prosecutor’s office refused to consider the defendant’s prior antisemitic behavior, including online posts spreading hateful content, and promoting conspiracy theories about Jews and Israelis, arguing that it was not directly related to the incident itself.

In May 2022, Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building, an act to which he later admitted.

According to the police investigation, Kheniche and his neighbor were having a discussion when the conflict escalated. 

At the time, he told investigators that he had tried to strangle Hadjadj but did not realize what he was doing, as he was experiencing a paranoid episode caused by prior drug use.

After several psychiatric evaluations, the court concluded that the defendant was mentally impaired at the time of the crime, reducing his criminal responsibility and lowering the maximum sentence for murder to 20 years.

Kheniche was ultimately sentenced to 18 years in prison and six years of “socio-judicial monitoring.”

In another case last year, the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, just west of Paris, appealed a criminal court ruling that cleared a nanny of antisemitism-aggravated charges after she poisoned the food and drinks of the Jewish family she worked for.

Residing illegally in France, the nanny had worked as a live-in caregiver for the family and their three children — aged two, five, and seven — since November 2023.

The 42-year-old Algerian woman was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “administering a harmful substance that caused incapacitation for more than eight days.”

Even though the nanny initially denied the charges against her, she later confessed to police that she had poured a soapy lotion into the family’s food as a warning because “they were disrespecting her.”

“They have money and power, so I should never have worked for a Jewish woman — it only brought me trouble,” the nanny told the police at the time. “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.”

The French court declined to uphold any antisemitism charges against the defendant, noting that her incriminating statements were made several weeks after the incident and recorded by a police officer without a lawyer present

In another shocking case last year, a local court in France dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted of the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”

More than a year after the attack, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure.

The original sentences, handed down in June, gave the two boys — who were 13-years-old at the time of the incident — seven and nine years in prison, respectively, after they were convicted on charges of group rape, physical violence, and death threats aggravated by antisemitic hatred.