Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Macron Recognizes 2003 Slaying Of French Jew As Anti-Semitic

(JTA) — French President Emmanuel Macron said that anti-Semitism was the reason for the deadly stabbing in 2003 of a young Jew whose killer was found unfit to stand trial.

Macron said this in a letter dated May 20 to Meyer Habib, a French-Jewish lawmaker who last month wrote the president to request belated recognition for Sébastien Selam, a 23-year-old DJ who was killed by his Muslim neighbor, as a victim of anti-Semitic violence.

“Recalled because of the heinous killing of Mirelle Knoll, the memory of this young Frenchman who fell a victim to the darkest of fanaticism lives on,” Macron wrote. Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, was stabbed to death in her Paris apartment on March 23. Prosecutors said a neighbor and an accomplice killed her, partly because she was Jewish.

The memory of Selam, Macron wrote, is part of “our national community, which is profoundly affected by anti-Semitic crimes like the one perpetrated against Sébastien Selam,” Macron wrote. It was the first time that a French official recognized the slaying as anti-Semitic. However, this recognition is symbolic and will not be reflected in the judiciary’s records on the case.

A French court in 2010 ruled that Selam’s killer, Adel Amastaibou, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was unable to control his actions. He was released from a psychiatric institution earlier this year, in what Habib described in his letter to Macron as an “affront” to Selam’s relatives. Meyer wrote this on Facebook on Sunday.

Witnesses said they heard Selam scream immediately after killing Selam in northern Paris: “I killed a Jew, I’m going to heaven.” He later told police investigators about the killing of Selam: “Allah willed it.”

Amastaibou was a petty criminal who became a radical Muslim.

The labelling of some violent crimes against Jews as owing to psychiatric problems has provoked widespread anger among members of that minority in France, prompting some critics to call this a cover-up by authorities or the judiciary.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.