Members of the French Jewish community expressed shock and horror last week after the premier of a play about Mohammed Merah, a French Islamist who shot and killed four Jews in a 2012 terror attack.
According to Israel National News, the play, entitled, “I Love Death as You Love Life,” focused on the last few hours prior to Merah’s death during a standoff with police several days after the massacre of school children Myriam Monsonégo and Arié and Gabriel Sandler in the Otsar HaTorah school in Toulouse. Arié and Gabriel’s father Yonaton was also killed. 
The play is “a disgrace and an ignominy” and an "enterprise of justification being falsely presented under the alibi of artistic expression," said Ariel Goldmann, Vice President of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), an umbrella organization representing organized French Jewry and an affiliate of the World Jewish Congress.
While the Jewish community has protested at what they see as the humanization of a monster, the play’s author countered that rather than justifying Merah’s actions, his work constituted "an interrogation about a monster created by society.”
The French Jewish community has been up in arms in recent weeks, alleging that their government of covering up the anti-Semitic motives of a more recent deadly attack on a Jewish woman out of political considerations.
In April, Sarah Halimi was thrown from a window in Paris. As she fell to her death, her murderer screamed “Allahu akbar.”
Kobili Traore, the murderer, had a history of antipathy toward Jews in general and his victim in particular. Only two years before the assault, he called Halimi’s daughter a “dirty Jew.” But when he was arrested he was temporarily institutionalized as he had claimed temporary insanity and, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, there was no reference to possible hate crime charges in the criminal indictment.
Immediately after the murder, Joel Mergui, the President of the Consistoire (the Israelite Central Consistory of France), said that he refused “to accept the convenient pretext of madness for a murderer who tried to make the victim look like a suicide case in front of witnesses who were powerless to act” and called on the police to “to look into the anti-Semitic character of this murder.”
Jewish organizations have said that they have received little to no information on the ongoing investigation.
In an op-ed in Le Figaro, CRIF President Francis Kalifat wrote "there is evidence that this is a textbook case of an anti-Semitic murder, but it is being covered up by an ‘omerta’ and this heinous crime has not been recognized for what it is."
“Our society is struggling to confront this new reality and to recognize the obviousness of naming evil when it comes to a Jewish victim," he said.
