A case that I have been following periodically for quite some time now is the 2022 murder of the elderly jew Rene Hadjadj by the Arab immigrant Rachid Kheniche in the city of Lyon, France. Jews have been shrieking that it was ‘motivated by anti-Semitism’ since the very start of this case (1) and as I usually do with such cases where we are not privy by their nature to most of the evidence; I held my tongue and waited to see what would come out because in such instances things usually do after the initial flurry of Torah thumping from the jews and their media organizations.
My patience paid dividends – as patience often does – as the facts of the case substantially disproved an ‘anti-Semitic motivation’ behind Kheniche’s murder of Hadjadj and the jews who were ‘sure it was motivated by anti-Semitism’ were revealed to have based that claim on next to no evidence whatsoever.
As Shirli Sitbon wrote in the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ on February 10th 2026:
‘A man who threw his 89-year-old Jewish neighbour from the 17th-floor of an apartment block in Lyon has been convicted of murder.
Rachid Kheniche, 55, invited René Hadjadj to his apartment in May 2022 before trying to strangle his victim and throwing him over a balcony of the building where both men resided.
Kheniche, who had published dozens of posts online that repeated antisemitic conspiracy theories, was charged with aggravated murder and had faced life imprisonment, but the Assize Court of Rhône rejected the claim that he was motivated by antisemitism.
Instead, Kheniche, a heroin and cocaine addict who said he was having a paranoid attack on the day of the murder, faced life imprisonment if the aggravating circumstance of antisemitism had been taken into account, but was instead handed a 18-year prison sentence.
Asked why he killed his neighbour, Kheniche said his “illness”, which was diagnosed after the murder, was to blame.
“I don’t know what happened. He was like a father to me.” he told the court.
Kheniche underwent two psychiatric assessments, with one concluding the killer suffered from psychotic paranoia, and the other suggesting he had severe personality disorders.
Prior to the murder Kheniche had posted dozens of times about about people he branded “sayanim” – a term used by conspiracy theorists to denote those they suspect of being Mossad agents.
However, the presiding judge said, this behaviour was not directly connected to the murder itself.
Immediately after pushing Hajaj to his death, the killer took an identification document and a page written in Hebrew that he found in the victim’s coat pocket inside the apartment and cut them up, the judge noted.
The judge said: “Had he thrown away the religious books and other Jewish objects and symbols found in the apartment this might have constituted evidence. But, she said, “that is not what happened.”
Alain Jakubowicz, a lawyer representing a Jewish umbrella group, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, and the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism, both civil parties in the case, told the court that Kheniche was “obsessed with Judaism”.’ (2)
Basically, Kheniche was a cocaine and heroin addict who had – possibly as the result of his apparently quite severe drug addiction – developed psychotic delusions and/or a severe personality disorder which then led him to become paranoid about his friend Hadjadj resulting in Kheniche believing that Hadjadj was part of Mossad’s Sayanim network – Sitbon implies this is a conspiracy theory when it is in fact based on the 1990 book titled ‘By Way of Deception’ by a former Mossad operative named Victor Ostrovsky and widely credited to be real by historians and writers on the Mossad – which then caused Kheniche in his delusional/psychotic state to throw Hadjadj off the balcony and thus murder him.
There is no ‘anti-Semitism’ involved there in any way, shape or form as Kheniche didn’t even vandalise the jewish books and symbols in Hadjadj’s apartment after he had murdered him, which therefore strongly suggests that the murder was the result of Kheniche’s delusions not because Kheniche ‘was an anti-Semite’.
Scratch another ‘anti-Semitic hate crime’!
References
(1) For example: https://www.thejc.com/news/world/french-police-will-open-antisemitism-probe-into-killing-of-jewish-man-89-after-u-turn-hv5rednv; https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/05/23/dont-exclude-antisemitic-motive-in-investigation-of-french-jewish-mans-brutal-killing-community-urges/; https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-885243
(2) https://www.thejc.com/news/world/france-rene-hadjadj-rachid-kheniche-murder-lyon-antisemitism-v7fjfkir
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