The specter of the beheaded teacher Samuel Paty continues to haunt France’s public education system, which the prime minister deems under threat from Islamist infiltration.
Each provocation by Muslim students reminds teachers in France of the fate of Samuel Paty, killed in October 2020 for having shown caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. Last month, the director of a High School in Paris resigned after a spat with a pupil refusing to take off her headscarf. She immediately mounted a campaign against him on social media which led to death threats and his “early retirement.” “Of course this reminds us of what happened to Samuel Paty after a similar smear campaign,” according to a teacher at the school.
Pointing this out can lead to well-worn accusations of “exploiting personal tragedies for political ends” and “criminalizing immigrants.”
Just as had been the case with Paty, this chain of events had started with a lie. The girl in question had accused the school principal of hitting her and tearing at her clothing, which, according to witnesses, was completely untrue. The director had merely reminded the veiled 18-year-old of the law, passed in 2004, which forbids the wearing on school grounds of “ostentatious clothing of a religious nature.”
At the time, legislators stressed that this also applies to the kippa and the “catholic” cross, but nobody was fooled. In fact, the law is to prevent French public schools from resembling those in Saudi-Arabia and Iran. (READ MORE from René ter Steege: Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s Crown Prince)
These days, the director of an elementary school in the small town of Neuilly-sur-Marne went on sick leave after being called “Islamophobic” by parents and others upset by the possible introduction of strictly secular school uniforms. The director, Nicolas Bourez, who has held the job for fifteen years, told Le Figaro newspaper that he no longer feels safe. “We know where accusations of Islamophobia can lead to. Now more than ever, I think about Samuel Paty,” he said, his voice on the verge of breaking.
Samuel Paty’s death has been extensively documented in the book Les derniers jours de Samuel Paty — The Last Days of Samuel Paty. In it, the writer and journalist Stéphane Simon retraces Mr. Paty’s fate, starting with a lesson on the freedom of expression. In it, he showed the 13- and 14-year-old pupils some of the Muhammad cartoons published by the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo.
In January 2015, Islamist terrorists had massacred almost its entire staff out of revenge for lampooning the prophet of Islam. Mr. Paty, in his school in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, 25 miles north-west of Paris, offered his pupils a choice. Those wo feared the cartoons would shock them could leave the classroom for a while. Some of them did, most stayed.
The lesson ended without incident, but the next day the school was rife with rumors. Monsieur Paty, one of his pupils alleged, had expelled all Muslims to show the others what the girl said was a “disgusting picture of our beloved prophet.” This was a lie, and the girl in question, Zora, wasn’t even in Mr. Paty’s class that day. She had been suspended for two days for unruly behavior. To hide this from her Muslim parents, she invented the story that she had scolded Monsieur Paty for ridiculing Muhammad. And got expelled for it. The parents believed her, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, and started petitions online demanding that this “scoundrel” be sacked.
Before he knew it, the teacher had become a hate figure for many Muslims in France. The death threats become more and more credible, but the authorities, the author of the book alleges, failed to take them seriously. Mr. Paty, 47 years old, separated from his wife, also a teacher, father of a young son, cut an ever lonelier figure. Some of his fellow teachers chided him for putting all of them in danger of a terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, an immigrant’s son from Chechnya, Abdoullakh Anzorov, had contacted Zora’s father whose online rants against Paty, aided by a self-styled “imam,” became more hysterical by the day. This 18-year- old would-be jihadist and small-time criminal travelled to Mr. Paty’s school and asked pupils waiting outside to point him out in exchange for 300 euros. They gladly agreed. Anzorov then started to follow the teacher who made his way home on foot, covering nearly all of his face with a hood and a face mask, as was his habit since the shitstorm had started a few days earlier. Anzorov killed him with a knife on a quiet street and used another knife to cut off the teacher’s head. He was shot dead by police officers a few minutes later. He had managed to post a picture of Paty’s severed head to his jihadist contact in Syria, who he had hoped to soon join.
It is difficult to grasp the shock waves caused by Paty’s death in a country still reeling from the Islamic terror attacks in 2015, first at Charlie Hebdo, then on the music hall Bataclan and the surrounding restaurants and cafés. That chilly autumn evening in 2020, it took a while for France to realize that in Mr. Paty, the terrorist had attacked a symbol of the French Republic, where public education and religion are strictly separated. Originally aimed at reducing the Catholic grip on education, this principle of laïcité now counters efforts by Muslims to impose their views.
France honored Mr. Paty with a state funeral, president Emmanuel Macron spoke movingly and in government circles firm words were spoken in favor of the defense of the laïcité. This did not stop certain Muslims from continuing to subvert its principles, by edging on girls to defy the ban on the abaya and other banned forms of “Islamic” clothing. (READ MORE: Dutch Citizens Reject Anti-Racist Saint Nicholas Celebrations)
In 2023, nearly three years to the day of Paty’s assassination, a teacher at a lycée in the northern town of Arras was stabbed to death by a former pupil of the same school, the son of Muslim immigrants from Ingushetia, a country bordering Chechnya. The suspect, quickly overpowered, said he had been looking for a teacher of history and geography, as Samuel Paty had been. He settled for Dominique Bernard, a beloved teacher of French language and literature.
The French political establishment is loath to establish a link between Islamic terrorism and the country’s “completely mad immigration policy over the last four decades,” in the words of Jordan Bardella, the main leader of the nationalist right. However, one has to be willfully blind to ignore the connection. The parents of Paty’s killer said they had fled Chechnya fearing for their lives, but had returned there after a stay in Poland before moving on to France. So much for the danger in their homeland. Journalist Stéphane Simon notes that French immigration authorities had serious doubts about the Anzorov’s asylum claims, but accepted them nonetheless. France belatedly expelled the whole clan after it emerged that Paty’s murderer had received a hero’s burial in his parents’ home town in Chechnya.
After being expelled from France, the father of Dominique Bernard’s alleged assassin continued to pour scorn on France for “despising Islam,” forbidding Islamic dress in schools and allowing the publication of cartoons of Muhammed. Which begs the question: why seek asylum in such a horrible place? If France had rejected the unconvincing asylum claims of these Chechnyan and Ingushetian faux refugees, Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard may have escaped their horrible fate.
Pointing this out can lead to well-worn accusations of “exploiting personal tragedies for political ends” and “criminalizing immigrants.” Well, some of them are indeed accused of, or condemned for, horrible crimes. As in April, when the son of Afghan immigrants allegedly stabbed to death a 15-year-old French schoolboy in the town of Châteauroux. In Bordeaux, shortly before, another Afghan had knifed to death an Arab, and seriously injured another, for drinking beer in a park. Policemen shot and killed him. Both Afghan suspects are in France legally, French authorities were quick to point out, no doubt keen to avoid criticism of being soft on illegal immigration.
Calling Islam a potential threat to French society was until very recently beyond the pale for politicians from both left and right. Prime minister Gabriel Attal, a member of the Socialist Party before joining Emmanuel Macron’s camp, broke this taboo the other day. Commenting on the latest threats against teachers, he vowed to fight “Islamist infiltration” and efforts “to import sharia law into our schools.” Nearly four years after the murder of Samuel Paty, the battle goes on.
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