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Samuel Paty was brutally murdered on his way home from the school where he taught in a northwestern suburb of Paris on Friday afternoon.
People gather as one person holds a cover of the French satirical weekly ‘Charlie Hebdo’ reading ‘All this, just for that’, Place du Capitole in Toulouse on October 18, 2020, in tribute to history teacher Samuel Paty two days after his beheading by an attacker who was shot and killed by police officers. Image: AFP.
PARIS – Thousands of people demonstrated in central Paris on Sunday in a defiant show of solidarity with a teacher who was beheaded for showing students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Protesters in the Place de la Republique held up posters reading: “No to the totalitarianism of thought” and “I am a teacher” in memory of the murdered colleague Samuel Paty.
“Do not scare us. We are not afraid. You will not divide us. We are France!” tweeted Prime Minister Jean Castex, who was among those gathered at the historic protest site.
Castex was accompanied by the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and the Minister of the Interior, Marlene Schiappa, who said they were there “in support of teachers, secularism, freedom of expression. “.
Some in the crowd chanted “I am Samuel”, echoing the cry of “I am Charlie” that traveled the world after Islamist gunmen killed 12 people in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 for publishing cartoons of the prophet. Islamic.
To applause, others recited: “Freedom of speech, freedom of teaching.”
“I am here as a teacher, as a mother, as a French and as a Republican,” said participant Virginie.
The 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack unleashed a wave of Islamist violence and forced France to engage in a national discussion about the place of Islam in a secular society.
After the massacre of the magazine, around 1.5 million people gather in the same Place de la Republique in support of freedom of expression.
‘THINGS HAVE TO CHANGE’
Local authorities said about 6,000 people gathered in Lyon, eastern France, on Sunday.
“The entire educational community is affected, and beyond it, society as a whole,” said the representative of the teachers’ union Bernard Deswarte in Toulouse, where an estimated 5,000 have gathered.
Hundreds more gathered in Nice, on the south coast, where a man rammed a truck into a crowd on a national holiday of July 14, 2016, killing 86 people.
“Everyone is in danger today,” said student Valentine Mule, 18, who was attending the Nice rally.
“Things have to change.”
Demonstrations were also planned for other cities.
Paty was brutally murdered while returning home from the school where he taught in a northwestern suburb of Paris on Friday afternoon.
On Saturday, counter-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said Paty had been threatened online for showing the cartoons to her civics class.
Representations of the prophet are considered taboo in Islam.
On the mobile phone of his murderer, 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov from Chechen, shot a photo of the professor and a message in which he confessed to his murder.
Witnesses said the suspect was seen at the school on Friday asking students where he could find Paty.
ONLINE CAMPAIGN
The father of a schoolgirl had launched an online call for “mobilization” against the teacher and had requested his expulsion from the school.
The girl’s father and a known Islamist militant are among those arrested, along with four members of Anzorov’s family.
An eleventh person was detained on Sunday, a judicial source said, without providing details.
The aggrieved father had named Paty and given the school’s address in a social media post just days before the beheading that President Emmanuel Macron has called an Islamist terror attack.
Ricard did not say if the attacker had any ties to the school or if he had acted independently in response to the online campaign.
The Russian embassy in Paris said Anzorov’s family came to France from Chechnya when he was six years old to apply for asylum.
Locals in the Norman town of Evreux, where the attacker lived, described him as low-key and said he got into fights as a child but calmed down as he became increasingly religious in recent years.
Friday’s attack was the second of its kind since a trial began last month for the Charlie Hebdo murders.
The magazine republished the controversial cartoons in the run-up to the trial, and last month a young Pakistani wounded two people with a butcher knife outside Charlie Hebdo’s former office.
‘DOING YOUR JOB’
On Saturday, hundreds of students, teachers, parents and lovers flocked to Paty’s school to lay white roses.
“For the first time, a teacher was attacked for what he teaches,” said a colleague from a neighboring town who gave only his first name, Lionel.
According to his school, Paty had given Muslim children the option of leaving the classroom before he showed the cartoons, saying that he did not want to hurt their feelings.
And Kamel Kabtane, rector of the Lyon mosque and a high-ranking Muslim figure, told AFP on Sunday that Paty was simply “doing her job” and had been “respectful” in doing so.
The ministers who make up France’s defense council will meet later Sunday to discuss the Islamist threat.
A national tribute will be held for Paty on Wednesday.
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