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Samuel Paty was a history teacher and wanted to teach his students what freedom of expression meant. At the beginning of October he showed his eighth graders at the “Collège du Bois d’Aulne” caricatures of Mohammed. Political drawings with potential for impact, especially for Muslims, but not only for Muslims. Drawings that have served Islamists for years as a pretext to kill people in France and elsewhere.
Paty, 47, wanted to teach her students that such a thing must be endured because freedom of expression, including freedom from religious blasphemy, is a fundamental value of French democracy. From the attack on the editorial office of the satirical magazine Charlie hebdo In January 2015, the French Ministry of Education urged teachers to include these values in their lessons.
Late on Friday afternoon, the fall break had just started, Paty was murdered on the way home; It seems like he was doing exactly that. A man armed with a 35-centimeter long kitchen knife cut the father’s throat in the middle of the street, very close to the Bois-d’Aulne institute in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a suburb about 30 kilometers northwest of Paris.
“One of our fellow citizens was killed because he campaigned for freedom of expression among schoolchildren,” President Emmanuel Macron said when he visited the crime scene on Friday night. The head of state seemed uncomfortable and was quick to compromise: the teacher had “clearly been the victim of an Islamist terrorist attack.” The attacker Abdoullakh A., an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen origin, was already dead at this time, shot dead by a police force. He lived with his parents in the town of Evreux in Normandy. That’s about 100 kilometers from the crime scene.
The attack once again shakes France. Some questions about the stability of the base, on which all citizens must lean, are now particularly worrying the country: Was it the ideal terrain for a fanatical killer of people who do not accept the values of the republic when these values supposedly enter conflict with Islam advises? Specifically: What role has the protest that the parents of Muslim students had brought to the school administration and put on the Internet in the days after Paty’s controversial cartoon lessons?
Macron: “They will not divide us”
The Conflans-Sainte-Honorine murder is one of the most symbolically and emotionally charged acts in the long series of murders France has experienced over the years. The attack hits the country in the heart. The fatal attack on a teacher is like an assassination attempt against the school as an institution, the founding of the republic, which in the French understanding of the state ensures the democratic integration of people of all origins and religions. “You shall not pass,” Macron says, and it sounds like a charm. “They will not divide us.”
The mood in the country is already depressed by the corona pandemic, as this weekend the rights to freedom have been restricted by a night curfew in the big cities. Now Islamist terror is back, costing 259 lives in France since 2015. Conflans’ cruel act reminds the French that the threat of terrorism from within, which Corona pushed aside, remains high.
The fact that people keep killing or at least trying to kill in the name of Islam. Also people who had not been noticed by the police as radicalized and those who do not need any guidance from foreign terrorist organizations such as the so-called Islamic State (IS) or al-Qaida to act. Just three weeks ago, a man from Pakistan came to the former editorial offices of Charlie hebdo Two people seriously injured with an ax. In his interrogations, he declared that he wanted to protest against the reissue of the Muhammad cartoons. The satirical sheet had the drawings at the beginning of the Charlie-Hebdo-The currently running process was reprinted.
It is not uncommon for Islamism and social media to interact in the worst possible way in attacks. This is the case with the alleged assassination attempt at Conflans-Saint-Honorine.
In his class, Samuel Paty drew cartoons Charlie hebdo It is shown, reported the Paris antiterrorist prosecutor Jean-François Ricard his first investigation results in the velvet afternoon. “The theme of the lesson was freedom of expression and its limits,” says Ricard. One of the drawings showed Muhammad naked, the prophet crouched on the ground in prayer, his buttocks extended and covered with a star. Above it says: “Muhammad: A star has come out.”
In the days that followed, several parents contacted the school administration to complain about Paty’s cartoon lessons. One father was particularly outraged. He asked the school principal to fire Paty and even filed a complaint with the police for the alleged dissemination of pornography in class. Above all, this father of a 13-year-old schoolgirl posted several videos on Facebook and YouTube to denounce Paty. In it, he called Paty a “delinquent” and asked to distribute the recordings. Y: In one of your video messages, the man gives the exact address of the high school, the name of Samuel Patys, and yells, in a cryptic but unmistakable way, to punish the teacher.
Apparently the killer knew the video. In any case, as of Friday at noon, according to the prosecutor, he was waiting in front of the institute to watch Paty. He had never seen the teacher, he did not know what Paty was like, but she had her name thanks to the video of the outraged father. “A. asked several students in front of the exit to show him Paty,” Ricard said. Until he found the master he would take revenge on.
A. was born in Moscow in 2002 and the French authorities had not yet noticed him as a radicalized Muslim. But just as violent. A half sister Ace joined the Islamic State in Syria in 2014 and is wanted by the French authorities. In Conflans, according to witnesses, Paty’s killer shouted “Allahu Akbar” on Friday. A task force shot him down with nine shots when police tried to catch him. The man threatened officers with a knife, according to prosecutor Ricard, and was carrying other weapons, including a so-called airsoft rifle.
Shortly after the attack, A. posted a gruesome message on the short message service Twitter. It showed Paty’s severed head. It is about revenge against the one “who dared to humiliate Mohammed,” the murderer wrote in the message, in which he also referred to President Macron as the “leader of the infidels.” The Twitter account was quickly blocked.
Investigators are now looking for possible accomplices or accomplices. Police had arrested nine people on Saturday morning. Among them are the parents and grandparents of the perpetrator. The student’s father, who posted his anger video online, is also being questioned.
Teaching becomes a test of courage
France is deeply insecure, especially its teachers, it would be too understandable. The murder of colleague Paty looks like mass intimidation, according to French educational associations. He asks who should now take the test of courage to teach the principles of freedom of the republic. For years, teachers in France have been faced time and again with parents who forbid their children to participate in physical education or biology classes on religious grounds.
This is what Macron calls “Islamist separatism.” Just a few days ago, the president delivered a keynote address on how he intends to counter these secessionist tendencies in his own country. After the bloody act of Conflans, he and his ministers now constantly assure the teachers of the solidarity that the whole country has for them. Liberal imams condemn the attack and declare that the Muhammad cartoons are, of course, compatible with Islam.
In Conflans-Saint-Honorine and in many other places in the country, people gather to commemorate Paty. A rally is scheduled for this Sunday in Paris, at the Place de la République. Of course, a political battle of interpretation over the attack has been raging for some time: Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National party, calls for Islamism to be “expelled from our country by force”, as if it were not also a homemade product of French society itself. .
Macron wants Samuel Paty to be honored as a hero at a state ceremony next week. “The obscurantism and violence will not win,” says the head of state. It is in the middle of the fight against separatism.
