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Confusing, sometimes contradictory messages have risen from the tide of outrage over the murder of French school teacher Samuel Paty.
Paty was stabbed and beheaded by a Chechen immigrant outside the Collège du Bois d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northwest of Paris, on Friday.
When he visited the crime scene on Friday night, President Emmanuel Macron advocated for national unity, saying “they will not divide us” and using the slogan of the Spanish civil war, “They will not pass.”
But politicians from the conservative Les Républicains and the far-right Rassemblement National accused Macron of being lax in his response to immigration and extremist violence.
Others blamed the left for what they said was its conciliatory attitude towards Islamist fundamentalism. Some evoked a feeling of tiredness or déja-vu.
French Muslim leaders expressed their horror at the beheading and proclaimed their support for freedom of expression. At the same time, they feared that the country’s Muslim community would be unfairly held responsible.
Abdoullakh Abouyezidevitch Anzonov, the 18-year-old murderer, was born to Chechen parents in Moscow. The family emigrated to France when he was six years old. He had no police record, but neighbors said he and five younger siblings were troublemakers at the housing project where they lived.
Anzonov had no connection to the school and did not know his victim. The friend who drove him 90 km from his home in Evreux to the school in Conflans said he did not know what Anzonov was planning. Anzonov waited outside the school and politely asked several students to identify Paty when classes were over.
The Journal du Dimanche newspaper on Sunday published the Charlie Hebdo magazine cartoon that allegedly molested a 13-year-old girl in Paty’s class. It shows a naked, bearded man with a cap, on all fours, with his rear exposed and his genitals exposed. The cartoon was signed by Coco, the nom de plume of a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist who survived the January 2015 attack that killed 12 people.
The girl’s father, identified as Brahim C, is one of 11 people in custody in connection with Paty’s murder. The others are Anzonov’s mother, father, grandfather and uncle, one of the murderer’s five younger brothers, two people who were present at the crime scene and whose role is uncertain, two acquaintances of Anzonov and Abdelhakim Sefrioui, the self-styled “leader of the imams” in France.
Safety checklist
Sefrioui’s name has been on the S (safety) list of suspected Islamist extremists for more than a decade, but he was viewed more as an agitator than a terrorist. He founded the Sheikh Yassin group, named after the Palestinian leader of Hamas who was assassinated by Israel in 2004.
A report from the national intelligence agency SCRT dated October 12 recounts the period leading up to Paty’s murder, which began on October 5 when the teacher showed two Charlie Hebdo cartoons to a class on freedom of expression. The SCRT report wrongly concluded that conversations between the school principal and the families had calmed the situation.
Paty had asked students who might be offended by the cartoons to leave the classroom. The next day, a student’s mother called the principal in tears, saying that her daughter had been forced to wait in the hall because she was Muslim. The director asked Paty to apologize for being “clumsy”, which she did.
But on October 7, the director received an email complaining of “Islamophobia” from Brahim C, who posted a video “call for mobilization” against Paty the same day on Facebook, the SCRT reported.
Brahim C posted a second video naming Paty and giving the school’s address. He denounced Paty’s “sacrilege” in a meeting with the director, to which he was accompanied by Sefrioui. The two men said the incident had psychologically harmed Muslim children.
Brahim C’s half-sister joined the Islamic State terror group in Syria in 2014, according to Le Parisien newspaper. Her daughter filed a complaint against Paty at the local police station for displaying a “pornographic image”, without specifying that it was a cartoon. The murdered teacher told police that the girl left the classroom and did not see the cartoon.
On October 12, Sefrioui interviewed Brahim C’s daughter in a video titled “Islam and the Prophet insulted in a public school,” in which he accused Macron of inciting hatred against Muslims. On the same day, Paty filed a defamation lawsuit.
Paty’s murder has focused attention on the dangers of social media. Numerous children at school saw the photograph of their teacher’s decapitated head, which was tweeted by the killer or an accomplice and relayed on a school Snapchat group.
Marlène Schiappa, Secretary of State for the Interior Ministry, called the French branches of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat to a meeting on Tuesday.
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