Posted for fair use......
TRUST
EUROPE
It was a Friday afternoon in October 2020, and Coralie, a junior high school French teacher at Collège du Bois d’Aulne, had just gone for a walk in the nearby woods with her dog to clear her mind before the two-week school vacation.
It had been a stressful week. Her co-worker, Samuel Paty, had shown controversial images in his history class, and the whole school was on edge. That morning, she had tried to say hello to Mr. Paty but felt he was avoiding her gaze, scuttling off to class instead of making the usual jokes or initiating a game of table tennis in the teachers lounge.
She was back home when the messages in her teachers WhatsApp group started flooding in. Murder in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Decapitation. Teacher, dead.
Coralie switched on the TV. And then everything crumbled.
“I knew right away it was Samuel,” she says.
It has been three years since a teacher who loved rock music and talking philosophy was beheaded by a Muslim man in a Paris suburb, where crisp hedges trimmed to perfection line up in front of white stucco houses. Three years since Mr. Paty’s own student spread the lie that would eventually get him killed.
The murder reverberated across France. Many Muslims said they felt targeted in response. The country’s vaunted secular culture received fresh scrutiny. Yet perhaps most of all, the killing shook the connection between teachers and their students. Held up as the advance guard of French culture and intellectualism, French teachers had a near-sacred relationship with students. Now, educators are no longer sure how to do their jobs.
Coralie is still reckoning with the series of events that led to Mr. Paty’s death. How did showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad in class end with a teacher dead? Did the students who pointed out Mr. Paty to his would-be assailant know the consequences of their actions? Weren’t they just kids?
“For weeks, I had nightmares. I stayed in my house with the blinds drawn,” says Coralie, looking out towards the Seine River at a local café. Like the other teachers in this story, she requested to use a pseudonym to protect her safety. “How could our students, who we trusted, turn around and do this? At first, I hated them.”
Since Mr. Paty’s death, France has continued to wrestle with its notions of secularism – laïcité – and the importance of freedom of expression.
Mr. Paty was the first teacher to die for what he taught in class, but he has not been the last. In October 2023, French teacher Dominique Bernard was stabbed in the northern town of Arras by a former radicalized student, supposedly for the French values he represented. And at the end of February, a school principal in Paris received death threats after asking a female Muslim student to remove her headscarf.
While the right to blaspheme is protected by French law, Mr. Paty’s murder has raised questions about where the line is between freedom and provocation.
Those questions are at the heart of what threatened to drive wedges between teachers, parents, and students at Bois d’Aulne, and between teachers themselves. Some agreed with what Mr. Paty had done, and some didn’t. Several left the school after his death, shaken by the event. Others left teaching entirely.
For Coralie and those who decided to stay, the hate is starting to fade away. Forgiveness is slow, but coming. Now, three years later, what she, her colleagues, and residents of all faiths in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine desperately want is to learn to trust again – in their students, each other, and themselves.
“Teaching is not always easy. ... We’re definitely more careful now,” says Joëlle Alazard, a high school history teacher and the president of the Paris-based Organization for History and Geography Teachers. “But we’re pushing ahead and teaching controversial subject matter.
“When students have their arms crossed and don’t dare ask questions, we have a problem. But when we know a class well and trust each other, we can have a debate and move things forward together.”
It was an average fall day in early October 2020 when Mr. Paty decided to show two caricatures from the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, featuring the Prophet Muhammad, to his oldest students during a class on freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
The choice was intentional. Even if showing images of the Prophet is considered blasphemous in Islam, France prides itself on being a secular country – especially within its education system. Was Charlie Hebdo being unnecessarily provocative, or was it within its rights? Where was the moral line?
Mr. Paty told students ahead of time that they could leave the classroom if they wished or close their eyes. The lesson went forward without incident, but later, a female student told her father that Mr. Paty had shown students images of a naked man, calling him the Prophet Muhammad, and forced her out of class because she was Muslim. On Oct. 8, Brahim Chnina posted a video on Facebook, calling his daughter’s teacher a pervert and lodging a complaint of pornography with the police.
Soon Mr. Chnina’s video was circulating on the social media pages of a Paris-area mosque and on WhatsApp groups in France and abroad. In one week, the video accumulated 13,000 views.
“I had friends in Algeria who were telling me about this video,” says Soraya, whose son was a student in Mr. Paty’s class on the day he showed the images. To protect her family, she asked to be identified only by a pseudonym. “I called the father and tried to reason with him, but he was incensed with rage. There was no getting through to him.”
Soraya sent a message to Mr. Paty in support, on behalf of the Muslim community. Then it came out that Mr. Chnina’s daughter wasn’t even in school on the day Mr. Paty showed the images – she had been given two days of suspension for bad behavior and presumably wanted to lash out.
But the damage had been done. Rumors began swirling around the schoolyard. What had Mr. Paty really shown in class? Should he have done it? Was he truly anti-Muslim?
Four days before his murder, the principal of Bois d’Aulne held an emergency meeting with teachers. The local administrative office had been notified, and police lined the front door. Unbeknownst to anyone, Mr. Chnina’s video had reached Mr. Paty’s would-be assailant, a Chechen Muslim refugee named Abdoullakh Anzorov.
“Samuel told us not to worry, but at this point, we really realized it was serious,” says Coralie. “At that meeting we asked, ‘Are there risks?’ You could feel this oppressive atmosphere at school.”
Then, on Oct. 16, Mr. Anzorov waited by the school gates, pulling a 14-year-old student to the side and offering him €300 (about $325) to identify Mr. Paty. The teenager, along with four others, accepted.
As Mr. Paty left the school at around 5 p.m., Mr. Anzorov beheaded him with a 12-inch-long knife on a street in nearby Éragny. Minutes later, Mr. Anzorov was shot and killed by police. But Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, and France, would never be the same.
Mr. Paty’s murder caused shock waves. While France is no stranger to terrorism, the attack of a teacher had shattered something sacred. Mr. Paty was given a state funeral, broadcast nationwide from Sorbonne University, at which French President Emmanuel Macron said that Mr. Paty had been the victim of hatred and misunderstanding, and that his death would not be in vain.
“We will continue to defend the freedom that you taught as well as laïcité,” Mr. Macron said. “We will not stop showing caricatures even when others back away.”
But despite Mr. Macron’s unwavering confidence, France was still trying to reconcile its vision of secularism with an increasingly diverse nation. It was also still reeling from the events of 2015, which had set the stage for Mr. Paty’s murder and become a defining moment in how France viewed terrorism then and now.
In January of that year, Islamist extremists stormed the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo and killed 11 journalists for their publication of satirical content related to the Prophet Muhammad. Later that November, Islamist terrorists again launched a violent spree across Paris, killing over 130 people at the Bataclan concert venue and restaurants around the city.
In the months that followed, France faced a wave of further attacks in cities such as Nice, Villejuif, and Rambouillet. In response, the government pushed through a series of anti-terror laws that would grant police and intelligence agencies extended powers. It also began employing the term laïcité more often in reference to French values. Following the January attacks, then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls said laïcité needed to be “proudly displayed ... since we’re being attacked because of it.”
Soon, laïcité was under threat everywhere. Muslim women were stopped on French beaches for sporting burkinis, or for wearing a hijab on city buses, in public institutions, or while driving. Religious symbols had already been prohibited in French schools since 2004, and now there were questions over whether veiled mothers could accompany students on class outings.
By the time Mr. Paty decided to show the Charlie Hebdo caricatures to his class in 2020, the French education system had become a battleground for laïcité.
“One of France’s biggest accomplishments when it broke with the Catholic Church [starting in the French Revolution] was its national education system,” says Philippe Gaudin, the director of the Institute for Religious Studies and Laïcité. “Until [1886], the church held full control. After that, French schools became the sanctuary of laïcité as a political project and not just a rule about respecting religious freedom to maintain public order.”
When France signed the 1905 law on the separation of church and state, religion was seen as an “enemy of the state,” says Mr. Gaudin, and laïcité was a reaction against this authoritarian regime. France’s education system was to be a place of free thought and speech, where all students, regardless of religion, had the right to learn.
But with those protections of laïcité has come debate about its reach. Though the nation came together in mourning after the 2015 attacks – defending its secular values in the face of radical Islam – France also saw a more than threefold jump in Islamophobic acts. Nearly half of French Muslims say they face discrimination based on their faith.
“We’re suffering greatly over the conflation between Islam and terrorism; the idea that our religion could produce violence,” said the French Council for the Muslim Faith in a press release following Mr. Paty’s death. “[At the same time], we must remain dignified, serene, and lucid in the face of hostility and anti-Muslim acts.”
And while the initial concept of laïcité was used by French leaders to ensure that religion – Catholic or otherwise – never controlled the country’s public services or education system again, it has often felt anti-Muslim by members of that community. Mohand-Kamel Chabane, a history teacher in Paris who wrote a book in 2022 about teaching in diverse, working-class neighborhoods, says that “many people, Muslims in particular, think that laïcité is used to prevent them from being free.”
Continued......
Samuel Paty was murdered, and teaching in France has never been the same
When controversy over a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad led to the killing of teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, colleagues had to learn to trust again.
www.csmonitor.com
TRUST
EUROPE
Samuel Paty was murdered, and teaching in France has never been the same
- By Colette Davidson Special correspondent
@kolet_ink
It was a Friday afternoon in October 2020, and Coralie, a junior high school French teacher at Collège du Bois d’Aulne, had just gone for a walk in the nearby woods with her dog to clear her mind before the two-week school vacation.
It had been a stressful week. Her co-worker, Samuel Paty, had shown controversial images in his history class, and the whole school was on edge. That morning, she had tried to say hello to Mr. Paty but felt he was avoiding her gaze, scuttling off to class instead of making the usual jokes or initiating a game of table tennis in the teachers lounge.
She was back home when the messages in her teachers WhatsApp group started flooding in. Murder in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Decapitation. Teacher, dead.
Coralie switched on the TV. And then everything crumbled.
“I knew right away it was Samuel,” she says.
It has been three years since a teacher who loved rock music and talking philosophy was beheaded by a Muslim man in a Paris suburb, where crisp hedges trimmed to perfection line up in front of white stucco houses. Three years since Mr. Paty’s own student spread the lie that would eventually get him killed.
The murder reverberated across France. Many Muslims said they felt targeted in response. The country’s vaunted secular culture received fresh scrutiny. Yet perhaps most of all, the killing shook the connection between teachers and their students. Held up as the advance guard of French culture and intellectualism, French teachers had a near-sacred relationship with students. Now, educators are no longer sure how to do their jobs.
Coralie is still reckoning with the series of events that led to Mr. Paty’s death. How did showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad in class end with a teacher dead? Did the students who pointed out Mr. Paty to his would-be assailant know the consequences of their actions? Weren’t they just kids?
“For weeks, I had nightmares. I stayed in my house with the blinds drawn,” says Coralie, looking out towards the Seine River at a local café. Like the other teachers in this story, she requested to use a pseudonym to protect her safety. “How could our students, who we trusted, turn around and do this? At first, I hated them.”
Since Mr. Paty’s death, France has continued to wrestle with its notions of secularism – laïcité – and the importance of freedom of expression.
Mr. Paty was the first teacher to die for what he taught in class, but he has not been the last. In October 2023, French teacher Dominique Bernard was stabbed in the northern town of Arras by a former radicalized student, supposedly for the French values he represented. And at the end of February, a school principal in Paris received death threats after asking a female Muslim student to remove her headscarf.
While the right to blaspheme is protected by French law, Mr. Paty’s murder has raised questions about where the line is between freedom and provocation.
Those questions are at the heart of what threatened to drive wedges between teachers, parents, and students at Bois d’Aulne, and between teachers themselves. Some agreed with what Mr. Paty had done, and some didn’t. Several left the school after his death, shaken by the event. Others left teaching entirely.
For Coralie and those who decided to stay, the hate is starting to fade away. Forgiveness is slow, but coming. Now, three years later, what she, her colleagues, and residents of all faiths in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine desperately want is to learn to trust again – in their students, each other, and themselves.
“Teaching is not always easy. ... We’re definitely more careful now,” says Joëlle Alazard, a high school history teacher and the president of the Paris-based Organization for History and Geography Teachers. “But we’re pushing ahead and teaching controversial subject matter.
“When students have their arms crossed and don’t dare ask questions, we have a problem. But when we know a class well and trust each other, we can have a debate and move things forward together.”
It was an average fall day in early October 2020 when Mr. Paty decided to show two caricatures from the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, featuring the Prophet Muhammad, to his oldest students during a class on freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
The choice was intentional. Even if showing images of the Prophet is considered blasphemous in Islam, France prides itself on being a secular country – especially within its education system. Was Charlie Hebdo being unnecessarily provocative, or was it within its rights? Where was the moral line?
Mr. Paty told students ahead of time that they could leave the classroom if they wished or close their eyes. The lesson went forward without incident, but later, a female student told her father that Mr. Paty had shown students images of a naked man, calling him the Prophet Muhammad, and forced her out of class because she was Muslim. On Oct. 8, Brahim Chnina posted a video on Facebook, calling his daughter’s teacher a pervert and lodging a complaint of pornography with the police.
Soon Mr. Chnina’s video was circulating on the social media pages of a Paris-area mosque and on WhatsApp groups in France and abroad. In one week, the video accumulated 13,000 views.
“I had friends in Algeria who were telling me about this video,” says Soraya, whose son was a student in Mr. Paty’s class on the day he showed the images. To protect her family, she asked to be identified only by a pseudonym. “I called the father and tried to reason with him, but he was incensed with rage. There was no getting through to him.”
Soraya sent a message to Mr. Paty in support, on behalf of the Muslim community. Then it came out that Mr. Chnina’s daughter wasn’t even in school on the day Mr. Paty showed the images – she had been given two days of suspension for bad behavior and presumably wanted to lash out.
But the damage had been done. Rumors began swirling around the schoolyard. What had Mr. Paty really shown in class? Should he have done it? Was he truly anti-Muslim?
Four days before his murder, the principal of Bois d’Aulne held an emergency meeting with teachers. The local administrative office had been notified, and police lined the front door. Unbeknownst to anyone, Mr. Chnina’s video had reached Mr. Paty’s would-be assailant, a Chechen Muslim refugee named Abdoullakh Anzorov.
“Samuel told us not to worry, but at this point, we really realized it was serious,” says Coralie. “At that meeting we asked, ‘Are there risks?’ You could feel this oppressive atmosphere at school.”
Then, on Oct. 16, Mr. Anzorov waited by the school gates, pulling a 14-year-old student to the side and offering him €300 (about $325) to identify Mr. Paty. The teenager, along with four others, accepted.
As Mr. Paty left the school at around 5 p.m., Mr. Anzorov beheaded him with a 12-inch-long knife on a street in nearby Éragny. Minutes later, Mr. Anzorov was shot and killed by police. But Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, and France, would never be the same.
Mr. Paty’s murder caused shock waves. While France is no stranger to terrorism, the attack of a teacher had shattered something sacred. Mr. Paty was given a state funeral, broadcast nationwide from Sorbonne University, at which French President Emmanuel Macron said that Mr. Paty had been the victim of hatred and misunderstanding, and that his death would not be in vain.
“We will continue to defend the freedom that you taught as well as laïcité,” Mr. Macron said. “We will not stop showing caricatures even when others back away.”
But despite Mr. Macron’s unwavering confidence, France was still trying to reconcile its vision of secularism with an increasingly diverse nation. It was also still reeling from the events of 2015, which had set the stage for Mr. Paty’s murder and become a defining moment in how France viewed terrorism then and now.
In January of that year, Islamist extremists stormed the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo and killed 11 journalists for their publication of satirical content related to the Prophet Muhammad. Later that November, Islamist terrorists again launched a violent spree across Paris, killing over 130 people at the Bataclan concert venue and restaurants around the city.
In the months that followed, France faced a wave of further attacks in cities such as Nice, Villejuif, and Rambouillet. In response, the government pushed through a series of anti-terror laws that would grant police and intelligence agencies extended powers. It also began employing the term laïcité more often in reference to French values. Following the January attacks, then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls said laïcité needed to be “proudly displayed ... since we’re being attacked because of it.”
Soon, laïcité was under threat everywhere. Muslim women were stopped on French beaches for sporting burkinis, or for wearing a hijab on city buses, in public institutions, or while driving. Religious symbols had already been prohibited in French schools since 2004, and now there were questions over whether veiled mothers could accompany students on class outings.
By the time Mr. Paty decided to show the Charlie Hebdo caricatures to his class in 2020, the French education system had become a battleground for laïcité.
“One of France’s biggest accomplishments when it broke with the Catholic Church [starting in the French Revolution] was its national education system,” says Philippe Gaudin, the director of the Institute for Religious Studies and Laïcité. “Until [1886], the church held full control. After that, French schools became the sanctuary of laïcité as a political project and not just a rule about respecting religious freedom to maintain public order.”
When France signed the 1905 law on the separation of church and state, religion was seen as an “enemy of the state,” says Mr. Gaudin, and laïcité was a reaction against this authoritarian regime. France’s education system was to be a place of free thought and speech, where all students, regardless of religion, had the right to learn.
But with those protections of laïcité has come debate about its reach. Though the nation came together in mourning after the 2015 attacks – defending its secular values in the face of radical Islam – France also saw a more than threefold jump in Islamophobic acts. Nearly half of French Muslims say they face discrimination based on their faith.
“We’re suffering greatly over the conflation between Islam and terrorism; the idea that our religion could produce violence,” said the French Council for the Muslim Faith in a press release following Mr. Paty’s death. “[At the same time], we must remain dignified, serene, and lucid in the face of hostility and anti-Muslim acts.”
And while the initial concept of laïcité was used by French leaders to ensure that religion – Catholic or otherwise – never controlled the country’s public services or education system again, it has often felt anti-Muslim by members of that community. Mohand-Kamel Chabane, a history teacher in Paris who wrote a book in 2022 about teaching in diverse, working-class neighborhoods, says that “many people, Muslims in particular, think that laïcité is used to prevent them from being free.”
Continued......