Classes are interrupted in France for two weeks in mid-autumn for the All Saints’ holidays. And four years ago, on Friday, October 16, the students of the Collège du Bois-D’Aulne in Conflants-Sainte-Honorine, a municipality of 35,000 inhabitants northwest of Paris, said goodbye without imagining what was going to happen shortly after. A man armed with a 32-centimeter knife appeared in front of the school in the middle of the afternoon. First, he asked the students about Professor Samuel Paty and then followed him towards his house. The man, an 18-year-old Chechen, attacked him with the knife and decapitated him. Then, he photographed the body and uploaded the image to the social network Twitter with a message “in the name of Allah, the all-merciful” and addressed to “Macron, the leader of the infidels.” “I have executed one of your hellhounds who dared to put down Muhammad,” he said. The police shot him down shortly after. Days before the murder, the teacher had shown some caricatures of Muhammad in class.
The story of Samuel Paty, the beheaded 47-year-old teacher, has deeply marked French society in the last four years. The teacher has become a symbol of the wave of intolerance sweeping the country and the difficulty of educating in a secular manner, a concept questioned today by part of the French left. The main defendant in the case, Chechen terrorist Abdulakh Anzorov, was killed by police gunfire. So the first trial, held last year, focused on the minors who provided him with access and information to pursue Paty and murder him. Six of them were sentenced to sentences of between six and 14 months in prison for their involvement in the murder. Now, a Paris court is judging the rest of the collaborators, eight people—seven men and one woman—among whom is the father of a student and a radical Islamist militant.
Justice, on its own
The terrorist mechanism, as the prosecution has defined it, begins with a 13-year-old teenager. The girl had been expelled from the center for a few days for bad behavior. To her parents, she made up the excuse that she had been punished for confronting Paty after he invited the Muslim students to leave the classroom. It was false. The student’s father, allied with a fundamentalist imam, circulated the lie on social networks and Islamist forums, and launched a campaign that would prove lethal. They thus placed a target on the head of the teacher, whom they accused of Islamophobia. Anzorov, a Chechen refugee born in Moscow in 2002, who lived 60 kilometers from the institute, learned of the viral campaign against Paty and wanted to take the supposed justice into his own hands. He stood at the scene, asked for information, paid 300 euros to some students to help him recognize his target and carried out the savage murder.
France was still shocked those days by a similar event, or premonitory in this case, such as the terrorist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. And what did happen is that Paty, a history and geography teacher, inclined to the difficult task of relating current issues with the past, tried to explain to his class of 13-year-old children what had happened. . That and in France, in the 21st century, you could die for some cartoons. The false rumor that circulated was that he had asked the Muslim students to raise their hands, and then he would have invited them to leave. But, in reality, he suggested that anyone who did not want to watch the caricatures of the prophet could close their eyes, look away, or briefly leave the classroom. And that was when a father, one of the eight accused now, mounted an online campaign against him, asked for his expulsion from the center and reported him to the police station.
This Monday, at the opening of the trial against eight accused of complicity in the jihadist murder that will last until December 20, the lawyers of the teacher’s family assured that they hope that this process will serve to demonstrate “the damage” that the Islamism in France. “France suffers from a real Islamist infiltration in its society by people who are not terrorists, but who end up pointing out and applying the law of sharia in less than 15 days,” lawyer Thibault de Montbrial, who represents Samuel Paty’s sister, Mickaelle, reported to the BFMTV channel. “What happened to his brother (Samuel) was not a fatality, an accident caused by a madman. “It is the result of a mechanism put in place by people who have been fed lies, something that did not happen in class,” added the lawyer, shortly before the start of the trial, which will last for two months.
