YOUTH BEHEADS TEACHER ON STREET IN FRANCE
What about the children?
Samuel Paty’s horrendous street execution has continued the trench warfare of religion vs. secularism, French native vs. immigrant, state vs. community, rationalism vs. faith in sometimes violent eruptions of accusations and defense. The body politic of France has bled. The focus of this tragedy has been two-fold: the victim of the murder, Samuel Paty, and the secularist French foundation —laïcité. However, nowhere have I witnessed an appeal to the interests of the Muslim students. What of the children, the invisible ‘other’ target caught in the fray? Who empathizes with them? Do we know them–who they are and where they came from? What is laïcité to them, liberator or oppressor?
What happened?
In the stand-off, Muslim students trying to take their places in an increasingly racialized and ethnically complex society were faced with images deeply blasphemous, effecting a serious rift between them and the educational system. Such marginalization must be addressed.
What the educational ideologues deemed an acceptable use of visual materials illustrating civic principles by the civics teacher was prologue to his horrifically grotesque murder: ideology with revenge. Samuel Paty, the teacher brutally slain near his home by a radicalized vigilante, was victim of more than the young Chechen murderer. The state approved of use of the images.
In sum, after M. Paty’s displaying of caricatures associated with the three Abrahamic religions, reactions and counter-reactions grew rapidly to morbid results. One particularly irreverent image, a cartoon of the naked Prophet Mohammed, fomented outrage among community members and the radicalization of the murderous criminal. However, all sectors of the nation, including religious and secular, grieved in outpourings of condolences, thereby condemning the act of the eighteen-year-old Chechen immigrant, Abdoullakh Anzarov, and any organisation associated with or supportive of the gruesome act.
As might be expected, prior to the execution, Muslim parents lodged complaints, one mosque even producing a video condemning M. Paty’s action. The state dug in its heels, closing that mosque, a religious community institution, for six months for criticising Paty. The Muslim organisation Baraka City and the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), a charity and a community organisation which compiles information on alleged acts of anti-Muslim hatred in the country, both came under attack by the French Interior minister, M Gérald Darminin, who threatened to shut them down, even as M. Macron decries separatism. The rift grew, for all France must be secularized. Thus, one must ask, “Is the issue freedom of speech or uniform secularism?” Therefore, in the conflict, two sides became rigid: the conservative Muslims demanding respect and redress and the French secularists insisting on the principles of laïcité, on which, proudly, they feel their freedoms are founded.
History ignored shapes the future, for Janus sees both ways as the past is the ground of the future. As prologue to this act, this use of cartoons was the third in a series bringing death now in a school context. On January 7, 2015, the horrific killing and wounding of 23 people after the publication of images by the magazine Charlie Hebdo, ended in the slaying of the two brothers responsible, after a fire-bombing in November 2011, for publishing similar caricatures with no deaths. On May 3, 2015, a Draw Mohammad contest drew gunfire from two shooters, leaving a security guard wounded and the gunmen dead in Garland, Texas. And then Charlie Hebdo went to school. A meme is an action or pattern that spreads throughout a culture carrying symbolic, even ritual, meaning. Is that indefatigable author, history, rewriting Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”?
So, what does one do?
The development of critical thinking and democratic principles within students is crucial in a democracy; however, I go back to some basic questions.
If the lesson on freedom of speech must evoke the challenge between secularism and a traditional faith community, only a respectful debate in a discussion of principle can ensure the Enlightenment ideal of reason, so core to the French character. In a civics classroom supposedly fostering educational dialogue, are not such vulgar images, especially knowing the precedents, red flags to the irrational. Such would not combat separatism, M. Macron, but would provoke it. Further, I must ask, “Who would want to see crude images of the Prophet in the buff?” Anyone?
The incensed teen’s brutality serves only to divide, for demonstrated to islamophobics again is that Muslims are uncivilized and violent, hardly a coming together.
Is the choice of lessons so limited? The students’ attention might be turned to London, a mere 214 mile flight from Paris where Julian Assange has been held in Belmarsh Prison for his publications of explosive Wikileaks documents. According to Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, “Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture”. The human rights expert has referred to the treatment as “collective persecution”, while M Jean-Yves Le Drian, Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs, has denied asylum to Mr. Assange from the France. While I don’t know that this material has not been presented, it might be a far more beneficial lesson.
However, that doesn’t pit the faith culture of a minority against France’s culture of pure secularism, so it might be found wanting.
Separation, Inclusion and Appropriation
As President Macron challenges what he calls Muslim separatism, he has asked for dialogue with influential Muslim leaders. Laudable, so preferable to trench warfare. In fear of separatism, as he says, these Muslim students are to become more French in their Islam, whatever that means. Discussion or catechism class? Yet, the Muslim world is no stranger to European paternalism, recalling M. François Georges-Picot in World War I, or even to Napoleon in Egypt and the rise of Orientalism. Even before the hideous crime, the rejections of parental appeals after the civics lesson were rejected. The liberal French state is to be monolithic and absolute. Where is the Egalité, Fraternité, Liberté in that?
Conversely, with equitable dialogue combining state and community to fight the terrorism plaguing the peace of all citizens, a youths might be more willing to join and less likely to murder on the street. Charlie Hebdo hasn’t helped unite.
So, the young may sup at the trough of cultural hegemony as re-educated Muslims. “Give me a child for the first seven years,” the Jesuit Loyolla is reputed to have said, “and I will give you the man.” However, it is a state curriculum, a primary agent of social conformism and nationalism everywhere. Of that, the Muslim parents must be very aware. A law was passed in the Senate with an addendum: “Academic freedoms are exercised with respect for the values of the Republic.” President Trump had the same concern for the teaching of American history.
The effect? After the outpouring of rage from the population and the homage paid to Samuel Paty, many people of traditional ethnicities are driven further from principled secularists in the dominant culture. Shared issues such as poverty, war, class inequities and global sustainability take a back seat. Solidarity has been blinded by bloodshed; the working class is further split.
This is about the kids!
Having taught many Muslim students in middle-class Ontario schools, I have some familiarity with their issues, many impoverished in their flight from massacres in their original countries. However, they were as varied a population as any: the enthusiasts, the toughs, the class clowns, the athletes, the academics, the troubled and all of the rest.
Some had experienced racism in various forms, and yet were wonderfully generous. As reported, a police officer would at night bark from his car for the “n….rs” to get back into their homes. Resiliently, they stood together as part of our community. In their gratitude, their families gave the entire school a banquet to celebrate the end of Ramadan. As teacher, department head, and acting vice-principal, and even as program director of the Anti-Homophobia Action Committee (AHAC) for the school board, I had total respect.
After 1987, upon the Ontario government’s having included sexual orientation in the Bill of Rights, large, urban school boards jumped to it. In my board, I became program director and implementer of AHAC, presenting in many schools and public venues, while that home school became testing ground for assemblies. As the teacher in charge, I was uncompromisingly “out,” even after being warned off by a well-meaning French teacher, “You can’t do that here.”
However, throughout that period, never, never, did I once have a sideways glance, rude remark, snigger or any slight from any of those Muslim youths. In fact, some participated in the Hate Crimes assembly. The young folks were the mainstay of school life—engaged, vigorous and strong. Respectful. So, as a gay, “out,” activist teacher, I had complete respect from all of them. No, any image of the Prophet from Charlie Hebdo would not have been welcome in my classroom.
It’s universal: no student must be humiliated and marginalised. The consequences may be catastrophic.
The teacher’s role
As I began teaching in 1967, the Ministry of Education of Ontario, Canada, had a slogan for teachers: to act as a “kind, firm and judicious parent.” I cannot find one of those qualities in those cartoons. Consider Mustafa struggling with behavioural issues and academics, now so far removed from Somalia as a stranger in a strange land enduring near-poverty. His stability was his family, his friends, his community and mosque. And, we hoped, school, which had to become a locus of learning and growth for his becoming a responsible and productive Canadian citizen. His being alienated from that would have been disastrous, for he was fragile. The singular function of the school had to be his graduation, a source of dignity and pride in his new country. Slippage was not permitted.
Admittedly, a middle-class Ontario school is some distance from a Parisian banlieue; however, the universal mandate is that all students must be safe and secure in the educational establishment.
The far, far better lesson must be grounded on Martin Luther King’s admonition in his speech in the Riverside Community Church on April 4, 1967, a year to day before he was assassinated. “Be neighbourly.”
Compare the two, Charlie vs. Martin. Who benefits? Cui Bono?