education

The Guardian view on Samuel Paty: don't let the death cult win | Editorial

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It is difficult to convey the sheer horror of the decapitation last Friday of a French secondary school teacher, Samuel Paty, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine near Paris. Such extreme violence is designed to terrorise and traumatise, and it does. Children should not under any circumstances be confronted with this level of brutality, let alone in the course of their education. France’s roughly 1 million teachers should have no reason to fear going to work.

It is a savage irony that President Emmanuel Macron recently announced additional funding for schools and an expansion of academic research on Islamic culture, as part of a package of measures in a new law against religious separatism. Official recognition that alienation and division are driven by poverty and lack of opportunity, as well as radical Islamist ideology, was overdue. The increased emphasis on inclusion was a hopeful sign, although the French aversion to recording ethnicity and religion in official data remains an obstacle to public policy with measurable outcomes.

To say that the events of last week were a vicious rebuff to such an approach would be an understatement. In our age of polarisation, many of us look to the humanities as a source of hope. We believe that training young people to be active citizens who are knowledgeable about the world is among the most important things that a state can do. For a history and geography teacher to be murdered because he dared to lead a classroom of teenagers into the bitterly contested terrain of free expression is a cruel reminder of how high the stakes have become.

Mr Paty, who was 47, had offered Muslim students the chance to leave his classroom before showing two of the cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad that were originally published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Yet his lesson was followed not only by complaints but a video uploaded by a parent to the internet. Since his killer, Abdullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old of Chechen origin, lived 60 miles away with no obvious connection to the school, it is no wonder that French ministers are now pointing the figure at social media companies. Yet again, in a situation where radicalisation has led to a loss of life, online communications have played an invidious role.

The risk, as is usual after a jihadist attack, is the destructive feedback loop that it creates. It is never just one individual that death cults seek to kill. Their aim is to foment hatred. Already, the French government has announced plans to deport 213 foreigners on a watchlist. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, and other rivals to Mr Macron’s right, will push him to go further, encouraging the public to salve its wounds by demanding a collective punishment and stirring up hostility to refugees and migrants.

The priority will be to track down any accomplices or supporters of Mr Paty’s killer. But Mr Macron must not allow his anti-extremism policies to be derailed by psychopathic ideology. He was right to say recently that the challenge is “to fight against those who go off the rails in the name of religion” while protecting other French Muslims. It is tragic that the events of last Friday have made that difficult task even harder.

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