“They have the will and the conviction. A boundless courage…”, this is not how a poem by Victor Hugo begins, but a Facebook post by a maths teacher in Nancy about the Taliban, as Le Figaro reports. Khalid B., a teacher in Nancy, published a post on Facebook on August 16 in which he supported the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul. Worse, his post was public and still visible on Friday September 3. However, his comments were reported to the school authorities. The courts immediately took up the case: “I considered that I had sufficient evidence to open a criminal investigation for advocacy of terrorism, which was assigned to the Nancy public prosecutor’s office,” said François Pérain, the public prosecutor. By then, Khalid B. had been teaching at Notre-Dame-de-Peltre for eight years, and his director claims he had “never heard any negative feedback” or any complaints until now.
At the beginning of the school year, he was to teach at a new school, the Lycée Professionnel Claude Daunot. “The comments he posted worry me because on his Facebook profile the name of my school appears and under no circumstances can such positions be defended in the name of the school,” the school’s director told Le Figaro. But although there are no posts to that effect, his Facebook profile is packed with links to accounts associated with Islamism. For example, Marwan Muhammad, former director of the CCIF, who has now been disbanded by Gérald Darmanin for his alleged role in the murder of Samuel Paty. Tariq Ramadan, who is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, is also currently under investigation for rape. He also posted several photos in support of BDS, an association that calls for a boycott of Israel and is considered anti-Semitic in several countries. The Académie de Nancy-Metz therefore decided to suspend the teacher “as a precautionary measure”.