Just over a year ago, Samuel Paty was beheaded in front of his school by a young jihadist of Chechen origin, who was shot dead by the police shortly afterwards. A few days earlier, the history and geography teacher had shown Charlie Hebdo cartoons in class as part of the civics lesson. As a result, a young pupil had complained to her father and lied. The latter then issued a fatwa against the teacher together with an Islamic preacher who was on the S-list for terrorism. A wave of social pressure on social media resulted in the teacher’s murder on October 16, 2020. One year later, however, many public figures still believe that the problem lies in the teacher’s responsibility in this chain of events that led to the worst. The tweet published by Islamic scholar François Burgat on Saturday October 16 is a case in point.
Samuel Paty is not a “hero of freedom of expression”, posted the scholar, who says he sympathises with left-wing extremist domestic groups, but Paty is the victim of a “vile version of freedom that is mistaken for freedom to humiliate”. He was responding to another internet user’s statement that one should “question whether it makes sense to show schoolchildren a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed on all fours depicting his* without being classed as an accessory to terrorism”. Many internet users have pointed out the strange hierarchy of causes of the teacher’s death. Philosopher Raphaël Enthoven notes that “after the assassination itself” now comes “the assassination of a dead man”.