In France, a teacher received death threats after warning of the growing influence of Islamism in the country. The philosophy teacher Didier Lemaire says he is now under police protection, reported the AFP news agency. The Versailles prosecutor said they were investigating the threats.
Lemaire published a letter in November following the murder of the teacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist last year. In it he accused the French government of not having an effective strategy against Islamism. In his 20 years as a teacher in a Paris suburb, he had seen how its influence had grown.
The teacher recently described the situation in his area to the broadcaster BFM-TV. “There are no more mixed hairdressing salons. Women are not tolerated in the cafes.” After the Jewish residents of the suburb had left it because of pressure from the Islamists, it was now directed against moderate Muslims and atheists, lamented Lemaire.
The teacher described the reality he was now faced with: His students, in a 70 percent Muslim commune, sent many jihadists to Syria.
France was again rocked by Islamist attacks last year. A man from Tunisia killed three people in a church in Nice. Shortly afterwards, in Avignon, the police shot and killed a suspect who was armed with a pistol and a knife and threatened passers-by and shouted “Allahu Akbar”.
But the Islamists in Trappes have not backed down. The Muslim mayor distributed pamphlets at the school denouncing the teacher. For having entered a school in his municipality in order to exert religious pressure, the mayor of Trappes should have been severely punished. But this is not the case and it proves that justice has long since been abandoned in entire areas of the country, explained Philippe Fontana, lawyer at the Paris bar to Valeurs Actuelles.
The case of the mayor of Trappes storming into a high school in his town is symptomatic of the lack of application of the law, and more particularly of criminal law, in certain zones of France, which have been “lost” to Islam. This denial characterizes the abandonment of the very purpose of a state, the “potestas”, synonymous with the power that it exercises within a defined space over its population.
The facts are known: outraged by the denunciation of an Islamo-leftism of which he is the symbol, the mayor of Trappes, Ali Rabeh, went to a school in his commune on Thursday 11 February to distribute religious leaflets. These facts may suggest a certain political activism since leftist politicians have been downplaying them, calling them “an error in the distribution of leaflets in a high school”.
Others deny the criminal intent outright, like an evening daily which reported the facts in its edition of February 16, 2021: “The mayor, Ali Rabeh, went with other elected officials to confront the teacher Didier Lemaire to distribute a message at the high school.”
Until the adoption of the law of March 2, 2010, under the government of François Fillon, “strengthening the fight against group violence and the protection of persons entrusted with a public service mission”, such an intrusion was qualified as a simple 5th class contravention, according to article R. 645-12 of the penal code, punishable by a fine of a maximum of 1 500 euros.
Since then, thanks to the will of the majority of the Republican right then in power, the contravention has become the offense defined in article 431-22 of the penal code: “The fact of entering or remaining in the enclosure of a school educational establishment without being authorized by virtue of legislative or regulatory provisions or having been authorized to do so by the competent authorities, with the aim of disturbing the peace or the good order of the establishment, is punished by one year imprisonment and a 7 500 euro fine.”
In a group, the sanction is increased to 3 years’ imprisonment and a fine of 45 000 euros. During the parliamentary work prior to the adoption of this law, its rapporteur in the Senate, François Pillet, had justified it by the need to make schools safe and added the possibility of placing their authors in custody.
However, the response has been non-existent in this case even though the state has to defend its teachers and the students entrusted to it. It has two options: either the Minister of Education, head of his administration, lodges a complaint, or the public prosecutor’s office initiates public action. The Minister has only condemned such an intrusion, as any commentator could have done.
Indeed, prohibiting entry into an establishment without authorization, “with the aim of disturbing the peace or good order of the establishment” is likely to cause the loss of the mayor’s civic rights, including the right to vote, and would result in ineligibility to be elected in future.
Thus, beyond the interesting proposed measure of dismissal of the mayor of Trappes, a criminal conviction would have been even more symbolic and effective. But the Versailles prosecutor’s office preferred to open a criminal investigation to identify the perpetrators of the threats to the elected official, reported on social networks instead. This is an obvious inequality of treatment by the prosecution, especially if it turns out that it did not conduct an investigation into the intrusion by the mayor at the school.
Several hypotheses may emerge, including that of a creeping politicization of justice. Whatever the effects, they are already certain: in Trappes schools are no longer sanctuaries, but targets for Islamists.
In Amiens this has certainly been the case. The private primary school Monseigneur Cuminal, located in the Etouvie district, will close down at the end of the school year. The direction of Catholic education of the Somme considered that the safety of children could no longer be guaranteed. The establishment, which opened in 1997, will definitively close permanently in July 2021, according to the direction of Catholic education of the Somme.
The playground is located at the foot of the Coursives, a block of buildings emblematic of the district. Muslim residents, whose homes overlook the large terrace at the back of school buildings, usually throw their garbage… directly out of the window into the schoolyard.
“Here, some people throw everything out of the window: it can go as far as refrigerators or washing machines. I assure you, it’s serious!” This was confirmed by employees of the cleaning company to which SIP, the social landlord, subcontracts the maintenance of outdoor spaces. The last cleaning of the terrace dated back to ten days. In the meantime, waste has been accumulating there.
There are gutted trash cans, bottles, dirty diapers, paint cans, toys, clothes. One of the employees present was not surprised: “One day, I almost took a microwave on my head. Just a few meters, and I would no longer have been here to talk to you.” In fact, during the interview with France Bleu, a tin can thrown from a window only narrowly missed the journalist.
In a statement, the Catholic Teaching of the Somme also declared that “attacks from the neighborhood, various forms of trafficking nearby, intrusions and illegal occupation of the yard contribute to the insecurity and prevent the school from functioning normally”.
The document specified that “the numerous improvements […] and security works carried out between 2015 and 2020 with the support of the town hall of Amiens have not made it possible to put an end to these difficulties either”.