The flood of outrage in France follows the teacher’s beheading

Confused, sometimes contradicting messages have emerged from the barrage of outrage over the murder of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty.

Paty was stabbed and beheaded by a Chechen immigrant outside the Collège du Bois d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, northwest of Paris, on Friday.

When he visited the crime scene on Friday evening, President Emmanuel Macron pleaded for national unity, saying: “They will not divide us” and used the Spanish civil war slogan: “They will not happen.”

But politicians from the conservative Les Républicains and the far-right Rassemblement National accused Macron of being negligent in his response to immigration and extremist violence.

Others blamed the left for its conciliatory stance towards Islamist fundamentalism. Some produced feelings of fatigue or deja vu.

The French Muslim leaders were appalled by the beheading and proclaimed support for freedom of expression. At the same time, they feared that the country’s Muslim community would be wrongly held accountable.

Abdoullakh Abouyezidevitch Anzonov, the 18-year-old assassin, was born to Chechen parents in Moscow. The family emigrated to France when they were six. He had no police records, but neighbors said he and five younger brothers were troublemakers in the housing project where they lived.

Anzonov had no connection to school and did not know his victim. The friend who drove him 90 km from his house in Evreux to the school in Conflans said he did not know what Anzonov was up to. Anzonov waited outside the school and politely asked several students to identify Paty if classes were interrupted.

The Journal du Dimanche newspaper published the Charlie Hebdo magazine cartoon on Sunday that allegedly upset a 13-year-old girl in Paty’s class. It shows a naked, bearded man wearing a skullcap on all fours, his backside in the air and his genitals exposed. The cartoon was signed by Coco, the nom de Plume of a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist who survived the January 2015 attack that killed 12 people.

The girl’s father, identified as Brahim C, is one of eleven people detained in connection with Paty’s murder. The others are Anzonov’s mother, father, grandfather and uncle, one of the murderer’s five younger brothers, two people who were present at the scene and whose role is uncertain, two acquaintances of Anzonov and Abdelhakim Sefrioui, the self-described “leader of the imams” in France.

Safety list

Sefrioui’s name has been on the S list (for security reasons) of suspected Islamist extremists for more than a decade, but he has been viewed as an agitator rather than a terrorist. He founded the Sheikh Yassin Group, named after the Palestinian Hamas leader who was murdered by Israel in 2004.

An October 12 report by domestic intelligence agency SCRT reported preparations for Paty’s murder, which began on October 5 when the teacher showed a free speech class two Charlie Hebdo cartoons. The SCRT’s report incorrectly concluded that conversations between the school principal and the families had calmed the situation.

Paty had asked students who might be offended by the cartoons to leave the classroom. The next day, a student’s mother called the headmaster tearfully and said her daughter had been forced to wait in the corridor because she was a Muslim. The headmaster asked Paty to apologize for being “clumsy,” which he did.

On October 7, the school principal received an email complaining about “Islamophobia” from Brahim C, who posted an “Appeal to Mobilize” video against Paty on Facebook that same day, the SCRT reported.

Brahim C posted a second video naming Paty and giving the school address. He denounced Paty’s “sacrilege” in a meeting with the headmaster, to which he was accompanied by Sefrioui. The two men said Muslim children had suffered psychological damage from the incident.

According to Le Parisien newspaper, Brahim C’s half-sister joined the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria in 2014. His daughter filed a complaint against Paty with the local police station for showing a “pornographic picture” without indicating that it was a cartoon. The teacher who was killed told police that the girl left the classroom and did not see the cartoon.

On October 12, Sefrioui interviewed Brahim C’s daughter in a video entitled “Islam and the Prophet Offended in a Public School” accusing Macron of inciting hatred against Muslims. On the same day, Paty filed a defamation lawsuit.

Paty’s murder has drawn attention to the dangers of social media. Numerous children at school saw the photo of their teacher’s decapitated head, tweeted by the killer or accomplice and retransmitted on a Snapchat school group.

Marlène Schiappa, State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, invited the French branches of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat to a meeting on Tuesday.