French President Emmanuel Macron cracked down on Radical Islamist and extremist Muslim sentiment after a French teacher by the name of Samuel Paty was beheaded. It turns out that Paty was beheaded by radical Islamists who believed the words of a 13-year-old girl who now admits that her story about her teacher was actually cooked up.
After allegedly showing students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Samuel Paty, 47, was decapitated in a Paris suburb in October. A teenage girl, daughter of Brahim Chnina, an accused in the murder of Paty, had earlier claimed that during a lecture on free speech and blasphemy, Mr Paty asked Muslim students to leave the classroom as he displayed caricatures of the Prophet from the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
According to the BBC, the teenage girl had made those claims on Mr Paty to please her father, who then filed a legal complaint against the teacher. The teenager’s lawyer, Mbeko Tabula, told AFP, “She lied because she felt trapped in a spiral because her classmates had asked her to be a spokesperson.”
Le Parisien reported that the girl had been suspended from class for bad behaviour but she claimed to her father that Mr Paty had suspended her because she protested over him showing students naked pictures of the Prophet.
Between her lie and Paty’s murder, the girl’s father, Brahim Chnina, 48, waged a social media campaign on his daughter’s account, posting two images. According to The Guardian, Abdullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old “radicalised Chechen migrant living in Normandy and scouring the internet for a cause,” was drawn to it.
Mr Paty and the school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine were identified via the social media campaign initiated by the teenager’s father. The allegations caused outrage around the world, prompting death threats against Mr Paty, who was killed 10 days after the teenager had made the false claims.
The teenager, identified only as Z in court, was attempting to conceal the fact that she had been suspended for cutting class on several occasions, a lie she confessed to on Sunday. She was exposed after some classmates said she was not even in the classroom when the teacher allowed students to close their eyes while seeing notorious caricatures from Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine whose staff was massacred in their offices in 2015.
According to BBC News, what actually happened on Oct. 6 was, Paty was teaching a class about free speech versus blasphemy and using Charlie Hebdo cartoons as examples of the conflict between the two. Before displaying the controversial cartoons, he permitted students to close their eyes.
After the beheading Emmanuel Macron had been on the offensive to deliver a strong, rightful response against the radicalization of Islam in France. Macron rose to lead his people amidst heightening extremism and had called out radical Islamists for their radical approach which was against the French way of life, or the French Lacite. He rose and delivered a big blow to radical Islamists in France as the Anti-Extremist law was cleared by the French parliament.
The body, wordings and intent of the bill have so much to teach the world. It is an example that other countries can emulate to deal with the radicalisation that extremist Islamists can indulge in.
The bill gave birth to another new offence for hate speech that makes it possible to quickly detain a person who spreads propaganda on social media and the personal information of a public service agent with the intent to harm them which can be seen as directly addressing the beheading of school teacher Samuel Paty in October.
The bill, which was brought in by the Macron government, also extends the neutrality principle, which prohibits civil servants from wearing ostentatious religious symbols like the Muslim headscarf and voicing political views, beyond public sector employees to all private contractors of public services.
Let this be an example to radical Islamists. Believing in the words of a 13-year-old who just wanted to avoid her Islamist father’s scorn, led to the gruesome death of a teacher.