2023-10-16 11:30:10
Just three years ago, on October 16, 2020, Samuel Paty, 47, a history professor, was murdered and then beheaded as he left his college by a young radicalized Islamist. Friday October 13, Dominique Bernard, 57, a French teacher, was stabbed to death while interposing, in his school campus, in front of another young person, also a radicalized Islamist. Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), Arras: in three years, France has been hit twice at the heart of its school system, the keystone of its republican institutions. Two teachers responsible for training citizens in the exercise of free will, the foundation of democracy, were killed in cold blood, by agents of an ideology which fights precisely the values which unite us.
Read our investigation: Article reserved for our subscribers The investigation into the assassination of Samuel Paty traces the “Time.news of a killing”, the prosecution requests a trial for fourteen people
This new tragedy can only fuel the grief and anger of national education staff, teachers in the lead. The whole country shares these feelings, in particular the parents and families of the twelve million students in national education. The day of solidarity with teachers established, Monday October 16, by the Minister of National Education, Gabriel Attal, must be an opportunity, not only for a tribute to the courageous teacher from Arras, but for a reflection on what the repetition of such attacks means and how to stop them.
If Islamists make French public schools a specific target, it is because it targets a project that is unbearable for them: a society where people of all beliefs, or without beliefs, live in good understanding, a society where Islam, like other religions, is respected and coexists with democracy and the Republic. Pivotal to this promise, secularism is precisely this principle, forged over the centuries, which allows the exercise of the freedom to believe or not to believe, and its corollary, the protection of everyone against religious pressures, including those which can be practiced in classrooms on teachers.
Punish tendentious remarks
Today, the latter need to be protected, not only by reinforced security measures around and in establishments, but also by the application of texts such as the 2004 law on the prohibition of signs which “conspicuously demonstrate religious affiliation” or the recent circular prohibiting abayas. The reality of the fear experienced by teachers faced with refusal or challenge to certain courses has been minimized for too long. They now fear that what they say in class will be distorted and exploited on social networks. One in two – 65% in priority areas – has “afraid to the point of avoiding certain topics”according to an IFOP survey from November 2022.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers Arras between astonishment, fear and anger, the day after the attack which cost the life of a professor
The protection of teachers must therefore also come from the freedom to denounce without fear and, if necessary, to sanction tendentious or threatening comments. This requires a reactive administration, where it too often tends to “sweep the dust under the carpet”. This protection finally involves contesting discourses which tend to present the secular rules in force in public schools as a form of hostility towards Muslims. Who can now ignore that this insidious rhetoric, holy bread for Islamists, is doubly deadly?
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers Attack in Arras: the executive, criticized on the right and the far right, chooses to display its firmness
That the teaching profession can, in France, be considered “at risk” is unacceptable. Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, Arras… The country now knows what would await it if the murder of Dominique Bernard left intact a certain naivety about Islamist aims at schools, if it did not sound like a call to the country to mobilize around its teachers and the Minister of National Education to plan over the long term the revaluation of the teaching profession, the last ramparts against obscurantism.
Read also: At school, a century of struggle against religious symbols: crucifix, veil, abaya…
#Teachers #bulwarks #obscurantism