Beheaded teacher not the only one threatened - video

Beheaded teacher not the only one threatened - video

After the brutal murder of a French teacher, solidarity demonstrations took place in Paris and several major cities, with motorcyclists disrupting one of the rallies. In the capital, a teacher said she had also been threatened by a student with a knife after a lesson on Islam. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin is considering steps to dissolve pro-Muslim organisations and deport more than 200 radicalised Islamists In the wake of the attack.

WORLD POLITICS OCTOBER 19. 2020 15:02

The situation is particularly tense and tensions are running high in France after the death of Samuel Paty, the teacher decapitated with bestial cruelty in an open street on Friday afternoon. Many took part in solidarity demonstrations in Paris and several other major cities to pay tribute to the memory of the 47-year-old teacher. The protest in Lyon was disrupted by motorcyclists who openly provoked the police overseeing the march.

The rally organised in the capital was attended by thousands of people.

One of the protesters, a teacher, revealed that she had also received threats from a student after a lesson on Islam. The fifth grader told her after class that he would send her to ISIS and the next day he went to school armed with a knife to threaten the teacher. The young woman said she was lucky, because her students took her side and prevented a potentially horrible outcome, adding however that she needed therapy for months to process the incident, which she will never forget.

In response to the rally, Prime Minister Jean Castex took to Twitter to send Islamists a message, saying „You do not scare us… You will not divide us. We are France!”

The demonstration was also attended by Assa Traore and several members of the Adama Committee named after her brother, who died following his 2016 arrest. Committee members posted some photos on Twitter of Assa and two men holding a sign at the Place de la Republique in Paris and asking people to show solidarity with Samuel. The police union Synergie-Officiers noticed the post and – being fully aware of the Adama Committee s contacts and supporters – described the committee s apparent sympathy for the murdered teacher as shameful.

The Adama Committee s attendance at the demonstration and their paying tribute to the beheaded teacher is rather hypocritical because they also took part in this weekend s protest to demand amnesty and housing for migrants that arrived without documents. The committee let the world know about its participation on Twitter, stressing that they support and identify with the cause and struggle of migrants.

After the teacher s decapitation, French authorities arrested 11 suspects, including the father of one of the students. Brahim Chnina initiated a protest movement against the teacher on social media and lodged a complaint against him with the CCIF, an organisation fighting Islamophobia in France. In a video recording, he says that one should be proud of one s religion and the prophet, and called the teacher a thug . He added that the teacher had no place in public education, and that his beheading was a divine punishment. The interesting part is that according to Europe 1, the daughter of Brahim Chnina was not even taught by the murdered teacher, Samuel Paty. The schoolgirl had presumably only heard from her schoolmates what happened in history class and told her father about it at home.

Zineb El Rhazoui, a former employee of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, discovered that the Ummah Charity Islamic NGO had initiated an online fundraiser to help the parent in the video, but it has since been cancelled.

Politicians in France also sprung into action in the wake of the brutal incident. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin consulted with the prefects on the so-called FSPRT list of radicalised Islamists and then announced that the government would deport 231 foreign nationals on that list. 180 of those are currently serving their jail term, but another 51 are still at large in France.

Last week Gérald Darmanin visited Rabat, the capital of Morocco to meet Moroccan Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit and Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita. They discussed ways to prevent the radicalisation of terrorists and made an agreement that France would return nine unaccompanied minor migrants to the country, Valeurs actuelles reports.

Going even further. the French interior minister announced that within the context of the state s fight against radicalised Islamists he would initiate the dissolution of two Muslim-friendly French organisations (CCIF and BarakaCity) – also backed by billionaire speculator George Soros – describing these groups as the enemies of the French Republic.

Idriss Sihamedi, the founding leader of BarakaCity, was detained last week for moral harassment and authorities also carried out a house search at the organisation s headquarters. Mr Sihamedi has been featured in the media quite frequently of late, mainly because he openly glorifies terrorism on social media. In his view, to die a martyr is the most beautiful thing in the life of a true believer and it is his duty to fight oppression and injustice.

Beziers Mayor Robert Menard also condemned the events, voicing his fear, however, that the years-long struggle against fanatical Islamists would never end and that they were not a small minority.

According to Mr Menard, the real problem is that 40 per cent of Muslims living in France put religious beliefs ahead of the values of the French Republic and, even more worryingly, their proportion is a staggering 74 per cent among Muslims aged under 25. These shocking figures come from a survey conducted by the French IFOP polling institute in early September, when the trial of those involved in the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo began.

WORLD POLITICS

Tags:

demonstration, france, gerald darmanin, islamisation, paris, radikalization