The French Senate has just made public the conclusions of an investigation launched after the murder of teacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist terrorist, which warns of the establishment of radical Islam in the country’s schools.
The data revealed by this report are alarming and speak of a situation that has been worsening every day in French schools for several years now. The school of the Republic is “in danger”, with a general increase in the “questioning of its values”, denounced François-Noël Buffet and Laurent Lafon – two of the senators in charge of the document – last Wednesday at a press conference.
Following the Islamist attack that ended in the death of Samuel Paty, beheaded by an Islamic terrorist of Chechen origin in October 2020, this commission of enquiry was set up at the request of the teacher’s sister, who filed a complaint with the Paris prosecutor’s office against the Macron administration, accusing officials of failing to take the necessary protective measures that could have prevented the murder. Paty, who showed his pupils caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, had received pressure and threats before he was killed that had been communicated to the hierarchy of the Ministry of Education, to no avail.
Now, the Senate document denounces an inexorable increase in violence and the inaction of the institution. According to the report, the figures from the national education department do not match the real figures and education has chosen to play down the problem.
The senators detailed the daily scenario faced by teachers, who are regularly threatened and even verbally and physically assaulted by students, as well as by their parents.
“Faced with an increase in violence, teachers often adopt a strategy of self-censorship. In sensitive subjects, such as natural sciences or history, they do not address the subjects that cause problems so as not to be reprimanded or questioned by students or parents about the content they teach,” the two senators explained.
The normalisation of radical Islam: “Do a Paty”
The normalisation of radical Islam is the phenomenon that most worries the authors of the Senate report. Moreover, they claim that the expression “faire une Paty” (“do a Paty” in English), referring to the beheading of the history teacher, has become a daily threat uttered against teachers by some students.
“This is the situation as it exists. One should not ignore the increase in demands for identity and community, nor the manifestation of radical Islam and certain new forms of spirituality,” Lafon criticised.
Faced with the magnitude of the phenomenon, the senators have formulated 38 recommendations that can be used to change the situation. They consider the level of secularism in schools to be ineffective and recommend that it be expanded. They also call for a complete overhaul of the system of sanctions, with harmonisation at national level.
The pursuit of secularism was one of the fundamental objectives of the programme of the former French education minister and now prime minister, Gabriel Attal, who last August banned the wearing of the abaya – the Islamic women’s tunic – in the country’s public schools.
“Secularism is not a restriction, but a freedom”, Attal declared at the time in an interview with the French channel TF1, where he described it as a “necessary and just” rule.
