After a French school teacher was beheaded by an Islamist terrorist, lakhs of demonstrators took to the streets lauding free speech and decrying ‘Nazislamisation’
Images of Samuel Paty displayed on govt buildings of France to express solidarity
In a stern message to Islamists in France, a determined French President Emmanuel Macron said, “Fear is going to change sides. Islamists should not be able to sleep easy in our country.” He was responding to the beheading of a French teacher Samuel Paty by Islamist terrorist.
Paying tribute to Paty, Macron hailed the teacher as a “quiet hero”. “He was killed precisely because he incarnated the Republic. He was killed because the Islamists want our future. They know that with quiet heroes like him, they will never have it,” Macron said.
Recent beheading of history teacher Samuel Paty has triggered unprecedented response in France, which forced the government to launch a massive crackdown on madrasas and Islamist institutions that churn out radicals.
Paty was killed by 18-year-old Chechen Islamist Aboulakh A in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, around 25 miles north-west of Paris. The terrorist also shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he launched the attack.
The teacher had ‘invited Muslim students out of the classroom’ before showing a Charlie Hebdo caricature of the Prophet crouching with a star drawn on his buttocks and the inscription ‘A star is born’, reported the Daily Mail.
A father of a 13-year-old student at the secondary school in middle-class Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a suburb 25 miles from the centre of Paris, told Reuters Mr Paty had told any Muslim students to leave because the cartoon would likely cause offence. For Muslim fanatics, any depiction of the Prophet is blasphemous.
One girl, thought to be Muslim, stayed behind by mistake, and later told her parents. They made a legal complaint to the school and held a meeting with the teacher, school principal and an official from the education authority.
The attacker was shot dead by police about 600 yards from the killing when he refused to drop his weapons and threatened the officers. It is unclear whether the gunman had seen the video.
Following the incident, Islamists across the world justified the gruesome murder of the teacher.
The French President denounced what he called an ‘Islamist terrorist attack’, claiming: “One of our compatriots was murdered today because he taught the freedom to believe or not believe.” He said the attack should not divide France because that is what the extremists want. We must stand all together as citizens.
“It is Islamic separatism that we have to attack. Islamic separatism is a conscious effort, a politico-religious one. It repeatedly breaks with the values of the Republic and aims to form a counter-society. This takes the form of taking kids out of school, developing sports and cultural communities that become an excuse for teaching principles that do not conform to the laws of the Republic. This indoctrination negates our principles such as equality of men and women and the dignity of the human being,“ said the French President.
The French anti-terrorism prosecutor has ordered an investigation into the murder with a suspected terrorist motive. Four people, one a minor, were detained hours later, the office of anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said without elaborating. Police typically fan out to find family and friends of potential suspects in terror cases.
Meanwhile, the general refrain among leading Islamic scholars across the world is that the Chechen student who recently beheaded French history teacher Samuel Paty has not done a serious crime. According to some scholars, he should not have committed the murder by himself but should have allowed a shari’ah court to award death penalty. In India, too, Islamo-Left-Liberals who were very vocal in the case of murder of George Floyd, 46-year-old US black man — and launched a campaign ‘Muslims lives matter’ on the lines of ‘Black lives matter’ — remained tight-lipped about the decapitation of the French teacher by an Islamic radical.
Talking to a Turkey TV channel, Sheikh Ali Al-Yousuf of the International Union of Muslim Scholars said from the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence, the Chechen teen has “not done any serious crime”. Punishment for insulting Prophet Muhammad is death, he said. “…The sentence should be carried out by a shari’ah court in an Islamic state.
According to Al-Yousuf, Islam is growing in France and elsewhere in Europe because of its ‘moral virtues’. He says: “Anyone who follows what is happening in France – the attacks against Islam and Muslims, and especially what we have seen lately – will see that there is an obvious media, political, cultural, and ideological campaign against Islam, Muslims, and the Prophet Muhammad, against every Muslim individual, as well as Muslim symbols, like the hijab. All this is crystal clear – it is called Islamophobia.”
Even after mounting onslaught on civilians and institutions, Islamic scholars try to play the victim card. “This is the problem, before we talk about this act [murder of Samuel Paty] – its judgement according to the shari’a and our opinion about it… We must firmly focus on all the hostile and disgraceful actions that have been directed against Muslims for many years, actions supported by the government and extremists in France and elsewhere that were meant to distort Islam’s image in the West,” Al-Yousuf said.
