On the night of the 16th, a new terrorist rampage took place in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, France, with the brutal murder of a junior high school history and geography teacher, and the case is still under trial, but new information is coming out from time to time. The President of the European Commission, Jean-Pierre von der Leyen, condemned the terrorist act and sent greetings to teachers all over Europe. French President Emmanuel Macron announced that a state funeral will be held for the victimized teacher. It is expected to be next Wednesday.
The French president will preside over an official ceremony to pay national tribute to the history and geography teacher at a school in a Paris suburb who was brutally murdered by terrorists. Some right-wing French lawmakers have suggested that the body of the murdered teacher, who was killed for explaining the spirit of the Republic to his students, be placed in the Pantheon of the Wise, which the terrorists pointed to as the French Republic.
Former French Prime Minister Valls said that although the wave of terrorist killings of the last few years has passed and the Islamic State has been defeated, Islamic extremism still exists in different ways and threatens our Republic. He called for a complete ban on Islamist extremism in France.
The President of the European Commission von der Leyen paid tribute to teachers in France and throughout Europe. She condemned the killing of a French history and geography teacher by a terrorist act. Von der Leyen noted on her Twitter account that without teachers, there would be no civility and democracy in Europe.
The President of Chechnya stated that the 18-year-old murderer, Abdoulakah Anzorov, was originally from Chechnya, and that he sends his greetings to the family of the deceased, but that he grew up in France and came to Chechnya only once, when he was two years old. The Chechen president’s implication was that the murderer had nothing to do with Chechnya. But as a Muslim, the President of Chechnya is blackmailing France, saying that France should not mess with Muslims, that Muslims have their own religion, and that no one can take away their religion.
The French police in Paris have opened a case to investigate as a terrorist attack. So far, the police have arrested 10 people in connection with the attack. It is being investigated whether the perpetrators had direct or indirect contact with the school’s students and their parents. The investigation does not rule out the possibility that the murderer saw the video of the victim’s teacher on the Internet, as some parents had posted it on the Internet.
The victim’s teacher, Samuel Patti, was a junior high school history and geography teacher who also taught moral and civic education to 13- and 14-year-olds. He previously taught a journalism and freedom of expression course in his classroom, which involved caricatures of the Prophet of Islam. The course was met with protests from some students as well as parents.
From Friday to Saturday, ten people were detained, including the parents of one student. One or more of the parents reportedly complained to the school. One of the parents also posted a video of the school’s class on social networks. They even put the teacher’s name, identification photo, home address, and other personal information on the social network. If the offender was an individual, did he or she commit the crime by watching this video and could the teacher be found to commit the crime. What is the relationship between this video and the person who posted it and the perpetrator? This is one of the myriad questions that the counterterrorism investigation will have to answer.
In the latest news, the tenth person summoned by the police is an Islamic extremist of Moroccan origin from the eastern suburbs of Paris named Abdelhakim Sefraoui, an active anti-Semitic activist known to the police for having accompanied the parents of a girl to a meeting with the school’s principal to demand that the teacher who was later killed be removed from her teaching position. He claimed at the time to be the president of the French Council of Islamic Imams, but in reality the organization was not legitimate.
In 2009, he spearheaded a protest rally in front of a Paris mosque against the mosque’s leader’s plan to negotiate peace with Israel. Valls was also present. According to media reports, the governor of France’s 92 départements later tried to strip the man of his French citizenship, but failed to do so.
In addition to the judicial investigation, the French government will also meet with representatives of social media, including Facebook and Twitter, because the murder of the teacher showed that before the murder, some parents had already been contacted on social networks, and some had accused the teacher of showing obscene images to their students. When the principal organized a meeting with the parents of the teacher, the most aggressive parents were not present. These cases show that social media often needs to be monitored for inappropriate comments that mislead public opinion, and even bullying incidents.
Compared to previous terrorist cases, the murder of the teacher was not only more brutal, but it was also more complex because it had to do with both inside and outside the classroom, the way in which the French school curriculum is structured, and the subtle influence of Islamic radicalism that permeates society. These complexities are often compounded by the fact that the political spectrum in France, from the far left to the far right, is polarized on issues related to Islamism, immigrants, refugees, and so on.
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