Solidarity with France as, once again, Islamist barbarity is unleashed

Beheading is such a dehumanising act. When someone is shot dead, or stabbed to death, we recoil. We are distressed. But that the head should be removed from the body. It is as if the perpetrator isn’t satisfied to take the victim’s life, he wishes, literally, to separate the mind from the body and to show that whatever once moved that person to speak, think or communicate with the world has been stilled forever.

When Abdoullak Anzorov, an 18-year-old immigrant from the predominantly Muslim republic of Chechnya, set out last Friday in one of Paris’s outermost boroughs to murder a teacher, Samuel Paty, for daring to show cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his class two weeks ago during a lesson on freedom of speech, there was no doubt in his mind how events should unfold.

The victim was to be prostrated on the street outside the school in which he had so grievously sinned and then, while still alive, beheaded. What happened to him, as God’s executioner, in the aftermath was a small matter. He would have done his duty as a Muslim and was assured of his place in heaven.

Thus it was that on Friday evening, 12 years after his arrival in France as a refugee from the violence in Chechnya – he waited. Having asked a group of pupils milling around the school gates to identify Paty, Anzarov pursued his intended victim a little way along the street before attacking him, stabbing him repeatedly with a butcher’s knife and then hacking through his neck and spinal column until he was able to hold the head aloft, declaiming “Allahu-Akbar” – God is great!

One can only imagine the impact this horrific scene had on the young people who were forced to witness it. Anzorov himself remained calm throughout, photographing the severed head on his mobile phone and tweeting the message, “From Abdullah, the servant of Allah, to Macron, the leader of the infidels, I have executed one of your hellhounds who dared to belittle Muhammad”.

By now, the police had arrived and the inevitable denouement played out. Anzorov refused to surrender. Instead, he advanced towards a group of officers, firing pellets from an air-rifle, waving his knife and continuing to recite Allahu-Akbar, until, as with one mind, they shot him dead.

For assailant and victim, the matter was closed. They were gone. But for France and its people, the Islamist nightmare that they hoped belonged in the past, however recent, was cruelly reawakened.

Paty, aged 47, a teacher of history, geography and civics, married, with a five-year-old son, became, within a matter of hours, a hero and a martyr. President Macron rushed to the scene; politicians of every hue joined him in expressing their revulsion and their unity in the face of an attack on French liberty and freedom of expression. All other stories were wiped from the front pages and the airwaves. On Sunday, in the Place de la République, in central Paris, a vast crowd assembled to pay tribute to the dead teacher and to reaffirm their commitment to France as a liberal and, most of all, secular state.

Other public gatherings occurred in towns and cities across the nation, with more formal acts of commemoration due to take place during the week ahead, led by the President. Placards and banners bearing the words “Je suis Samuel” and “Je suis Prof” were everywhere to be seen, reminiscent of the time following the murder in 2015 of staff employed by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that first published the supposedly blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet.

In Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, the town, some 20 miles northwest of Paris, the school in which Paty taught is to be renamed in his honour.
But when the shock and the mourning subsides and what passes for normal life resumes in a nation hobbled by Covid, serious questions remain to be answered.

What part in the lead-up to the drama was played by the parents of Muslim pupils outraged by the fact that their young teenage children were being taught by a blasphemer? Paty had asked any in the class he was teaching who might be offended by images of Muhammad to excuse themselves from the lesson. But when news of what they were being shielded from reached the home of one girl in particular, an ugly social media campaign began in which Paty was depicted as an enemy of Islam. Several people have been held for questioning by the police in relation to this campaign, which clearly reached Evreux, the town in Normandy 100 kilometres distant, where Anzorov lived. Among those in custody are a number of his known associates. But it is unclear what charges, if any, might be brought.

Police and justice officials will also wish to know which pupils identified Paty to his killer and to what extent, if any, they might, however unwittingly, have helped the killer in his work. Anzorov may well have concealed the knife he used for the beheading, but he was also in possession of an air-rifle, which should have been apparent to those with whom he spoke. Did they suspect that he was up to no good, or were they simply too frightened, or too blasé, to care?

Finally, and crucially, what is to be done about the teaching of laïcité (secularity) in schools? It is axiomatic of France that there should be a clear separation of Church and State. In the days, pre-9/11, when Islamic extremism rarely extended much outside the Muslim world, the law – rooted in the Constitution – went largely unchallenged. Such murders as were committed by religiously-inclined Muslims were generally connected to the colonial war in Algeria and its aftermath, dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. Today, with the numbers of Muslims in France approaching six million, laïcité has become central to an ongoing political and philosophical debate.

Everyone remembers the Islamist attacks in Paris and Nice in 2015 and 2016, in which hundreds died. But since then there has been a steady drip-feed of attacks by individual jihadis, resulting in the deaths of some twenty people, including perpetrators, police officers and, in one case, an elderly Catholic priest. Many others have been wounded.

The murder of Samuel Paty is notable not just for the barbarity with which it was accomplished, but for the link with the Charlie Hebdo attack and the challenge it poses to France’s self-image as a liberal society in which all faiths and none are equal and no belief system other than that defined by Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité is recognised by the State.

If Emmanuel Macron’s in-tray was full last Friday lunchtime, today it is overflowing. But at least on this occasion his allies and his rivals, as well as most of the people of France, stand united behind him.

Abdoullak Anzorov and others of his ilk do not represent the nation’s mainly peaceful, if watchful, Muslim community anymore than extremists of the Far Right represent the views of everyday French citizens as they struggle to get on with their lives. As yesterday’s mass turnout in Paris showed to the world, the resources of the Republic, though strained, are not yet exhausted.

Vive la France!