{"id":1928,"date":"2020-10-31T10:05:52","date_gmt":"2020-10-31T14:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=1928"},"modified":"2020-12-11T18:18:50","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T22:18:50","slug":"islamophobia-unleashed-in-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2020\/10\/islamophobia-unleashed-in-france\/","title":{"rendered":"Islamophobia unleashed in France"},"content":{"rendered":"

W<\/span>hen the news came of the murder of Samuel Paty<\/a>, the feeling was both terrifying and familiar. Since 2012, this kind of event has been happening on a regular basis in France. The horrific Charlie Hebdo<\/em> and Hyper Cacher (kosher supermarket) killings of January 2015, and the even more horrifying attacks of November 2015 which left 130 dead are still present in everyone\u2019s mind, and there have been a number of smaller attacks. For a big part of the French population, especially Muslims, the horror is compounded by the fear of the backlash, heightened repression, and discrimination that always follows such tragedies.<\/p>\n

Paty was a secondary school geography and history teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a multiracial town on the outskirts of Paris. He was beheaded by 18-year old Abdoullakh Anzorov, who in turn was shot by police. Anzorov was born in Russia of Chechen parents, having come to France with his family as a 6-year old. He was not a student of Paty, nor did he live in Conflans. The apparent reason he chose the teacher as his target was because Paty\u2019s name circulated on the Internet for having shown his 8th<\/sup> grade students two cartoons depicting Muhammad, taken from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This was in the context of a class on freedom of expression \u2013 although at least one of the cartoons is clearly offensive, the teacher had done the same in previous years without any outcry. Paty was seeking to foster an open discussion in class, while Anzorov considered the showing of the cartoons as an insult to Islam.<\/p>\n

The exact motivations of either are not, in any case, what should guide our analysis. In 2015, a woman killed her husband with an axe because he mocked her Catholic faith, but this did not become headline news, nor was the political landscape changed by it. In order to understand why this particular murder has had a major impact on the political climate, we must look at the history of Islamophobia in France, and what parts the school system and the \u201cwar on terrorism\u201d play in it.<\/p>\n

Islamophobia in its modern form has been a force in French politics since the 1980\u2019s and schools have been its central locus, as the place where \u201crepublican values\u201d\u2014 i.e. the French variety of bourgeois ideology\u2014is hammered into young people\u2019s brains. The difference with the old style colonial Islamophobia is that Muslims were now targeted as part of the French population, not as indigenous people in the colonies, nor as migrant workers fated to go back to their country of origin. The 1980\u2019s were the decade when many \u201csecond generation migrants\u201d, i.e. French citizens born in France of migrant parents from North or Subsaharan Africa, many of them Muslim, were starting to demand respect for their rights, with huge marches in 1983 and 1984 and a number of organizations springing up.<\/p>\n