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France: Murder of Samuel Paty

Fight Terrorism Through Solidarity, Not Hatred

On 16 October, France was horrified by the murder of Samuel Paty, a teacher beheaded in the street...

Wednesday, 28 October 2020 15:26 (UTC)
Tiphaine & Brune
ISA in Poland & ISA in Belgium
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On 16 October, France was horrified by the murder of Samuel Paty, a teacher beheaded in the street by an 18-year-old Chechen for showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed during a civic education course on the theme of freedom of expression. In response, demonstrations against hatred and in solidarity with teachers have taken place throughout France, but the racism and Islamophobia that has dominated French politics for decades is taking advantage of this tragedy to reinforce itself.

We share the horror felt in France and elsewhere following this terrible assassination. Such a foul act is indistinguishable from the imperialist drone attacks that drop bombs on families in Afghanistan. We are angry at the terrorist but also at the menaces of the right-wing Salafist extremists and the traditional extreme right. The Salafists want to spread their ideology of hatred and instrumentalise the real racism and Islamophobia that exists to draw people into their ranks. In the same way, Le Pen — but also Macron — will use this tragic event to sew division and distrust within the working class.

A situation aggravated by bourgeois politicians

For years, from one government to another, racist and islamaphobic policies and rhetoric have intensified. In the media, everything is a pretext to throw oil on the fire: burkinis, canteen menus and even people’s first names. Recently, deputies left the national assembly to protest against the presence of the vice-president of the student union UNEF Maryam Pougetoux because she wears a veil. To make matters worse, on 2 October Macron announced a bill to “strengthen secularism” that will further extend the ban on religious signs and practices in public sector workplaces.

In a sense, this goes completely against the spirit of the separation of church and state and religious freedom. It is the state that should be secular, but not enforce this on individual users of services and civil servants. According to the principle of secularism, the state must guarantee everyone freedom of conscience and religion. But for years now, in the mouths of bourgeois politicians, “secularism” has simply meant “anti-Islam”.

Similarly, one can question their notion of “freedom of expression”, when France is only 34th in the world press freedom ranking by Reporter Sans Frontière. Activists also know what political freedom and freedom of demonstration mean under Macron: repression against yellow vests and police searches against La France Insoumise.

Teachers on the front line

In organising this course on freedom of expression and using these cartoons as material, Samuel Paty has simply followed the programme determined by the National Education. The government requires teachers to cover essential subjects like freedom of expression and equality, values which they have previously undermined with their destructive and racist policies.

There are many testimonies of teachers who find themselves in tense situations in which management offers no support or even takes a stand against them (often to make them feel guilty individually). For example, when Samuel Paty reported the harassment and threats against him, his principal asked him to apologise (for doing his job as requested!) and did nothing to protect him.

This is all the more hypocritical as teachers are subject to a duty of reserve and can incur sanctions if they talk about politics in the course of their work. Here again, the aim is to prevent teachers from speaking out and opposing the official governmental politics. The teachers have to relay official propaganda during civic education classes.

The worsening of study conditions is not unrelated to the distress and physical danger faced by teachers. Because of the competition between institutions, principals have an incentive to not report incidents so as not to be downgraded. Job cuts mean that teachers have little time to devote to individual students and to build up a relationship of trust with them, which would also help in tense situations.

This is a general situation in the public service. In this climate, public service workers find themselves exposed to insults and violence, and even risk their lives — all to be constantly treated as lazy people who are always on strike and to have their salaries and jobs frozen.

“Divide and rule”

When a worker has just paid with his life for the tensions fuelled by bourgeois politicians, they jump at the chance to outbid each other. They impose a narrative which wants to divide society into two camps without nuance: either that of the republic as they conceive it, or that of Islamic terrorism.

In the rallies that took place after the assassination of Samuel Paty, on several occasions activists were insulted because they represented a more nuanced position. The president of UNEF Mélanie Luce was called a “collaborator” and a “traitor to secularism”. In Anger, a teacher who is a member of the CGT was booed for intervening saying that the government underfunds public schools and favours private Catholic schools.

As for Mélenchon, for having participated last year in the march against Islamophobia, he was outrightly accused of complicity in the murder by Manuel Valls. He has been accused of being an “islamo-gauchist” — a term that shows how the right intends to use this binary vision of the situation for its own political agenda.

On TV, right-wing politicians compete with each other over ideas to increase repression, such as prisons or re-establishing military service. Interior Minister Darmarin has announced that he wants to expel “231 people in an irregular situation who are being followed on suspicion of radicalisation” — but he will not stop there; this pretext will be used to increase acceptance of expulsions in general.

All this will only make the situation in the classrooms even worse. Teachers will continue to suffer not only from increased social tensions, but also from the effects of austerity policies on their working conditions. These phenomena are two sides of the same coin of French policy throughout this period: the starving of public services and mass unemployment creates the breeding ground for hatred and discrimination, which in turn allows years of austerity to be accepted through the game of “divide and rule”.

This is why we think it is important that the impulse of working-class solidarity of the teachers for their murdered colleague should be distinguished from the divisive ideology of the government and the elite. The call should be clearly made for workers’ unity against terrorism, racism and austerity. It is therefore regrettable that Jean-Luc Mélenchon spoke in favour of “national unity” with the right. He went so far as to call for more repression, control and expulsions in the Chechen community. Even Darmarin said that Mélenchon was too far to the right!

Security is an illusion in a social desert

A social desert has emerged in a context of growing precariousness, of economic, social and environmental crisis — aggravated by the Covid pandemic — which denies many the most basic opportunities. Tensions increase with the aggravation of the crises. Social exclusion is thus increasingly visible.

Samuel Paty’s assassin, Abdullakh Anzorov, arrived in France 10 years ago at the age of 8. Instead of wondering whether or not his father should have been granted refugee status, one might wonder how in 10 years France, the world’s 6th largest economic power, boasting of its supposedly egalitarian republican school system, has failed to convince a teenager that there were better prospects in this society than this attack, which was as horrible as it was suicidal.

A few days before the 2016 Brussels bombings, sociologist Sarah Bracke wrote in the Flemish daily De Standaard (19/03/2016) about the systematic marginalisation and dehumanisation of population groups in the country’s poor neighbourhoods, ones that also have large migrant populations: “Dehumanisation carries with it violence. In the first instance symbolic violence, but which can quickly become physical violence”.

The French government undermines our security by saving on social security, working conditions and wages. This leads to an increase in conflicts and social tensions in society. Reactionaries of all stripes — populists, Salafists, racists, fascists — find fertile ground here. Just like the government, they too want to strangle our collective political and trade union opposition.

Thus, the idea of ‘security’ is becoming more and more illusory with the destruction of public services, budget cuts and wage freezes, justified by governments as ‘necessary’ to revive the economy.

Every worker knows that safety in the workplace requires investment in infrastructure and general working conditions to prevent stress and other health problems. Our neighbourhoods and society are no different.

Imperialism

Samuel Paty, but also the victims of the attacks in France and elsewhere, have not in fact been protected by the State, which nevertheless deploys considerable resources in its ‘war on terror’. Yet it is the “protection of the citizens” that justifies the imperialist interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Syria, the Sahel..

These interventions are also points of ‘radicalisation’. The interventions of the American and British imperialists played a decisive role in the development of fundamentalist organisations, including Al Qaeda and the Islamic state. These flourished in a situation of destruction of the infrastructure of the countries under attack. The social vacuum, the lack of response of the atomized labor movement in these countries, was filled by fundamentalist forces.

Social tensions and the growing extreme right, but also social resistance

The covid crisis, the economic crisis, the wars: all these tensions are not going to improve in the coming period. The Islamophobic ideology of so-called experts will only reinforce these tensions, and provoke racist attacks. Following the assassination of Samuel Paty, we very quickly saw examples of this, including the attack on two women who were stabbed and subjected to racist insults while walking around the Eiffel Tower district.

We also see the extreme right, and in particular the Rassemblement National de Marine Le Pen, taking advantage and capitalising as much as possible on Samuel Paty’s case.

The workers’ movement, the unions, the organisations of the working class must prepare now for a rise in the ideas of the extreme right and an ever greater normalisation of these nauseating ideas. Only by proposing a programme with real solutions in the face of the social desert and the crisis of the system can the extreme right and fundamentalists of all kinds be prevented from thriving.

In recent years in France there have been mass mobilisations across many sectors: the yellow vests movement, struggles against pension reform, health workers in struggle, the struggle of undocumented migrants. All these examples show the incredible potential for social struggle that exists in France.

It is in the streets, united against the divisions sewn and stoked by the ruling class, that we will be able to replace hatred and distrust with solidarity. But in the long run, it’s the whole capitalist system that is guilty. Guilty of the oppressions it generates, guilty of economic and social crises it continually creates which foster a breeding ground for the extreme right and the terrible attacks like the one Samuel Paty suffered. It is high time to replace it with a system based on the meeting of social needs and not on the thirst for profit; a democratic socialist society.

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Fight Terrorism Through Solidarity, Not Hatred (28 Oct 2020)

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