Samuel paty

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Samuel Paty’s murder has still not been reckoned with

Two years ago on Sunday Samuel Paty was brutally murdered by an 18-year-old outside his school in a Parisian suburb. The teacher’s crime was to have shown an image of the prophet Mohammed during a class discussion on the freedom of expression.   Paty’s killer was a Chechen, and it’s noteworthy that the two other major Islamist terror attacks in France in recent years – the murder of three worshippers in a Nice church and the killing of a policewoman in Rambouillet – were also the work of foreign-born terrorists.   Homegrown Islamic terrorists are now a rarity in France.

Tuesday

Fiyaz Mughal

The Batley protestors don’t represent me

The protestors outside Batley Grammar School could be heard shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ — God is great. It’s a term I often use when I need spiritual strength, a basic prayer. But this time, the prayer was being used as a war cry by those who seemed to think that re-affirming their Muslim identity would help them sack a teacher in a school. It amounted to nothing less than the defamation of Islam. There are perhaps three million Muslims in Britain, the vast majority of us proud to live in one of the most tolerant countries on earth and feeling no conflict between our faith and our nationality. British values are liberal values. Freedom of religion is respected, and freedom of speech too.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

A small French town and the betrayal of Samuel Paty

There is a council meeting in the southern French town of Ollioules tomorrow but one item has been removed from the agenda. The mayor, Robert Beneventi, will not now propose renaming the area's Eucalyptus College after Samuel Paty. You'll recall the fate of Monsieur Paty, beheaded just beyond the gates of his Parisian suburb school last October by a young Islamist enraged that the teacher had shown a caricature of the Prophet during a lesson discussing freedom of expression. Paty’s brutal death sparked revulsion around the world – save in Pakistan and Turkey – and in France there was a large rally in Paris. There were numerous placards proclaiming 'Je Suis Samuel' and similar sentiments were widely expressed on social media.

Monday

Dominic Green

Life, liberty and the pursuit of laïcité

From our US edition

The French were asking for it, weren’t they? All that laïcité is the political equivalent of a short skirt. What did Marianne think would happen if she went out like that?The very act of being French, Politico tells us, ‘incites’ Muslims to murderous rage. A New Yorker writer explains that Charlie Hebdo cartoons are ‘effectively hate speech’, which effectively implies that Samuel Paty, the teacher who showed the cartoons to his pupils in a class on free speech, got what he deserved. The New York Times tells us that there are fine people on both sides: the real victims of Islamist terrorism in France are French Muslims, who are left feeling uncomfortable.

Laïcité

Thursday

Francis Pike

Erdogan’s game: why Turkey has turned against the West

From our US edition

Six years ago, at the opening match of the new Basaksehir Stadium in Istanbul, an unlikely soccer star emerged. The red team’s aging, six-foot center-forward lumbered toward the white team’s goal, and a delicate chip over the advancing keeper brought a goal that sent the stadium into ecstasy. The scorer was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the run-up to an election in which he became his country’s 12th president.For Erdogan, a former semi-professional footballer, it was brilliant self-promotion. Like Fidel Castro’s baseball pitching or Chairman Mao’s ‘world-record’ Yangtze river swim, Erdogan’s contrived sporting prowess helped make him as much a cult as a politician.

erdogan