Schools will pay tribute to the murdered teacher. In September, a teacher from Haut-Rhin was threatened with death after talking about the cartoons of Muhammad.
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Un duty of memory. Two years after the assassination of Samuel Paty, teachers and students will pay tribute to the professor, in a context of renewed concern about respect for secularism, with an increase in incidents linked to the wearing of religious symbols at school in september. The Ministry of Education published Thursday morning the figures for attacks on secularism for September, which show an increase in reports for the wearing of religious outfits (including abayas and qamis, traditional long clothes worn respectively by women and men). men).
The ministry recorded 313 reports in schools, colleges and high schools in September and 904 in the second quarter of 2022 (April to July), for which the figures had not yet been published. This is an increase from the average for the first quarter of 2022, when the ministry had recorded 627 incidents. Incidents for “wearing religious signs and attire” accounted for more than half of the total in September (54%), compared to 41% in the second quarter of 2022 and 22% in the first quarter.
“There is indeed a wave of people wearing outfits that could be considered religious,” said Education Minister Pap Ndiaye in an interview with World of Thursday. “For a few months, we have become aware of a phenomenon of coordination and agitation of part of our youth on social networks, he adds. We will do what is necessary to limit as much as possible the harmful influence of these Islamist agitators. »
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Before the start of the school year in September, a State self-radicalization service had sounded the alarm: the Interministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalization (CIPDR) had accused the “Islamist movement” of questioning “the principle of secularism at school” by relying on social networks, in particular Twitter or TikTok, to encourage the wearing of clothing marking a religious affiliation.The management staff of the ID-FO union asked for “clear directives” in the face of a problem which “has not diminished since the start of the school year, quite the contrary”. “We cannot publish a catalog of all the clothes that could be religious, answers Pap Ndiaye in The world. That’s why headteachers need to look carefully for conspicuous signs. »
A shock still present
Sign of the tensions on secularism, a teacher of a high school in Thann (Haut-Rhin) notably suffered at the beginning of October “death threats from the uncle of one of his students” after having “addressed in class freedom of expression, cartoons of Muhammad and Charlie Hebdo “, according to a judicial source. The rectorate of Strasbourg “firmly” condemned Wednesday these “intimidations and these threats”. These incidents come as schools prepare to pay tribute to Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, beheaded on October 16, 2020 by a radicalized young man who accused him of having shown caricatures of Muhammad to His students.
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The event had aroused considerable emotion throughout the country. The time of tribute, Friday or Monday, “could take different forms” and whose “content will be left to the choice of the teams”, indicates the minister in a letter sent to the rectors of the academy. “We ask all establishments to do so”, insists in The world Pap Ndiaye, stressing that the assassination of Samuel Paty was a “huge shock” which “is still felt”.
The minister will be present at the Sorbonne on Saturday afternoon alongside Mickaëlle Paty, the teacher’s sister, for the awarding of the first Samuel-Paty prize, organized by the Association of History and Geography Teachers (APHG). The next day, the anniversary of the death of Samuel Paty, a tribute will take place at 6 p.m. in front of the college where he worked, and a wreath of flowers will be laid in Square Samuel-Paty in Paris, opposite the Sorbonne, inaugurated in 2021.