French faith leaders rejected religious violence and the government vowed a firm crackdown after a history teacher was beheaded by a young Muslim refugee for showing a caricature of Islam's Prophet Mohammad in a course on free speech.
The Catholic bishops conference and two bishops condemned the bloody killing of Samuel Paty in a Paris suburb by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee apparently enraged by a social media campaign against the teacher. Leading Muslim, Protestant and Jewish organisations joined in the protest.
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated yesterday against the killing in Paris and large cities such as Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux and others.
“We've got everybody on our backs,” a teacher from the eastern suburbs said at the Paris march. “The television news, the politicians – and now we're being killed for doing our job. We have colleagues who've committed suicide, and now they're killing us at the end of a school day.”
It was the second attack in three weeks sparked by the caricatures, which prompted the murder of 12 staffers at the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in 2015 after it published them. A young Pakistani refugee knifed two people last month amid renewed emotion stirred up by the current trial of accused accomplices of the three gunmen killed during the 2015 drama.
Bishops' conference spokesman Vincent Neymon expressed “sadness and horror” at Paty's murder and prayers for his family, students and colleagues. “Will our country become a school of fraternity, the only bulwark against this incredible violence?” he asked in a tweet.
Rouen Archbishop Dominique Lebrun denounced the “fanatism that has killed” and rallied Christians and Muslims on Sunday around a memorial to Fr Jacques Hamel, whose throat was slit in 2016 by two supporters of the Islamic State extremist group during Mass in his church there.
“The Rouen diocese will continue to teach in its schools the basic elements of fraternity. The Ten Commandments are the basis: ‘thou shalt adore only God’ and ‘thou shalt not kill’ are inseparable for us,” he said
Versailles's Bishop Eric Aumonier said Paty's murder “upsets us like all citizens attached to the values of freedom, equality and fraternity” and united Catholics with “all those who are deeply wounded by this appalling act”.
He quoted Pope Francis's encyclical Fratelli Tutti: “What happens when fraternity is not consciously cultivated? … Liberty becomes nothing more than a condition for living as we will …”
President Emmanuel Macron, who recently announced a new drive against radical Islam in France, promised a tough response. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin vowed to ban some Islamist groups. “There is no accommodation possible with radical Islamism. Any compromise compromises us,” he said.
Macron has admitted France has not integrated many of its five million Muslims and that this marginalisation feeds radicalisation. His goal of creating a “French Islam” upholding national values is ambitious; prior governments over the past three decades have tried but failed to do so.
Most Muslims here accept laïcité – the strict secularism the state teaches its pupils – but resent their marginalisation. The main divide runs between provocative defenders of this strict neutrality and radical Islamists who violently reject criticism of their Prophet Mohammad.
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