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France’s schools are succumbing to the Islamist threat
A 13-year-old Muslim girl was beaten unconscious outside her school gates in Montpellier in southern France on Tuesday. Her mother says she was attacked because of her religion but on this occasion most of the mainstream media has baulked at reporting the story.
That’s because Samara was a Muslim who didn’t follow her religion the way many of her classmates did. ‘My daughter dresses in European style,’ said her mother, Hassiba. ‘They called her a kafir, which means miscreant.’
The truth is that the Republic is as scared as its teachers
Samara was also called names because she refused to wear her hair under a headscarf. She was proud of her hair. She dyed it red because it made her feel ‘free’. Her courage has been brutally punished. One of her alleged attackers was a teenage girl in a headscarf.
I first wrote about this phenomenon in these pages eight years ago, when I felt compelled to correct those in the British and American press who were indignant about the fact that France had banned the burkini from its beaches. In that article I gave some examples of young French Muslims – all women – who had been set upon by ‘the police of mores’. My anger was wasted. In countries across the West, foolish progressive types continue to virtue signal their support of Islamic dress. As the EU-funded Council of Europe put it in a promotional campaign in 2021 for the headscarf. ‘Beauty is in diversity as freedom is in hijab’. Tell that to Samara.
My wife teaches in a state school in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the vast majority of her teenage pupils are Muslims of African origin. They are largely respectful of the law that bans the wearing of religious symbols and garments in schools, although many sport a headscarf to and from school.
Recently, my wife took her class on a school theatre trip to Paris. Some of the girls insisted on wearing the headscarf on public transport. The police of mores have their spies, and if word got back to the girls’ estate they’d have some explaining to do. Once in the theatre the girls had the confidence to remove their headscarves.
The mother of Samara has accused the school’s authority of indifference to her daughter’s plight. She had been threatened and harassed for months but nothing was done. Few in France are surprised.
Last week, Mickaëlle Paty appeared on television to talk about her brother, Samuel, murdered outside his school by an Islamist in 2020. She accused the state of being in ‘denial’ and said they still don’t understand the nature of the threat.
Samuel Paty isn’t the only teacher to be murdered by Islamists. Last October, Dominique Bernard was stabbed to death in his school playground. In recent weeks a headteacher was threatened at knifepoint by a pupil inspired by previous Islamist atrocities, and another resigned after receiving death threats from Islamic extremists.
That’s what can happen if you tell a pupil to remove her headscarf. The local education authority put out a statement claiming the headteacher’s resignation after 45 years in the profession wasn’t linked to the incident. This was a lie. In an internal communique, the headteacher said he feared for his security and his school’s if he stayed at his post.
Who could blame him? Few teachers, my wife included, feel that the state is fully behind them. A problem can’t be confronted if its existence is denied.
The truth is that the Republic is as scared as its teachers. Occasionally, one of my wife’s pupils arrives in the classroom wearing a headscarf. She removes it when asked. This week my wife had a chat with one of her pupils about the headscarf. The girl said she wears it because it’s in the Coran. Had she read the Coran? No, but she and her friends receive messages from influencers on TikTok who tell them that the headscarf is the sign of a good Muslim. It’s never the parents who tell the girls this – it’s social media.
The Islamists’ strategy of intimidating has intensified in recent months. They sense that France is faltering. This is a weak and ineffective administration with a president interested only in Russia and the Olympics. Macron’s new education minister, Nicole Belloubet, is a Socialist with a reputation for appeasing Islamic extremism.
In the last month, 150 schools across France have received menacing messages from Islamists. Teachers feel targeted. A survey last year reported that 48 per cent self-censor in the classroom to avoid confrontations, an increase of 11 points on a similar study in 2018. A couple of times in recent months my wife, explaining with balance the conflict in Gaza, has been challenged by pupils who don’t agree with her analysis.
The situation is not much better in Britain, where the teacher at Batley Grammar School remains in hiding three years after being threatened with death by Islamists. As the human rights activist Dame Sara Khan said this week in her official review of the incident, the state ‘totally and utterly failed’ the teacher.
On Wednesday, Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, was asked on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme if he envisaged the teacher returning to his profession. ‘I’m not too sure about answering that specific question,’ replied Kebede, nervously. ‘It’s an incredibly sensitive situation.’
It is ‘sensitive’ only because for many years politicians and education authorities in France and Britain have lacked the courage to confront an Islamist ideology that is built on threats and intimidation underpinned by a faux sense of victimhood.
It’s now too late. That ideology is in the schools and spreading. A study in 2021 reported that 65 per cent of Muslim schoolchildren in France lived more by Islamic law than by French law. Samara was not one of them, and for that reason she lies in a hospital bed.
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