The betrayal of Samuel Paty

Five years ago today, in a quiet Parisian suburb in broad daylight, teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded. His killer, Abdullah Anzarov, a self-described ‘servant of Allah’, had hoped to send a message to ‘the infidel Macron’. ‘I executed one of your hellhounds’, he boasted on social media, his post accompanied by a photo of Paty’s severed head.

The teacher’s only ‘crime’ was to have shown some Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class on freedom of expression. The same cartoons that, just five years before, had inspired two brothers to target the satirical magazine in an Islamist attack, slaughtering eight of its editorial staff and four other people.

The initial response to Paty’s murder was heartening. Tributes to the slain teacher came in thick and fast. French president Emmanuel Macron led a memorial service and posthumously awarded Paty the légion d’honneur, France’s highest civilian award. He saluted Paty as ‘the face’ of freedom and the ‘embodiment’ of French republican values. Macron also vowed a crackdown on Islamist extremism. The French government immediately shut down the Cheikh Yassine Collective, an Islamist group whose leader had waged an unhinged hate campaign against Paty, falsely claiming that he had discriminated against Muslim pupils. Thousands across France joined marches for free speech.

Yet that moment of defiance was all too brief. Five years on, it would now be impossible to claim that France or Europe has truly honoured Paty’s memory. The medieval forces that led to his killing have only been emboldened. Worse, some of the very nations that once took pride in their liberal, secular traditions are bending over backwards to appease this intolerance.

Tragically, Paty’s murder had precisely the chilling effect the terrorist would have wanted. It’s not just cartoons of the Islamic prophet that teachers are now wary of showing their pupils. A year after the killing, a survey found that nearly half of French secondary-school teachers would avoid or downplay issues like ‘sexuality, the Holocaust and evolution’ for fear of ‘angering Muslim pupils’ or to avoid making a ‘scene’. In 2023, teachers in a school west of Paris felt compelled to walk out after receiving a flood of complaints from Muslim parents over a Renaissance painting. Pupils were, apparently, ‘disturbed’ by the nude bodies depicted in Giuseppe Cesari’s Diana and Actaeon (1603). French schools, once geared towards instilling secular, liberal values, are now at the vanguard of Islam-inspired censorship.

Elsewhere in Europe, things are even bleaker. Twenty years ago in Denmark, the publication of 12 cartoons of Muhammad ignited a global firestorm. Back then, the Danish government stood firmly behind the cartoonists and their right to free expression. Denmark’s ancient blasphemy laws were repealed in 2017. But now, Denmark has a new de facto ban on blasphemy. In 2023, it joined the ranks of Iran, Afghanistan and other Islamist theocracies by making it a crime to treat a holy book ‘improperly’ – of course, we all know this was not about the Bible.

The UK is also developing a form of Islamic blasphemy law, albeit more tentatively. Hamit Coskun, a Turkish-born dissident, was recently convicted of a religiously motivated hate crime for burning the Koran. Thankfully, this was overturned on appeal, but his case exposed the police and the court’s eagerness to silence critics of Islam.

What’s more, the authorities do seem to tacitly condone violence or threats towards anyone who is seen to offend against Islam. When Coskun was burning the Koran in London outside the Turkish embassy, he was attacked by an enraged passer-by, Moussa Kadri, who slashed at him with a knife. Kadri was convicted but spared jail.

Similarly, in 2021, a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who showed a cartoon of Muhammad in a religious-studies class, was hounded out of his job and forced into hiding. The local Islamic hotheads who menaced him with death threats have faced no consequences whatsoever. The police, the school, the local Labour MP and just about anyone in authority sided uniformly with the sectarian bigots. There may not be an Islamic blasphemy law on the statute books, but the mob has been given a green light to enforce one of its own accord.

The tragic irony is that none of this censorship, none of this appeasement, has done anything to calm tensions or placate hardline Islamic anger. On the contrary. The anti-blasphemy bigots have only been emboldened. The message being sent by the authorities is that their grievances are valid.

Five years on from the slaying of Samuel Paty, 10 years on from the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it has never been more necessary to defend the right to offend. Our right to mock gods and prophets, to ridicule all and every faith, must be sacrosanct once again. We cannot let the Islamists win.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.