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Samuel Paty of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine

On October 16th, 2020, Samuel Paty, a middle school history teacher in the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine area, was beheaded by Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov, an eighteen year old Russian Muslim refugee who had been living in France since he was six years old. Paty had created a lesson for his class to teach his students the freedom of expression, in which he utilized the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazines that showcased caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. This information was posted on Facebook through a video from a parent of a Muslim student that was in the class where this lesson took place. This video was posted onto Facebook nine days before the tragedy took place. It was then reposted by another Facebook user who was a self-proclaimed imam that was known for having extreme Islamist views. This Facebook user also attached Paty's personal cell phone number and the address of the school he worked at to the post.

Because of this extreme act of terror, French President Emmanuel Macron decided to stand firm on his stances against Muslim extremism while also wanting to uphold France’s values on freedom of expression. Macron and members of his party that are in the French Parliament decided to propose three bills that would drastically change the atmosphere of French society and education for the good of freedom of expression.

The first bill would criminalize on-campus gatherings that trouble the good order of the establishment; the punishment for violating this would be a $45,000 fine and/or 3 years in prison. The second bill was a global-security bill that aimed to aid law enforcement in situations similar to the Paty murders. However, a multitude of the details/provisions of this bill made French citizens upset. One of these provisions is that this bill would criminalize the publication/sharing of photos of police officers unless their identifying features have been blurred. This bill also stated that law enforcement will now be able to utilize drones to film citizens in public, along with allowing body-camera footage from police officers to be live streamed in real time to French authorities. Lastly, this bill would also harshen sentences for people that are charged with assaulting a police officer.

The third bill’s goal was to strengthen respect for the principles of the Republic by means of tweaking the education system in a multitude of ways. The French Government described this bill as a part of President Macron’s strategy to counter radical Islamists attempts to influence French society in a negative way. It would assign every French child with a tracking number in order to enforce the attendance of each child in government-recognized schools. This would effectively end most homeschooling practices and privately religious owned schools in France, which means that French parents now cannot guide their child’s education path to best suit their needs. Elective home education would be subjected to an issuance of authorization by the State, and it would only be approved if the child's specific situation was defined by law. This would also give the French government control over the quality and quantity of education that a French child gets, whilst also ensuring that all French children are educated in the values of the French Republic. The bill would also criminalize sharing identifying information about a public servant that could be used to inflict harm along with “intimidating/threatening violence upon a public official from motives drawn from convictions or beliefs.”

Shortly after the murders, Macron also began to push for another proposed anti-extremist bill that would force imams to train in France while cracking down on the various groups that spread extremist and separatist ideals. This bill would also increase public funding for Islamic studies along with providing funds for low-income housing in the banlieues around Paris, which has been an area notorious for violence.