Je suis Samuel
Oct 17, 2020 by Jill
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
The beheading of a teacher in France is the barbaric logical conclusion to cancel culture.
Yesterday, cancel culture turned murderous. It became positively medieval. On a suburban street on the outskirts of Paris a schoolteacher was beheaded in broad daylight for the supposed crime of showing caricatures of Muhammad to his pupils during a classroom discussion about freedom of speech. Decapitated for dissing the prophet, in France, in the 21st century. In essence, the teacher was cancelled, in the most thorough and depraved way imaginable. Enough is enough – everyone must now stand against all snivelling apologists for censorship and cancellation and defend unfettered freedom of speech as the cornerstone of civilised society.
The news from France was truly grim. Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old teacher of geography and history at a middle school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, was murdered and beheaded by an 18-year-old Chechen Islamic extremist. The murderous censor was heard yelling out ‘Allahu Akbar’. Then we discovered why Mr Paty was slaughtered in such a deranged, premodern fashion: because he dared to show some of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of Muhammad to his pupils during a lesson on why the liberties of thought and speech are so essential to the French Republic. That he reportedly offered his Muslim pupils the opportunity to leave the classroom while the Muhammad caricatures were being discussed wasn’t enough to protect him from the 7th-century fury of his executioner, who no doubt felt ‘offended’ by Mr Paty’s behaviour.
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