Taking Secularism a bit too far.
I know that generally, we talk only about Anglo concerns, and we all try to respect each other's position about sacred and secular.
I don't want to see this devolve into a god/no-god debate, though.
The French pride themselves on being a secular society to the point they discourage the wearing of any religious symbol or dress in public. From time to time this is challenged by religious people who do not want to violate their religious dictates. But I am wondering, in the case of the recent beheading of a French teacher for having shown caricatures of Mohammed in a class. It seems to me that while the French teacher was within his rights to take pride in his secularism it does not mean he had the right to offend a person of faith. This is not the first time a French teacher has been killed for displaying caricatures of the prophet. Seems like some people have not learned from past experience.
What do you think?
I don't want to see this devolve into a god/no-god debate, though.
The French pride themselves on being a secular society to the point they discourage the wearing of any religious symbol or dress in public. From time to time this is challenged by religious people who do not want to violate their religious dictates. But I am wondering, in the case of the recent beheading of a French teacher for having shown caricatures of Mohammed in a class. It seems to me that while the French teacher was within his rights to take pride in his secularism it does not mean he had the right to offend a person of faith. This is not the first time a French teacher has been killed for displaying caricatures of the prophet. Seems like some people have not learned from past experience.
What do you think?

Comments
I find the ban on the hijab and other religious symbols in schools (I think the restriction is broader but not a blanket ban, but it is also really about the influence of Islam) problematic. Australians like me pride ourselves on multiculturalism though. We have a different sensibility to the French. People wear Islamic dress everywhere here, and you see it on the telly more and more. Just the other day, I saw a journo wearing a burka at a press conference.
I support criminalising hate speech, to the extent that it is not under current law. But this was not hate speech, and showing the cartoon in this context was not about fomenting hate, but critical thinking. Perhaps the teacher was unwise to use this image, given the reaction it provokes among militants. Perhaps he should have shown the Piss Christ, or perhaps shown the cartoon as one of a number of offensive images. But I will not allow the actions of militant and violent people to have any influence at all on what is shown to a group of kids to get them to think about values.
If people can't process the difference between a history class engaging with sources for discussion and a street preacher hurling sectarian positions in earnest, how would a history teacher be meant to teach the European Reformation or the wars of religion in France? People from the faiths involved will read stuff in the primary sources that could offend their faith. If you want to discuss serious matters, there need to be teaching spaces where people can engage with the sources and they need not to be policed by the most intolerant and dogmatic who don't want other people to be allowed to exercise their consciences.
Still: I think the framing of this as a matter of taking offence is unhelpful. Compare with racially offensive material. The main problem isn't that it causes unpleasant emotional states in the people offended: it's that it causes unpleasant attitudes to the person offended in the people who find it acceptable. (At best, condescension to their thin skins.) Saying that it's ok for children of racial minorities to leave the room before you discuss whether offensive racial stereotypes should be acceptable shows that you do not grasp the problem: you are saying that the discussion can go on perfectly well despite the exclusion of the voices that most ought to be listened to. It is (unconsciously probably) a demonstration of one's power to determine the terms of debate.
It seems to me there is no evidence he was attempting to exercise such a right.
Those are too different things Gramps. 'Skating on thin ice' means to me 'taking a risk'. I agree that the teacher was taking a risk.
I don't agree that we should allow the feelings of people of faith to be more than just one factor to consider in deciding how to present a lesson on freedom of speech designed to get kids to think about values. Apart from anything else, the nature of the subject calls for controversial examples.
a) it was unnecessary;
b) they knew it was likely to rile people up;
c) **some** Muslims have been known to summarily execute non-Muslims believed to offend Allah and the Prophet;
d) they weren't bravely making a statement about their own gov't, trying to spark a much-needed revolution;
etc.
There might have been reasons that made good sense to someone from and immersed in French culture, but I couldn't see them.
FWIW, YMMV.
Certainly it's a topic that needs to be discussed, but is there a need to show pictures you know will deeply offend some people in having that discussion? I agree with the way Golden Key puts it.
I have tried to raise my kids to learn from others' mistakes so they don't make the same ones themselves.
To include the material in the class is not to take a neutral line on the morality of disseminating it (even if the person leading the class thinks it is).
I accept that images of Mohammed are offensive to Muslims. Murdering scumbags, on the other hand, are very much more offensive, and to very many more people.
I'd certainly question whether it was necessary to show these cartoons in order to have a discussion about the limits of free speech. I wonder whether similar teachers would consider it reasonable to show their class, for example, deepfake porn "starring" M and Mme Macron as an example of free speech? The non-Muslims in the class will not gain more understanding of the offense by seeing the pictures than they would of having them described.
Let me be clear: I don't think that publishing Mohammed cartoons should be illegal, and I do think that killing people should be illegal. I also don't think that "it's not illegal" is justification for being offensive.
I am, however, somewhat suspicious of the purity of the popular defence of free speech associated with this issue, because it has provided an opportunity for ingrained racial prejudice to express itself as virtue. How many FN supporters linked arms with the secular left in the protests? How many secularists enjoyed the permission to release their own racist sentiments?
Except the cartoons are just about a person so there's more reason to support their publication.
The teacher? I presume was following curriculum. So no. There's no reasonable limit to their use.
(And there are plenty deeply offensive religious caricatures/propaganda images that I've seen while studying religious history. The stuff on the papacy alone...)
I recently listened to a whole bunch of highly sexist male church ministers holding forth on tape archive, as part of a discussion of a sexist moral panic in the early 70s which has important lessons for modern day moral panics. I'm female and I want those discussions to happen and I want people to be able to hear what was said in the name of religion and to discuss it intelligently. But I absolutely don't want blasphemy to be a reason for determining what church history we may or may not discuss and what sources we can use, and certainly not accusations of blasphemy backed by violence. The most I will concede to blasphemy is that you don't have to hear it or see it, if you don't like it, but you don't get to decide what it is for anyone else with differing religious beliefs and to threaten them accordingly.
When things were different on that score, it didn't lead to religious tolerance, it led to the opposite - religious persecution, torture and murder on a huge scale (often bound up with violent racism). It just can't be treated like simple sexism or racism giving offence for these kinds of reasons. It leads too easily to people going 'this is for God, the ultimate arbiter of what is right, so all human rights and compassion and liberties can go out the window because we must obey God and not man'. Tolerance quickly becomes a religious vice to be stamped out. Compassion to heretics is seen as dangerous weakness. It's just too dangerous, it's the kind of thing where people, through thinking they're being tolerant, can end up undermining the very building blocks of a tolerant multicultural society that ultimately depends on it.
Yes. Thank you for articulating this.
How can you actually talk about this stuff well, if seeing it is not allowed?
There is obviously a tricky balance here, and maybe a school is not the best environment, but it does seem as if the teacher was trying to find a way of getting that balance. Which some people found so unacceptable that he was killed for it.
You get similar issues with bans on Mein Kampf. There's been all sorts of positions on this. If I remember correctly, for a long time in Germany you basically had to submit an explanation of your research interest in order to access a copy. But in order to research it, or Hitler's thinking, you did need to be able to read it. And now there's various (not entirely effective) bans on 'plain' editions of it but acceptance of a heavily annotated edition.
In some ways, the French state education system is among the most intolerant and dogmatic ideological hotbeds in the land.
There is a battle raging in French secularity (laicité) between those who believe (as I do) that it means providing a level playing field for all expressions of faith and none in the public sphere, and those who can be described as secularists (or historically, anti-clericalists) who believe it means restricting any and every expression of faith to the private sphere. The cursor in the French education system is firmly at the secularist end of this tension, and in general it pursues this end with an ideological, sometimes Pharasaical zeal. I would say it's one of the largest obstacles to multicultural integration here.
(One of the clearest indications of this ideological tendency being on the rise is a planned law that would only recognise education by state schools or schools operating under contract with the state (i.e. Catholic): home schooling and fully private schools, which are a constitutional right, would be prohibited. I'm all in favour of French state education, but making it the only option makes me very uneasy.)
In other words, the prospect of shrinking from using the cartoons in a class resonates with many of this ideology as blasphemy just as much as showing the cartoons resonates with blasphemy for fundamentalist Muslims, and the teacher is a martyr of almost religious proportions who, if not canonised, has at least received the Legion d'Honneur posthumously. It's the Republic doing what it does worst, aping a religious faith.
In absolute terms, I defend the teacher's right to use the cartoons as a resource.
I'm also strongly in favour of unrestricted free speech - I squirm at France's anti-holocaust denial laws.
However, rights need to be used responsibly and, even in the French republic, fraternally.
The recent beheading comes against a backdrop of the trial of several people originally involved in the Charlie Hebdo shootings. Charlie Hebdo chose to publish another cartoon of Mohammed to coincide with the trial. That cannot be viewed as anything less than a provocation. It was undoubtedly a good teaching opportunity, but whether it was a good idea to use the cartoons in question at this particular point in class is less sure.
I've sat down and talked with radicalised Muslims in jail. My conclusion is that relating to them involves first-hand experience of religious belief, which offers an immediate common point. At least part of the motivation of one guy I've spoken to for planning acts of terrorism appears to be palpable fear of not being pure enough to be accepted by God in the hereafter. There's a lot more to it than that, but I think getting him and others like him out of radicalisation is going to require a more understanding approach that is sensitive to spirituality rather than some sort of Clockwork Orange style reprogramming.
This seems to me to summarise the issue here. It's the balance between saying that everyone in a secular state has the right to exchange ideas, and that everyone has a duty to treat others as courteously as they would wish to be treated.
If you over-stress the duty not to offend, you undermine the right to not be bound by the dictates of other people's religions.
To me the test is whether the offence is gratuitous. And in this case it clearly wasn't. The teacher decided that the educational purpose of the class would be better served by using these images. That's his judgment call to make.
To my mind, the publication of further cartoons of this nature in the context of the trial was a provocative abuse of free speech that significantly increased the probability of some sort of extreme response. Abuses of free speech of this nature exacerbate the danger to free speech in the long run.
From memory this did involve a Muslim Shipmate and at least one Shipmate who was obviously anti Islam. It was a difficult thread to Host for fairly obvious reasons. The repugnance re paedophilia and the reverence for the Prophet met head on. I can't even remember the thread title and if it survived it would be in Oblivion on the old forum.
These days such a thread would probably be discussed in Epiphanies but it would be a difficult thread to Host anywhere.
On the other hand, at the time of the da Vinci code, we had lots of discussions about whether Jesus could have been married and had children. So much so that we had a special forum for a while. I remember Louise putting her critical boots on and dismantling Dan Brown's shortcomings as an author! On grounds that had nothing to do with any dogmatic matters or issues of Christian sensitivity.
Underlying these memories is a discomfort I feel about comparative sensitivities. What promotes tolerance and what doesn't. And what is tolerance anyway?
I feel the definition of tolerance may have moved away from live and let live and is more about identifying more closely with the sensitivities of others. We all exercise degrees of voluntary self censorship based on our perceptions of the feelings of others. It's easy to cross lines inadvertently.
Meditate on the 99 Names of God with them?
FWIW. Just popped into my head. YMMV.
I wonder what the teacher was wearing...
I think André Malraux summed up the post-christian challenge well: "I believe that the challenge of the [twenty-first] century, faced with the greatest threat humanity has ever known, will be to find room once more for the gods". French state education fails at this more often than not, and whether the French state can succeed is in doubt.
To my mind, the hierarchy of responsibilities goes something like this:
1. The immediate perpetrator
2. Those that directly incited him to do it and facilitated that
in other words, those involved in direct action. Some way below that come
3. Those that indirectly incited him to do it through condemnation of the cartoons
Whether criminal liability in this case stops after 2. or 3. is a vexed question.
Some way below that comes
4. Those who decided publishing such cartoons at a sensitive time was a good idea
Any responsibility of the teacher comes a long way below that. But it's too simplistic to ignore the background and context.
It's way, way, way below.
How about we don't actually spend our time discussing how not to offend someone so much that they kill you, and spend our time discussing how to stop people from being so completely unable to deal with alternative views to their own that they kill people over it.
And this is not a proposition that saying and doing anything is okay and if people are offended then that's entirely their problem. But the elephant in the room here is the utterly wild disproportion between the offence and the reaction.
I genuinely worry about a situation where we just sort of sail past the "oh yeah, beheading people is bad" part and spend all our time focusing on whether the teacher did something wrong. No. Let's sail past the "oh yeah, maybe the teacher was a bit unwise and misjudged his choices" and spend all our time focusing on how utterly fucking wrong it is to be a religious-police-vigilante who takes it upon yourself to commit murder and claim that as righteousness.
Let's NOT talk about taking secularism a bit too far. Let's talk about taking religion way, way too fucking far. Let's not spend pages and pages discussing the speck in one person's eye when we could spend all that effort figuring out what to do about the truly enormous log that was in the other person's eye.
Being a bit of a dick about something doesn't justify murder. No equivocation, it doesn't. The teacher bears no culpability for his murder, those who think murder is an appropriate response to people not kowtowing to your religious taboos are the problem here.
Well, rightly or wrongly, the cartoons WERE published, and when somone decided to respond to the cartoons by commiting mass murder in Paris a few years back, that sort of made them into a current event. Current events being something generally considered suitable for discussion in a classroom context.
Though I guess there IS the question of how far a deviation from the standard curriculum this was. If free- speech and its ramifications are a normal part of the French curriculum, and teachers are in the habit of showing controversial works as part of the discussion, I think it's fine to show the cartoons.
On the other hand, if the teacher was supposed to be discussing, say, the construction of the Paris sewer system, and used that as an excuse to segue into showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, especially KNOWING there were Muslims in the class, well, that might have been a little on the gratuitous side.
Discussing how to stop people from being completely unable to deal with alternative views isn't going to get very far until we consider their starting view. That does rather lead us into considering whether there is actually anything wrong with showing the cartoons.
The thing is, this doesn't happen in a featureless void. It occurs in a situation in which Muslims are routinely presented in public discourse as people who are a problem to be either managed or suppressed, but who do not need to be heard or listened to. It occurs in a situation in which Muslims are generally less well off, generally hold fewer positions of public respect, and have much restricted access to the media.
Would it be acceptable to bring anti-semitic cartoons into such a lesson? Maybe. But it would be coming from a position in which everyone knows that the teacher and the wider society recognise them as unacceptable - someone who argues that anti-semitic cartoons should be acceptable is either perversely contrarian or actually unacceptably anti-semitic.
Until one recognises that, one is discussing how to get Those People to tolerate us telling them that they do not matter.
(As I said in an earlier post, thinking that one solves the problem by giving people permission to leave the room completely misframes the nature of the problem. What is wrong with anti-semitic cartoons is not that Jews have thin skins.)
But were the Charlie Hebdo cartoons anti-Muslim in the same way that, say, a cartoon portraying all Jews as hook-nosed bloodsucking usurers is anti-Jewish?
From what I've seen of them, the Hebdo cartoons ridiculed the founding Prophet of Islam, not Muslims generally. Sort of the same way that Freud's Moses And Monotheism basically ridiculed the founder of Judaism, by saying that he was the leader of a cult of Egyptian sun-worshippers who was probably murdered by his own sons in a fight over who gets to bonk all the women.
I can think of many reasons not to include that essay in a school textbook(shaky history, for starters). But if it was for some reason considered useful for study, I don't think I'd want it removed just because it might offend Old Testament literalists.
(Ritual disclaimer: it isn't acceptable to behead people who distribute anti-semitic cartoons.)
What I'm trying to say is that the problem around offensive material is not the emotional reaction in people whose sensibilities are over-tender (implicitly unlike us).
It's not that Muslim sensitivities are innately over-tender, it's that within a secular society they are private sensibilities. And that it is unreasonable for any individual or group to expect to be able to impose their private sensibilities on the rest of us.
But I'm left wondering how far down it extends. Is everyone responsible for all the indirect consequences of their action ?
Or does there come a point where we go no further down ?
Perhaps on the grounds that some person did not in a moral sense cause anything because the chain of cause and effect ceases at the point where it runs through a person who has free will ?
Or on some other grounds?
What you're missing here is the ideological inflexibility of French state education. In many respects it is like a religious cult. Its reluctance to have anything remotely religious on its premises is more like primitive superstition than a rationally held view.
Education, or as the French love to say, pedagogy, involves getting alongside people and leading them forward from where they are. As @Dafyd hints above, little genuine effort is made within the French education system to start from where people are. It was not so long ago that French textbooks, including in the Caribbean and France's African colonies, notoriously referred to "our ancestors the Gauls".
Just so I understand, are you arguing that the teacher, in displaying the cartoon from the trial-period, was trying to join in the provocation?
Ought? The killer felt bullied and controlled, had nowhere else to go. Education is a privilege. Being patronizing with it to marginalized minorities, to the disempowered, the poor, to second class citoyens, without actually addressing their material deprivation is bullying and controlling, gaslighting. By a still, just as much as always, culturally colonial power in Africa. 'Never mind all your actual felt social injustice, you need enlightenment above all.'. Fuck off.
I kinda wonder why, if the killer was motivated by sociopolitical considerations, he didn't choose a more sociopolitical target. I mean, the National Front, to take just one example, certainly doesn't confine itself to spoofing the Prophet, but rather engages in all sorts of political shennanigans designed to harness governmental power against Muslim immigrants.
Granted, I'm sure Marine Le Pen is surrounded by bodyguards 24/7, but surely there are party offices etc. all over Paris, easily accessible for a young man looking to decapitate someone complicit in the repression of his demographic.
I suspect that the way in which he would have constructed his identity (see both Eutychus and Dafyd's posts above) had much to do with target selection.
You have now made at least 2 attempts to say how the "murderous fool" is not morally responsible for murdering.
I simply have nothing to say to you. If we can't even get a consensus that murder is morally a bad thing to commit, what is the point?
Because there is a huge, huge difference between trying to explain some of the context in which a crime such as this occurred, and actually trying to just remove responsibility for the crime altogether.
Do you mean he constructed his identity as being that of a Muslim?
He can be as morally responsible as he likes with his 70 virgins. Why provoke mad dogs? The context is injustice as big as it gets. If you have nothing to say, then don't.
"Mad dog"? Doesn't that kinda go against the spirit of arguing that he's motivated by concern over injustice?
Or is that we're ALL mad dogs, in some veterinary metaphorization of the Fall?