Terrorist attacks throughout Europe

Following Barcelona, hate that we're at this point but as others have suggested it might be best to contain thoughts and info on these in one place.

Back in June Europol published an EU terrorism report: https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/2017-eu-terrorism-report-142-failed-foiled-and-completed-attacks-1002-arrests-and-142-victims-died

i just wanna go on record as saying these attacks are bad and i do not enjoy them

now i'm justing going to be filled with dread whenever i see this in SNA

better this than not knowing if a city thread has been bumped for art gallery advice or mangled corpses

Open to suggestions - maybe the thread title should have 'Rolling discussion of' added to make it clearer it's not necessarily been bumped in response to a new attack.

Finland stabbings breaking news?

#pray4tuomas

Eight people stabbed in Surgut, Russia with the attacker shot dead.

Turku attack confirmed as a terrorist incident.

One of the worst aspects of all these attacks is that they seem to have no definable political content other than a desire to kill westerners because they are westerners. The attackers apparently have no political demands at all.

Not Westerners, the perpetrators are usually 'Westerners' themselves, infidels.

The desire is more to strike fear in the West. The victims themselves can come from all over the world.

Not quite sure what happened at Nimes station last night - man arrested with "fake gun"?

gun forgery is a serious offence

news says it was a « pistolet d'alarme », a gun replica that can't shoot. They're evidently legal to use in private but not in public.

Too early to say if it's terrorist related. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/21/marseille-car-old-port-france-police

evidently the murderer had been brought by an "association" (usually this means a private group) from Grenoble to Marseille for specialized psychiatric care.

Reports that the van driver in the Barcelona attack has been shot and killed. They don't hang about, the Spanish police.

Wait, had he been arrested?

Nothing confirmed yet.

OK, now I'm hearing he has been arrested and the police have shot dead someone else 'wearing an explosives belt'.

Do you have to arrest someone before shooting them I wonder

Ultimate right to remain silent iirc

Woman I work with is over visiting her parents.

― Wewlay Bewlay (Tom D.), Thursday, 17 August 2017 16:30 (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

She was safe and well but her parents live 10 minutes away from where this guy just got offed by the Catalan cops.

The Guardian is reporting that the man identified as the driver has been shot dead and that he was wearing a fake vest.

http://www.bluemaize.net/im/automotive/vest-t-shirt-8.jpg

?

you can see why they'd shoot him

Brussels attack: Man shot after stabbing troops

Result

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41055985

Dunno when we decide that attacks pass whatever smell test is required but Buckingham palace

Headcases are always waving knives about or setting themselves on fire or whatever outside Buckingham Palace, it's like a, er, Mecca for the criminally insane.

Eyyyyy

OK, so the guy at Buck House drove at a police car, brandished a 4ft sword and repeatedly shouted "Allahu Akbar", as ever though the line between terrorism and mental disorder is thin.

Arah haven't we all done it

Well, you know how things can get on top of you.

Policemen?

A few years back there were two very disturbed local people who were arrested for planning to kidnap the singer Joss Stone and decapitate her with a samurai sword. If it wasn't so genuinely disturbing, some of the details of how they got caught were quite darkly comical. This was only a few years into the Tory cuts on mental health services, as well.

is this a good thread for this? http://www.jpost.com/International/EU-envoy-Israel-can-learn-from-Europe-how-to-fight-terrorism-503168

London ?

Or possible industrial/gas accident

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/15/trains-london-euston-milton-keynes-cancelled-huge-fire-in-harrow

Sorry for bump, seems fairly clearly industrial

alternatively:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41278545

that is mental. I just keep thinking, what would I do if I saw someone with a lit bucket on the tube?

i tell you what i definitely wouldn't do is stop to take fucking pictures of it, as multiple train passengers apparently did

kind of appreciate that they did, though

p sad that some people got trampled on the way out. though it is london public transport i suppose.

If it's a bomb, it's the world's worst - based on the reports at the moment (noise, flame, heatwave), it sounds like a chemical reaction, some bloody painter reckoning he can carry these two things in the same tub with some cardboard between them or such.

Someone on TV at some point today will say "chemicals don't just explode!", which is as damning an indictment of the educational system as you can imagine.‬

somebody's done their Run, Trample, Crush, Hide, Tell training

Must admit I hadn't thought Parsons Green would be high up on the list of potential targets for an ISIS operation.

think the police have confirmed it's a terrorist act, as far as live news feeds are concerned.

If it's a bomb, it's the world's worst - based on the reports at the moment (noise, flame, heatwave), it sounds like a chemical reaction, some bloody painter reckoning he can carry these two things in the same tub with some cardboard between them or such.

ooh, is this why you're not allowed to take tins of paint on buses?

Must admit I hadn't thought Parsons Green would be high up on the list of potential targets for an ISIS operation

busy as hell at rush hour though

it still looks more like the doings of a hapless art student rather than a terrorist.

such a fine line

i guess we just call everyone terrorists now to even the score with the daily mail

Checklist:

* Did you feel terrified?
* Did somebody do a thing?

i guess there might be an inncocent explanation for it, but why would you carry a bucket inside a bag?

if I stopped to ponder the actions of everybody I saw on public transport

maybe if it had a hole in it xpost

or maybe they'd bought the bucket. like when you buy a bag and put it in your bag

Or they might need the bag for something else later.

Yes, maybe carrying one unwieldy bucket on the tube wasn't enough inconvenience for them and they were going to pick up another one

There's one photo that shows what appear to be fairy lights coming out of the bucket and Twitter has been quick to point out this report:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-40046773

Bit soon, Lidl. Bit soon. 😳 pic.twitter.com/xyfmgwasRs

— Flappy of Quack (@jesuiscanard) September 15, 2017

I lolled

The blast, on an eastbound District Line train from Wimbledon, is being treated as terrorism, police said.

The Metropolitan Police said it was too early to confirm the cause of the fire and the station, which is above ground, has been cordoned off.

maybe I'm stupid or naïve but why is it so important to decide whether it's a terrorist act or not before you even know what's caused the bang?

cos they want to catch the perp asap?

oh god

Another attack in London by a loser terrorist.These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017

Calling incidents terrorism before they've actually determined what happened seems to be what they do now. There might be stuff they aren't telling us though. Oh fuck off and die, Trump.

Isn't Scotland Yard's Inspector Lestrade in contact with Sherlock Holmes anymore or what?

how do we know Trump's twitter account isn't run by a bot?

i'll stop playing faux naïve and just ponder whether there aren't systemic and political (small p) reasons that encourage this rush to judgement too

if your department's brief is counter-terrorism you kind of have a subliminal but vested interest in keeping the importance of your department in the public eye

have they apprehended anyone here?

Sky's 'reporter on the scene', Mark White, was in the pub the other night watching the Celtic v. PSG game, so he's used to horrific incidents.

May fucking loves those Cobra meetings, they give her a chance to project the pretense that her battered party and parliamentary authority still actually counts for shit.

if this is terrorism tho it's obviously the work of an elaborate and highly-trained network

I bet ISIS will be looking at the state of that explosive device and marveling at the UK Jihadis levels of expertise and finesse, so much!

it's reassuring in some small way i guess that there are still cack-handed terrorists out there

xp hey all they've said is terrorist, it could be an extreme right wing officer in the British Army or anything

aye, true. But when you've been brainwashed Manchurian Candidate style, certain trigger words control how you think!

why MC Tunes never released an album called The Mancunian Candidate is beyond me

mc tunes why hast thou forsaken us

I'd breathe more easily if he were still around

Tunes still lives in Manchester.

goddammit i walked right into the setup for that 'joke' from nv, what a chump

mc tunes vs islamic state - tunes splits the carrier bag

lol! I saw MC Tunes at the Sheffield Octagon in about '90. He had a battered looking face that exuded much wear and tear, but not much wisdom. I'm not sure if he has got the answers! I can remember him saying "Fuck the Babylon" a few times tho!

much better xp

BBC and NYT are reporting it was an improvised explosive device w/ a timer -- any reason to think it *wasn't* terrorism?

May fucking loves those Cobra meetings, they give her a chance to project the pretense that her battered party and parliamentary authority still actually counts for shit.

― calzino

she really needs to give up on the "COBRA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA" slogan though.

yikes; be safe London

BBC and NYT are reporting it was an improvised explosive device w/ a timer -- any reason to think it *wasn't* terrorism?

tbf some people have weird hobbies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I shd finish that Tunes poll some day

Before a terrorist kills you.

on current stats that gives me a few thousand years, I like those odds

BBC News quite happy to just put LONDON TUBE EXPLOSION as the ticker headline giving no sense of scale (sure they won't be the only ones though).

LONDON BUCKET FIRE

I bet ISIS will be looking at the state of that explosive device and marveling at the UK Jihadis levels of expertise and finesse, so much!

too many foreign terrorists in our game, young brits don't get a chance. of course if your name was abu bakr sam al-ardici you'd be given the top job.

inappropriate choking work lol

lol ditto

Same :)

If you're Tom or Paul or 'Arry or Lee, "lone wolf" is about as far as you can go.

don't, as i just did, boss sitting beside me, allow your mind to place big sam's face in place of al-baghdadi's as you mentally replay one of those brief isis sermon videos they show on the news

xpost

now contemplating the necessity of a secondary "Lolling at Inept Route One Brit Terrorism" thread

the misshapen caliphate

sounds like the title of a book they discuss on radio 4

Four lions on teh shirt

"place me in any cell in the world, i will deliver the module"

"my client can fit a bomb into a bucket from quite a long way away"

Robyn Frost, about to enter the station to travel into central London, saw “blood on the floor and people running down the stairs screaming ‘get out’”. Aaron Butterfield, a production manager, also arriving at the station, described people “crawling over one another” in desperation as they tried to flee. There was more panic, he said, when police told them there had been an explosion, and “someone was running around with a knife” and there was possibly another explosive device, he said.

are we now doomed to a world where some fucking idiot says "someone is running around with a knife" every time anything explodes?

just went to google this to see what happened

#BREAKING Man was shouting 'Allahu Akbar' when attacked with a hammer two persons in Lyon, #France pic.twitter.com/Ghel8VNRes

— Rami (@RamiAILoIah) September 15, 2017

and found nothing about this attack but apparently there was a [second, different] knife attack earlier today?

there was an attempted knife attack here in Paris today, at Châtelet, on a soldier on anti-terror patrol, is that what you're thinking of? no one was hurt, attacker was captured, said something about Allah during the attack, was previously unknown to French intelligence, apparently.

The Irishman was said to have been heard to shout allahu akhbar as he snuck off early for a cheeky pint, his disciplinary meeting heard

Reports that the toddler shouted allahu akhbar whilst refusing to eat vegetables, naughty step told

Democratic convention "screamed allahu akhbar" while selecting Clinton - breaking

if he had shouted allardyce akbar nobody would have batted an eyelid

People on bus looking at me funny, may shout allahu Akbar in a bid for distraction

in most of the country the only words anyone understands nowadays are "allahu akbar"

lol you all

do you think it would throw these lads off their stride if everybody joined in with "allahu akbar"?

could be like the new kolo/yaya toure tune. maybe to the same tune.

would love to see a video of a load of pissed up young lads in some town centre singing it.

a lot of that at the Emirates last night according to the BBC

They've been among us the whole time.

apparently a politician who refuses to give interviews to the press or speak in public has referred to this attack as "cowardly"

"big sam's face in place of al-baghdadi's"

Lol! I can't get that image out of my head now.

'We won't let terrorists change the way we live'

yeah, apart from every time there is an explosion now, there will be an unruly all-for-one stampede over the unfortunate people on the deck. That wonderful Blitz spirit!

Bowin to Blitz

Has Corbyn condemned The Big Sam yet though?

Sorry London, in what has been a shitty year across the globe, you are dealing with an extra level of bullshit.

nah

shit happens everywhere

the tower fire is the only really shocking thing to have happened here lately

I can remember MTV Raps doing a live broadcast outside Piccadilly Tube station in the 90's while a security alert was happening. Fab 5 Freddy was saying something ridic like "Wow, do you live with this terrorist danger on a daily basis in this city?". Lol, hardly comparable with living in a Crips and the Bloods warzone U know, but we survive!

Indeed, I'd quite like if they could catch this clown with the bucket before I go to my work tomorrow.

... but anyway I'm certainly not losing any sleep.

maybe it was a clown on his way to work? have they checked to see it is was full of confetti?

I wasn't trying to belittle anyone's current paranoia. Just reminiscing about those more genteel IRA days.

Tomorrow's DM front page is predictably wack - apparently its google's fault?

I am really annoyed by the obvious theatre of terror levels, mainly because I don't remember them being implemented before 9/11, so it feels like they've been invented by white people who don't like brown people.

And when the IRA used to make improvised explosive devices, they tended to use more than 1 LIDL bag and a bucket. Remember the Canary Wharf damage? What was terror threat level then?

the local army camp always had a board out the front with the current BIKINI state on it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIKINI_state

also, this was 1988

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7Wm4qXC_j4

Indeed, I'd quite like if they could catch this clown with the bucket before I go to my work tomorrow.

― The Doug Walters of Crime (Tom D.), Friday, September 15, 2017 8:54 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

... but anyway I'm certainly not losing any sleep.

― The Doug Walters of Crime (Tom D.), Friday, September 15, 2017 8:54 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe it was a clown on his way to work? have they checked to see it is was full of confetti?

― plp will eat itself (NickB), Friday, September 15, 2017 8:57 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Alright me laddio, yer nicked"
"Ya got me bang to rights, er I mean allahu akbar"

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/386-clown-police.jpg

What's going on in London?

Fire engines and armed police on the scene

Unconfirmed reports of shots fired but no reported casualties. Huge police presence and people being cordoned off/kept in shop basements, but it doesn't look that bad on the TV?

Sounds like nothing much.

Gunshots - my friend’s boyfriend is locked in someone’s wine cellar until the all-clear.

At this stage, we have received one report of a woman sustaining a minor injury when leaving Oxford Circus station. There are no other reported casualties. More updates to follow.

— BTP (@BTP) November 24, 2017

This is going to sound, and be, very pedantic, but from next time on we use London Rolling for this kind of thing yes good ok

I don't think so, that thread has other uses and I don't want to worry that something's happened every it gets bumped for whatever reason.

We have not located any trace of suspects, evidence of shots fired or casualties. Officers still on scene. If you are in a building stay there, if you are on the street in #OxfordStreet leave the area. Officers continue to search the area. More updates as soon as we have them

— Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) November 24, 2017

Looks like it may have been an electrical fault or something else mistaken for gunshots. If there's any kind of sharp bang in the current climate then people are understandably going to panic and think it's either shots fired or a bomb. Given how rapid the police response was there'd be ambulances on scene if anything much were taking place.

TfL tweeted to say both stations are now open againp. Wtf?

Vermin.

pic.twitter.com/XrxRuP8oST

— Nick Srnicek (@n_srnck) November 24, 2017

sounds similar to the stampede at jfk last year (where the "gunshots" turned out to be people celebrating usain bolt winning the 100m on tv)

A high voltage dead short doesn't half make a terrifying flash and bang and these are nervous times, fair enough. But these irresponsible fuckwits need shutting down for good.

fair, if it's a fuse box then it's not as stupid as the jfk thing

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/08/the-terrifying-jfk-airport-shooting-that-wasnt.html

T*mmy R0b!ns0n getting the online piss ripped out of him is a very fine start to the weekend.

The Daily Mail article quoted a tweet from 10 days ago as breaking news.

This is why the Daily Mail is full of rubbish. The article (now deleted) stating there was a lorry attack at Oxford Circus using a tweet from 10 days ago as evidence...🤐 pic.twitter.com/Sji0olu4kE

— Ali (@TvvitterGod1) November 24, 2017

RIP Olly Murs

Fuck me. They should be prosecuted. Not sure what for, but there’s got t9 be something.

They should have been prosecuted long before now for hate speech but this is somehow a new low. And lest we forget our PM is going to their brown-nosing parties to suck up to them!

A question I have no idea as to the answer of: are newspaper tweets considered to be published matter?

We might find out when somebody finally gets murdered after a spate of electrical/gas fault related hate crimes.

a really close friend of mine who lives in Germany was visiting London for one single day and got caught up in this, what are the chances? He spent an hour hiding under a table in complete darkness and is really shaken up.

I don't think so, that thread has other uses and I don't want to worry that something's happened every it gets bumped for whatever reason.

― Matt DC, Friday, November 24, 2017 5:42 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this has been bugging me

surely 'idiot crowd panics over nothing in oxford circus' is pure 'rolling london' and certainly not 'terrorist attacks throughout europe'

Can you stop this.

Can you stop this otm

too soon

surely 'idiot crowd panics over nothing in oxford circus' is pure 'rolling london' and certainly not 'terrorist attacks throughout europe'

Can we just skip straight to the bit when you belatedly realise how obnoxious this is?

If a bit of the old fisticuffs down Carnaby Street is enough to start a disorderly stampede these days, it doesn't do much to dispel the Metropolitan Elites = soft as shite rep!

*folds arms* "Ah ha, I know exactly what this massive police presence on London's busiest street is, before all the people who are actually there, it's the Rolling London thread for me!"

Even though it was nothing, it's a combination of annoying thread policing, being a dick towards the original poster and wise-after-the-fact, wake-up sheeple bollocks.

'rolling london' is actually about terrorism tho

& LBI knows i mean him no ill

it was just plain old pedantry

calz otm btw

The far-right gained tried to gain a bit of capital, stoking up fears at this incident - so yeah a bit of pedantry and time-wasting bull crap is just what we need.

twitter afaict was nothing but ppl mocking ol' yaxley-lennon

That this has somehow ended with Kolo Toure telling Piers Morgan to shut the fuck up on Twitter has in some way made it all worthwhile.

Soon after I posted it to this thread I regretted it. For the sole reason that it was too soon to determine which thread it should go in, ie. nothing was sure yet. And I don't want to be one of "those guys", y'know like the DM crying wolf and using every rumor for their own sick agenda. I'm not one of those guys but prob played into it, idk.

We need a 'Rolling something's up but we don't know yet if it fits in the rolling London or trrsm thread thread'

hostages taken at supermarket in SW France; one dead, ISIS connection claimed

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43512791

Four dead (reportedly) including the terrorist. His call for the release of Salah Abdeslam unsurprisingly unsuccessful.

Van drives into crowd in Münster, Germany, at least 3 dead

Three including the assailant, who shot himself.

Just a random schmo with a history of suicide attempts, nothing to see here.

This moron's effort was so crap no-one's even mentioned it on ILX yet:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45180120

Two people were treated in hospital for their injuries but discharged.

extremely shoddy performance, 2/10 at best

glasgow airport guy possibly even worse

"You won't take me alive ..pigs! erm well maybe next time"

It was reported on the BBC news i heard this morning as mostly a commuter headache.

No Smeato this time round so this guy has no excuses.

(xp) One of my workmates was moaning about his delayed bus journey today, the only time I heard it mentioned.

what do failed terrorist martyrs get as an afterlife punishment? 72 Chuckle Brothers wi' reet appetising hairy arses!

glasgow airport guy possibly even worse

― imago, Tuesday, August 14, 2018 10:15 AM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

something i tend to forget: there were 2 guys, one died of burns, the other is serving life in prison

A dark green Jeep Cherokee, registration number L808 RDT,[16] travelling at a speed estimated by a witness as about 30 mph[17] (48 km/h), struck security bollards in a terror ramming attack at the main entrance to Glasgow Airport.[2] The vehicle was reported to have several petrol containers and propane gas canisters on board. One eyewitness said flames issued from beneath the car when it hit the building, while another eyewitness said it appeared the driver was trying to drive through the terminal doors. According to reports, the car was occupied by two "Asian-looking" men.[18] When the Jeep failed to explode, one man (later identified as Abdulla) threw petrol bombs from the passenger seat and the other (Ahmed) doused himself in petrol and set it alight.[6] Police indicated the vehicle burst into flames when it was driven at the terminal.[19] An eyewitness noted that a man got out of the car and began to fight with police.[20] Another eyewitness said that the man was throwing punches and repeatedly shouting "Allah".[21][22][23] The man was arrested and later identified as Bilal Abdulla, a UK-born doctor of Iraqi descent who was working at the Royal Alexandra Hospital. Another man exited the car and ran into the terminal building while he was on fire and began writhing on the ground, before being kicked in the testicles by an airport employee, John Smeaton,[24] who was awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal for his heroism.

(I can hear Yakety Sax in the background when I read that)

kicking someone in the bollocks while they writhing about on the deck, on fire, seems a strange definition of gallantry to say the least.

He was wearing his best trainers though.

flaming gallantry

not seen such gallantry since this local "legend" known as Marbles was having a piss with one hand resting on an electric cement mixer, his brother thought he was being electrocuted and decided the best action would be to smash him hard in the back of the head with a shovel, to separate him from the device. He was never the same after that and started speaking in tongues and getting arrested for exposing himself to pensioners, which is a form of terror attack - so fair to say he was radicalised in some way!

free radicalised

Another layer to the smeato story is that there was another civilian, a taxi driver if I remember correctly, who intervened, did more, was injured, but was ignored by the press. Smeato came to prominence based on the TV interviews in the immediate aftermath which ended up on tv globally.

if you aren't a fireman or five 0 you need to stay out of this hero game.

my type of heroes don't fucking take selfies with shit royal trinkets or stand for minute's silences or do fucking stupid guard of honour type exhibitions with their stupid fucking fireman sam hats lined in front of them!

well smeato is a not very smart working-class protestant from glasgow so he was basically guaranteed to be right into that stuff

taxi driver made the front page of the Daily Record at least

http://elegilegi.org/img/john-smeaton-jokes.jpg

so did they both kick the burning terrorist in the nuts, or what?

one each

No wonder the guy died.

it would have been a different story if he was wearing a fanny-pack rammed with semtex, although not quite 2-0 to his nuts against the incoming kicking feet!

Five victims in Strasbourg, France. Don't know whether they're wounded or dead.

It's a clichéd thing to say, but it always hits harder when you've lived there.

Chances are they were targeting the Christmas market.

Once had a mean viande de cheval in Strassbourg.

Not looking good, this. Xmas market indeed.

1 dead, 6 wounded. Shooter still on the run.

Of course there's already talk on Twitter of how this is a government-devised conspiracy to distract us from the gilets jaunes.

We going to talk about how an alleged Neo-Nazi tried shooting up a synagogue on Yom Kippur or not?

He couldn’t break in because the door was reinforced, but he shot two other people and streamed the whole thing on Twitch, great.

In a chilling echo of the Christchurch mosque shooting, the gunman recorded the attacks on a head-mounted camera and uploaded it online with an antisemitic and rightwing extremist rant. German media identified the killer as Stephan Balliet, a 27-year-old German citizen.
One woman was shot dead outside the synagogue near a Jewish cemetery and one man killed in a nearby kebab shop.

The German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, described it as an antisemitic attack.

meant to bump this for the murdered Paris police officers too, nothing helpful to offer rn tho tbh

I was going to post on this thread earlier but I couldn't remember what it was called.

depressing, and part of a v.worrying trend of rising anti-semitism

How is yesterday's attack in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine being covered in your countries? It is obviously the only subject of discussion here in France today.

mainly just reporting - haven’t seen any commentary. i’ll ignore the very rapidly published editorial position of the spectator which is i’m afraid as you might expect.

actually i should be more careful - the spectator piece is relatively cautious. it’s probing fault lines - it states a failure of the education system in poor areas, and talks about the electoral problems the attack poses macron, and says it compounds issues raised by the toulouse massacre, as well as bataclan and charlie hebdo. the implication is that the state is failing on terrorism, and that this will raise the salience of the issue over the build up to elections in a year and a half’s time.

the area which feels most provocative but i don’t have enough info to judge is where it says the government assertion there are no “no go zones” to be absurd, citing evidence of weekly attacks on police stations and police officers.

I live in one such "no-go zone" in Paris, where my kids have been among the very few non-Muslims in their schools, so I'm sensitive to how these places are perceived from the outside.

I don't know what the electoral consequences will be---Mélenchon gave one of the earliest and loudest condemnations of the attack, and Macron has been working on an anti-separatism law. But it would seem indeed that Le Pen will receive a boost from this.

But the sheer number of emails I've received today from fellow parents indicates that this attack has struck a particular nerve. Liberty of expression in particular against religion is one of the founding values of the Republic, and this is an attack on that value. I think the desire to protect this liberty of expression is strong enough to unite elements of the far right and far left---unite to do what is the question. And where the centrists fall, those who think that this liberty of expression is generally compatible with personal religious beliefs, is another question.

Suffice it to say that this is an enormous event in French history.

the murder of the teacher is grotesque and offensive. do you think it will be socially/politically significant than other recent terrorist events?

it seemed to me one reason it might be more potent is because it’s to do with the secular teaching principles.

this meant one thing i was surprised about reading the description of what took place in the class was that the teacher said that muslim students (13-year olds) could leave before he showed the picture to avoid causing offence. i think my immediate, cautious, reaction was to question whether it could have been approached in a way that didn’t have to mean students might want to leave the room.

Yes, I think it will be more politically/socially significant than other recent terrorist attacks here, because it targets both French secularism (laïcité) and education, and the relation between the two. These are revolutionary topics, they're at the heart of the Republic.

My wife is quite shook. Her father, now retired, taught histoire-géo for many years at the collège level.

Quebec media outlets are strongly focused on the event, and it's worth noting that 'laïcité' is also highly valued here. A quick peek at Canadian newspapers reveals little to no coverage at all.

That approach of telling Muslim children they could leave the room was so ham-fisted and divisive, even if you wouldn't expect the terrible outcome that happened - some kind of shit storm was guaranteed.

so that's an extremely fucked up thing to say in context

I was making a very serious point here, if you want say that is fucked up I don't really care tbh. You are currently the most tedious cunt on here and I've got zero respect for you.

“some kind of shit storm” yep I guess so

good thinking calz, nobody else had considered that aspect of the story

you know very well I didn't mean some kind of deadly violence by "shitstorm" and I meant just controversy or cultural offence. but yeah go fuck yourself as well tbf- you are just as full of shit.

was recently reading a book about The Raj that talked about the differences between French and British colonialilism. The French made more of an effort to asimilate their "subjects" into some sense of extended nationhood than the Brits. The shrunken dying remains of both these empires have problems it seems, yes. I won't take anything back I have posted on this thread, especially at the behest of a military flag fucker, serial apologist of US imperialism.

Keep it up, tough guy, you’ve got us all dead to rights

You’re literally the guy in the “if you run into assholes all day...” trope.

I'm only talking to you here, so less of the "all". And as a mod it is in quite bad taste and poor form to take your personal beefs onto a thread like this.

I have nothing personal against you. The way you consistently call other posters cunts with almost no provocation is not a personal beef.

I should say “my problem with the way you call other posters etc etc”

next some clueless showboating prick want's to call me "fucked up" I won't it as a provocataion, if i haven't had a few drinks. But if I do - well it's all part of the game i'm afraid!

I'm very calm most of the time. But if I feel like I'm being wronged/misrepresented by some other prick I will stick up for myself.

You can stick up for yourself without calling people names and cursing them out all the time. It’s a thing.

I mean I absolutely do the same shit sometimes, I’m not innocent here. But blasting Simon as a “tedious cunt” right out the gate seemed a bit much, he was just taking issue with your phrasing.

the manner in which you have just derailed this thread over personal beefs (and yes I am at fault myself as a mere fucked up poster as well). If I was a mod I would resign in discgrace. You fight fire with gasoline. If someone wants to criticise another poster in a quite arsey + lame fashion and not except some lively pushback on a saturday night, then fuck this board and it's shitty moderators tbh.

this is about France right now, right? Euler, hope things are ok where you are

fwiw folks, if you feel you’re being detoured from the topic at hand when people are actually dying, by all means take it to another thread

as for the issue of allowing children who did not want their religious beliefs denied, allowing them to leave the room — this reminds me of a high school spanish language teacher who was very religious who showed us a movie that implied off-screen sex was going on, who thought it was a good film but decided not to continue it the next day because of a conflict of beliefs

any kids who didn’t want to watch for religious reasons likely already got the point. they’re very aware of what those cartoons entail, because it’s a part of being a muslim in france. I could see where it could be interpreted as “bully these students because they’re the bad muslims” but the articles make clear that was not the framing

I mean, ffs, there were kids whose parents opted out from the simplest sexual education when I was young and I have no idea who wasn’t in those class sessions, because who cares? This is just how parental and social controls in classes flush out, and it’s always awkward and there is no easy way to present material and start conversation without a minority opting out

I can’t remember anyone opting out from sex ed at my high school, including the more evangelical types.

thanks mh. yeah, things are ok where I am. The attack was in a suburb of the city, whereas we live in the city proper. The suburbs are a different story, because while the government officially requires integration, in practice minorities are allowed to form their own subcommunities. Islamic immigrants are numerically the most important of these. In the case of the present murderer, a Chechen of a Muslim family, his mother was rarely seen outside the home, and was veiled when seen. The veil is a key issue in French life today, because it seems to contradict the liberty of women. In the clash between religious liberty and women's liberty, I think the Republic stands and will continue to stand more with women than with religious people. For instance, Macron banned homeschooling last week, in order to prevent Islamic separatists from continuing to have their children avoid French public school "indoctrination", but also to make sure that women are not forced to stay home to attend to their children. It does not surprise me that most of the discussion I've been involved in over the last few days has been with mothers who want to make sure that nothing like this happens again.

There are other fault lines exposed. One of the 10 people who is currently being held by the state in connection with the murder is a man, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, who has run a pro-Palestinian organization for some time (his organization is named after one of the founders of Hamas who was murdered by the Israeli military). Sefrioui is active in anti-Islamophobia and in anti-Semitism. He produced a video this week decrying the teacher who was murdered, a video that was widely distributed. The investigators are trying to determine if the murder was inspired by the video.

Paywall warning, but this is a good summary (in French) of the timeline leading up to the murder:

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/10/18/attentat-de-conflans-comment-un-incident-mineur-est-devenu-hors-de-controle_6056460_3224.html

Yes, that's a terrific article.

Tbh, the way that Islam and its adherents are racialized in the West makes any attempt by the West to curb Islam a racial attack, IMHO, even if it isn't meant to be.

And I write that as someone who both finds religiosity more than a little unpalatable AND has worked at an Islamic burial ground, digging graves and helping with services.

Is the exercise of the right to liberty of expression against a religion, an attempt to curb that religion, in your view?

prevent Islamic separatists from continuing to have their children avoid French public school "indoctrination"

Teaching the equality of women and the political beliefs of the Enlightenment as social norms is a form of indoctrination. Having grown up in a society that accepted these norms, I find them to be beneficial doctrines.

It is a thorny problem to settle the question of how much of a foreign culture and its norms immigrants are able to retain, when those norms contradict the norms of the host society. There is an inherent friction there that cannot be remedied, but only managed to some degree. Ghettoizing immigrant cultures has been one traditional answer to this problem, but it brings a raft of new problems with it. Assimilation is the other obvious path, but not all immigrant communities can accept assimilation, because it entails the loss of their core identity and is as unthinkable as self-mutilation or suicide.

Good luck, France.

Euler, since adherents of Islam are racialized in the West, much of what amounts to freedom of expression against Islam amounts to vile racism, in my opinion, and should be sanctioned. The West and not the adherents of Islam made it about race, so either the West continues to racially persecute Muslims via denying religious expression, or the West owns up to the racial element of its denial of religious expression and makes it clear that it's about freedom from religion, not race. I'm not counting on the latter happening.

Right, so you are against the liberty of expression against Islam, but not necessarily other religions. I’m just trying to get your view right, so correct me if I’m mistaken.

There's been a lot of bullshit posted on this thread, over an attack that really sickened me (my sister is a teacher), and I just want to address this specific point and go:

The veil is a key issue in French life today, because it seems to contradict the liberty of women. In the clash between religious liberty and women's liberty, I think the Republic stands and will continue to stand more with women than with religious people. For instance, Macron banned homeschooling last week, in order to prevent Islamic separatists from continuing to have their children avoid French public school "indoctrination", but also to make sure that women are not forced to stay home to attend to their children. It does not surprise me that most of the discussion I've been involved in over the last few days has been with mothers who want to make sure that nothing like this happens again.

Oh well of course no women are religious, nor are they capable of thinking for themselves. Amazing how acceptable it seems to be to paint such a big group of people as these thoughtless drones.

When I lived in London, I would occasionally see veiled women, and it was something really new to me, and I won't lie, I understand why people find it a bit offputting. I started going to a pharmacy near where I lived, where occasionally the pharmacist was a veiled woman (this in itself was very unusual as iirc veiling is far more common among Arab women in London and I was in the Kurdish/Turkish bit of town where you almost never see it), and that made me think about it a lot. Pharmacists are extremely highly qualified, she was hardly some little woman sitting in the corner afraid to speak or leave the house. If she wanted to wear a veil, if doing so made it more easy for her to do her job, how was it my problem to say otherwise? (Frankly, I started buying all my embarrassing stuff from that pharmacy cos if she was laughing at me, I didn't know, lol). The attitude of why-do-women-wear-veils is very strange and has definite misogynistic overtones to me; the demand that one should be entitled to see a woman's face or body is at the root of a lot of attitudes to it. And the hijab ban is even worse, for God's sake, it's a hair covering. Nuns used to cover their hair! I thought that decision was one of the worst, because it's explicitly saying, you're not welcome if you do this, you're not one of us and you never could be.

Laicité originated with the state's need to strip power from the Catholic Church, and I can fully understand the strength of the French attachment to it, having been raised in a country where the health and education systems were run by the Church, where you couldn't get divorced til 1996. But I do very much still - still! - consider myself a Catholic despite all that, and so I think I have some insight into how fucked the Church/state relationship can be, and then when I think of things like the hijab ban, I think of what Riz Ahmed said a few years back about 9/11:

Ahmed was 18 years old on 9/11, and he saw it change everything for his community. “In the ’80s we were called black, at least politically black,” he says. “In the ’90s we were ‘Pakis.’ But after 9/11, suddenly we were Muslims.” It did not surprise him that hatred toward Asian immigrants spiked after the attacks, but what happened among his friends and family did surprise him. “What you start getting is this rising conservatism of the Muslim community in Britain. People’s parents used to watch Zee TV” — an Indian entertainment channel — “now they’re watching Islam Channel. I saw so many people who used to be D.J.s, rude boys. They chopped up their vinyl, grew beards. So you had the retreat of British Muslims from culture post-9/11. Because people all have to pick a side.”

How is something like this not pushing French Muslims to do the same, to pick a side? You say they're not allowed in public schools or buildings if they wear a headscarf, how is that not forcing people who would like to belong into a conflict they didn't choose to be in? And for that matter, a French Muslim woman wearing a headscarf in public, wearing the veil in public, is not being submissive, she's being defiant - of the state's ability to tell her what she can and can't wear. If a religious woman wants to cover her hair but the state forbids it, how is that not taking her liberty from her?

Laicité was designed for the Catholic Church, to be a wrench from centuries of influence and control. Its use to prohibit minority religious communities from freely practicing their religion in public is inappropriate in my view, and let's be honest - tons of people with no interest in any women's rights or freedoms are very happy to use it against French Muslims. If you look at just the headscarf ban in isolation, it's saying to girls and women and their families that they have to pick a side, and if they pick the wrong one then they're choosing society's margins. How can that be freedom? Freedom for who, exactly? If Muslim children aren't attending public schools because of the law, where are they going? Private Muslim schools or homeschooling, for example. What's that doing for integration?

Also, I have searched and searched for a piece where a teacher was talking to Muslim students about the history and context for laicité and its cultural importance, but I can't find it.

I just find it utterly confounding to look at France's approach over the past few decades and think that it's working. I can't pretend I have any answers but I do want people to read and consider that Riz Ahmed quote.

gyac, judith butler wrote about this dynamic particularly well imo:

In this context, I want to point to a few sites of political debate involving both sexual politics and anti‐Islamic practice that suggest that certain ideas of the progress of ‘freedom’ facilitate a political division between progressive sexual politics and the struggle against racism and the discrimination against religious minorities. One of the issues that follows from such a reconstellation is that a certain version and deployment of ‘freedom’ can be used as an instrument of bigotry and coercion. This happens most frightfully when women's sexual freedom or the freedom of expression and association for lesbian and gay people is invoked instrumentally to wage cultural assaults on Islam that reaffirm US sovereign violence. Must we rethink freedom and its implication in the narrative of progress, or must we resituate? My point is surely not to abandon freedom as a norm, but to ask about its uses, and to consider how it must be rethought if it is to resist its coercive instrumentalization in the present and have another meaning that might remain useful for a radical democratic politics.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00176.x

Thank you, that’s really interesting, I’ll have to check out her writing on that. :)

There’s a lot to respond in your post, gyac, but I’ll stick with just a couple of things. One, the veil ban is against all religious symbols in public institutions like schools, not in the streets generally. If you come to my neighborhood you’ll see the streets full of headscarved women, and a few neighborhoods over, many men in kippah. They just have to take them off in public school and the mairie. Two, this isn’t why so many Muslim children in France have not been inscribed in public school: rather, it’s because their parents want their children taught Koranic Arabic and rather little else. Laïcité was not established just to have another religious take a protected place in French life.

What I said:

You say they're not allowed in public schools or buildings if they wear a headscarf,

And for that matter, a French Muslim woman wearing a headscarf in public, wearing the veil in public, is not being submissive, she's being defiant - of the state's ability to tell her what she can and can't wear.

Laïcité was not established just to have another religious take a protected place in French life.

Which other religious symbols (loose definition imo since veils etc aren't directly prescribed by Islam as I understand it) was the ban set up to deal with Euler and do you think you can argue with a straight face that this ban wasn't intended to be an act of enforced assimilation dressed up as a general prohibition?

France has a long history of imposing uniformity on its populace through coercion - see the drive towards French over the various minority dialects - but it's an approach with tons and tons of negative externalities, and I don't think it's ever fully accounted for its colonial past and treatment of those subjects to be able to have an honest conversation about France today.

It is an open question whether every proscription aimed at "enforced assimilation" is ethically impermissible.

We're not talking about every proscription tho, we're talking about this specific, divisive, racist one

Is Islam a race?

It's treated as one by most racists.

xp. ^ Strike my comment. I retract it after a bit of thought.

“Race” and “racialised” aren’t the same thing, and it’s probably not a coincidence that most Muslims in Europe aren’t white either.

What is conspiratorial and racist about what I said? Laïcité was aimed, as you said gyac, at ending the legal domination of French public life by the Catholic Church. No other religion should dominate public life either. Like Christianity, Islam is an proselytising religion, in the sense that it seeks to covert non adherents; gathering new adherents is viewed as a goal of these religions. Like Christianity, Islamic adherents want to use states to further their proselytising goals. Is it conspiratorial and racist to say that? Is it conspiratorial and racist to want to prevent that political aim for all religions, including Christianity and Islam, as I do?

Noodle Vague the ban was aimed at all religious symbols. My Jewish students don’t wear kippah in class. I’ve never seen a crucifix on a student.

xp I think you’ve crossed quite a few lines into racist conspiracy theories when you’re saying Islam is trying to take over France and when you insinuate that it’s comparable with the previously hegemony the Catholic Church held over France, yeah. Do you honestly not see how this sounds?

I didn’t say it was yet comparable with the dominance of the Catholic Church through the 19th century. I think no religion in France should be able to strive for such dominance again.

Is that a danger with less than 10% of the population being Muslim?

and what the hell does it have to do with headscarves

Eep sorry, you’re talking about Läciteé, my bad. I’m just not going to do this.

xxp guess it depends on whether or not you're a history teacher

Great book on the veil in the Bloomsbury 'Object Lessons' series by Rafia Zakaria.

while i agree with a lot of your post gyac, as a general point it's perfectly possible to be an intelligent woman that thinks for herself while at the same time living in a system that punishes women for certain choices or behaviours. so i don't think it's as clear-cut (not just in these circs) as being thoughtless drone vs capable woman.

Yeah, the idea that Islam could achieve "dominance" on the level of the catholic church in France just seems insane to me - it's a minority religion whose adherents are marginalized and racialized within French society, its penetration into government and business elites is minimal. Follow the money, as always with these things.

Noodle Vague the ban was aimed at all religious symbols. My Jewish students don’t wear kippah in class. I’ve never seen a crucifix on a student.

This seems dishonest, too - the ban was clearly created to target Islam, it wasn't christian or jewish symbols being used in class that triggered its creation (or else it would have existed ages ago). The fact that the law itself includes all religious symbols doesn't change that.

it seems to me that such a blanket ban quite deliberately ignores the differences between the cultural meaning and importance of different symbols and the extent to which they're cultural markers as well as religious ones

and the extent to which this doesn't create a cultureless space but a space containing only state acceptable cultural signifiers, including but not limited to brand logos for example

as well as the acceptable dress codes that women of all cultures are surrounded and pressured by

So we agree that laicite is western chauvinist bullshit, then?

Not necessarily, I fully acknowledged the need for it and why French people value it. Sadly we’ve had a couple of examples itt how people can use it as a wedge for bad faith or just utterly mad arguments.

the extent to which this doesn't create a cultureless space but a space containing only state acceptable cultural signifiers

there were some exceptionally brazen examples in Quebec iirc

Yeah, tbh, from my understanding at this point, laicitee is mainly a way of justifying French racism and Islamophobia and attempting an erasure of its colonial, western chauvinist history.

gyac otm imo and thank you for that.

Last year at this time I worked in a school, and it was also a polling place. I walked in on voting day and one of the poll workers was a tiny woman in full niqab, covering her face except for the eyes, sitting at a table ready to help you vote in a democratic election. Possibly she was also there as a interpreter, to help her community exercise their rights in a new country.

It was a real "his heart grew by three sizes that day" moment.

and the extent to which this doesn't create a cultureless space but a space containing only state acceptable cultural signifiers, including but not limited to brand logos for example

― Notes on "Scamp" (Noodle Vague), Monday, October 19, 2020 11:16 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also soooo good. Again, the only protected acts are acts of capitalism--weren't UKers just saying this in the "why are all the rona regulations completely nonsensical?" thread?

Yes - some of them regs here are straight up 'spend money or don't do it' - like you can't get together with a group of mates to play football but you can take part in paid organised football coaching sessions. My daughter can't practice dancing with her friends (with whom she shares a classroom and a schoool bus) but they can go to the dance school. I can't meet my father in his house but I can meet him in a cafe etc.

That is absolutely bonkers, though unsurprising

This is a good article from a French point of view on the differences between French and American responses to the murder of Samuel Paty. Because it's behind a paywall, I copied the text here. This message board ILX is almost exclusively used by Anglo-Americans, and so the article helps me understand where posters on this thread are coming from.

Apaise-t-on une société ouverte en veillant à n’offenser personne ou en apprenant à tolérer les offenses ? Au-delà de la condamnation unanime du crime horrible de Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), cette question ne reçoit pas la même réponse de tous les Français, et certainement pas de toutes les démocraties.

Aux Etats-Unis, beaucoup de commentateurs condamnent, implicitement ou explicitement, le manque supposé de « sensibilité culturelle » des Français non musulmans à la « communauté musulmane » que révélerait la diffusion des caricatures de Charlie Hebdo, et voient dans l’assassinat du professeur de Conflans l’indice d’une France de plus en plus divisée.

Cette analyse ignore la diversité des réactions parmi les Français de confession musulmane, mais elle est dans la droite ligne du mouvement qui s’est emparé de nombreuses universités américaines, où on encourage les professeurs à éviter tout propos, toute lecture, qui pourraient mettre mal à l’aise une partie de leurs étudiants.

Pour moi qui vis aux Etats-Unis, la réponse ne fait pas de doute : la pratique américaine conduit à une impasse, où l’espace commun du débat démocratique et de la raison ne cesse de se réduire. Sa logique ultime est d’interdire à un homme de parler de la condition féminine, à un blanc du sort fait aux noirs. La « communauté » devient une forteresse d’où il est interdit de sortir, au nom d’une expérience communautaire qui serait la même pour tous les membres de la « communauté », et serait incommunicable à ceux qui n’en sont pas membres.

La société se transforme en une juxtaposition de forteresses haineuses et il ne reste plus à la puissance publique qu’à tenter de réguler les relations entre ces forteresses par une judiciarisation croissante des rapports sociaux. Cette évolution provoque des réactions violentes dont le succès de Donald Trump en 2016 et la réhabilitation du politiquement incorrect sont les symptômes. En croyant apaiser la société en la segmentant, on exacerbe les rancœurs et l’agressivité.

La voie française, qui accepte le blasphème et encourage l’irrévérence, n’est cependant pas simple à mettre en œuvre dans une société beaucoup plus diverse qu’elle n’était au temps de Jules Ferry (1832-1893). Elle fait peser une responsabilité écrasante sur les enseignants. C’est à eux qu’il revient, comme le faisait le professeur de Conflans, de faire réfléchir les futurs citoyens sur le difficile équilibre entre la nécessité du débat, qui exige la tolérance, et les besoins du vivre-ensemble, qui exige le respect.

Dans une société ouverte, cet équilibre ne devrait pas être régi par la loi, qui doit protéger sans réserve la liberté d’expression d’une société démocratique, mais par la multitude des décisions individuelles. C’est l’implicite d’une société, cette civilité par laquelle chacun modère son comportement, tolérant ce qu’il juge excessif ou offensant, acceptant des convictions différentes, osant affirmer vigoureusement, et quelquefois insolemment, les siennes, mais choisissant quand et comment le faire.

En montrant à ses élèves les caricatures de Charlie Hebdo, Samuel Paty ouvrait de façon intelligente et courageuse un débat nécessaire qu’une société ouverte ne devrait jamais clore. Nous devrions tous souscrire au hashtag #jesuisprof. Quant à #jesuischarlie, il y a des circonstances où je le fais mien, d’autres où je le récuse.

the article helps me understand where posters on this thread are coming from

there's definitely conflict and ambivalence among Americans about the position this article associates with the US and education/freedom of expression. Even among leftist/progressive Americans.

Allowing for mangling by Google Translate, this is not a good article. Or at least the third paragraph is incredibly defensive and tells on the author's biases much more than it actually describes what minorities in higher education actually want from their post-secondary experiences.

Google Translate's rendition:

For me who live in the United States, the answer is clear: American practice leads to an impasse, where the common space for democratic debate and reason is constantly shrinking. Its ultimate logic is to prohibit a man from talking about the status of women, a white man from the fate of blacks. The "community" becomes a fortress from which it is forbidden to leave, in the name of a communal experience which would be the same for all members of the "community", and would be incommunicable to those who are not members of it.

like, get the fuck out of here with this bullshit

I was able to understand most of it in the original French, but did have to rely on Google Translate in parts -- I think the translation is pretty un-mangled in terms of meaning?

Ah thank you. I was like, "is it just me or is that bullshit?" but I thought maybe I didn't understand something. Turns out I understood just fine.

I mean, it harkens back to the "trigger warning article in the Atlantic" thread and the Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism thread.

La société se transforme en une juxtaposition de forteresses haineuses et il ne reste plus à la puissance publique qu’à tenter de réguler les relations entre ces forteresses par une judiciarisation croissante des rapports sociaux. Cette évolution provoque des réactions violentes dont le succès de Donald Trump en 2016 et la réhabilitation du politiquement incorrect sont les symptômes. En croyant apaiser la société en la segmentant, on exacerbe les rancœurs et l’agressivité.

Kind of a bold analysis considering the far right isn't exactly in crisis in France.

This is the entire article run through Google Translate:

Do you pacify an open society by making sure not to offend anyone or by learning to tolerate offense? Beyond the unanimous condemnation of the horrible crime of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), this question does not receive the same answer from all French people, and certainly not from all democracies.
In the United States, many commentators condemn, implicitly or explicitly, the supposed lack of "cultural sensitivity" of French non-Muslims to the "Muslim community" that the dissemination of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons would reveal, and see in the assassination of the professor. de Conflans indicates an increasingly divided France.

This analysis ignores the diversity of reactions among French people of Muslim faith, but it is in line with the movement that has seized many American universities, where professors are encouraged to avoid any comments, any reading, which could harm at ease some of their students.

For me who live in the United States, the answer is clear: American practice leads to an impasse, where the common space for democratic debate and reason is constantly shrinking. Its ultimate logic is to prohibit a man from talking about the status of women, a white man from the fate of blacks. The "community" becomes a fortress from which it is forbidden to leave, in the name of a communal experience which would be the same for all members of the "community", and would be incommunicable to those who are not members of it.

Society is transformed into a juxtaposition of hate fortresses, and all the public authorities have to do is try to regulate the relations between these fortresses through an increasing judicialization of social relations. This development provokes violent reactions of which the success of Donald Trump in 2016 and the rehabilitation of the politically incorrect are the symptoms. By believing to appease society by segmenting it, we exacerbate resentment and aggression.

The French way, which accepts blasphemy and encourages irreverence, is not, however, easy to implement in a society much more diverse than it was in the time of Jules Ferry (1832-1893). It places an overwhelming responsibility on teachers. It is up to them, as Professor de Conflans did, to make future citizens reflect on the difficult balance between the need for debate, which requires tolerance, and the needs of living together, which requires respect.

In an open society, this balance should not be regulated by law, which must fully protect the freedom of expression of a democratic society, but by the multitude of individual decisions. It is the implicit nature of a society, this civility by which everyone moderates their behavior, tolerating what they deem excessive or offensive, accepting different convictions, daring to assert vigorously, and sometimes insolently, their own, but choosing when and how to do it.

By showing his students the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, Samuel Paty cleverly and courageously opened a necessary debate that an open society should never end. We should all subscribe to the hashtag #jesuisprof. As for #jesuischarlie, there are circumstances where I make it mine, others where I reject it.

It's worth noting that the author is a French diplomat. So yeah, not exactly the best spokesperson for the 'American point of view', which is hardly monolithic to begin with.

This message board ILX is almost exclusively used by Anglo-Americans

the whole piece seems to want to talk about "the open society" as an abstraction with no connection to ongoing histories of oppression and institutional prejudice. "taking offence" feels inadequate to describe people's reactions to the experience of being addressed and policed as somehow lesser citizens because of their race, gender, beliefs, sexuality, culture

The author, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, lives in New York, as a former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations.

i wonder if a teacher stripping naked and dancing the conga around a classroom would also be a clever and courageous way of debating freedom of expression

gyac, yes, I am an American citizen. Aren't you a resident of the UK? If you'd prefer, I will say, native English speakers.

Maybe this is my memory getting fuzzy, but I feel like this position (the author's opinion) was more acceptable in progressive circles in America in the 70s-90s, and has only really shifted in the past 20 years.

The author, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, lives in New York, as a former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations.

Certainly a position where I would expect someone to really study and understand the complexity of intersectionality on American campuses

the whole piece seems to want to talk about "the open society" as an abstraction

Well, when the final conclusion is about which hashtags we should endorse...

It’s cool how freedom of expression is bold and courageous when you’re using it as your intellectual shield to discriminate as you normally do.

gyac, so to be clear: you think Samuel Paty was discriminating against his students?

gyac, yes, I am an American citizen. Aren't you a resident of the UK? If you'd prefer, I will say, native English speakers.

xp to my previous post: I'm not saying this in a "millennials are snowflakes" way -- just that it seems to me, as a LOL American, that the French way has remained the same, whereas America has changed.

gyac, so to be clear: you think Samuel Paty was discriminating against his students?

I don't know why you think I was saying that Islam is "taking over". I am talking about the murder of Samuel Paty and what can be done to prevent further murders of French teachers of histoire/géo giving their units on civics.

Also, to me, "terrorism" seems an awkward term to be used to describe this murder ... or is that term just being used to mean "criminal act motivated by Islam" ... a variant of "hate crime"?

??? Isn't the answer some form of "Give immigrants the resources and the space to live well in their new country without discrimination, and probably their 18-year-old children won't suicide by cop because they'll have good lives and good future opportunities to look forward to"? I meannn

just that it seems to me, as a LOL American, that the French way has remained the same, whereas America has changed.

tbh here the French ppl I know through my wife, much like the portuguese ppl in my group of friends, are much closer to the "American" way in this regard than the "French" way, tho obv there's other factors of class, education, etc. in there and I wouldn't want to claim either group representative. You could also paternalistically argue that they've "become" that way due to US influence, but good luck growing up in Europe w/o getting a fair helping of that whether you want to or not.

what can be done to prevent further murders of French teachers of histoire/géo giving their units on civics.

This framing just makes no sense.

i feel like a lot of the groundwork for allowing us to question the sweet, egalitarian idealism of enlightenment values was done by French philosophers tbf

I’m referring to your earlier posts which are still up there and which you haven’t clarified - if I’m wrong in what I (and others) are seeing, then feel free to correct me.

I mean, I’m no expert here, but I feel that the current approach of crackdown after crackdown after crackdown and increasing institutional discrimination isn’t really doing anything other than giving certain elements that they want, and by France implicitly telling a portion of society they won’t truly belong unless they fit in in a way that is difficult or problematic for them, the nation is voluntarily abdicating the role of the larger community and leaving lots and lots of space for those lonely and alienated people to be recruited by those who do not have their interests or France’s at heart. But as I said, I’m no expert.

_what can be done to prevent further murders of French teachers of histoire/géo giving their units on civics._

This framing just makes no sense.

I had read Euler's post as summarizing the views of the government and officials and "popular opinion" -- which I agree with you, gyac, are problematic

gyac, I will respond to your post about "discrimination forcing Muslims in Europe to “pick a side”?"

(though I don't agree that the ban on religious symbols in public offices is discrimination against Muslims in particular, though I recognize that based on what has been posted, I stand alone here)

How is something like this not pushing French Muslims to do the same, to pick a side? You say they're not allowed in public schools or buildings if they wear a headscarf, how is that not forcing people who would like to belong into a conflict they didn't choose to be in? And for that matter, a French Muslim woman wearing a headscarf in public, wearing the veil in public, is not being submissive, she's being defiant - of the state's ability to tell her what she can and can't wear. If a religious woman wants to cover her hair but the state forbids it, how is that not taking her liberty from her?

I think the ban on religious symbols in public offices is heavy handed and useless. I don't support burkini bans, or bans on the niqab. I think in this regard we are in agreement.

But if a religious person wants blasphemy against their religion to be forbidden, I think they are wrong.

Yes, sarahell is right, I was just trying to summarize what I take to be the "mainstream" French view on what's happened. My own views are obviously more aligned with those views than anyone else's here are, because I believe that protecting public life from religious imperatives---what the French call "obscurantisme", is important.

??? Isn't the answer some form of "Give immigrants the resources and the space to live well in their new country without discrimination, and probably their 18-year-old children won't suicide by cop because they'll have good lives and good future opportunities to look forward to"? I meannn

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Monday, October 19, 2020 6:10 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

in order, do you know the details of what happened here? The 18 year old had just been given a car by his father so that he could join his father in doing security work. He had a reasonable blue-collar future ahead of him. Instead, he drove more than 100km to murder a middle school teacher he'd learned about on social media.

I don't want to read you as saying that discrimination generally licenses murder of school teachers.

Pointing out that discrimination against a group powers extremism isn't the same as saying it justifies extremism.

It's pretty common for well off members from marginalized groups to still identify with that group identity enough for that marginalization to power their extremism.

I've probably just been watching too much "Criminal Minds" but I feel like there needs to be room in this discussion for the possibility of this kid just being a fucked up kid, and it not being "terrorism" or a threat against the French way of life.

I mean he could be, but there is an ecosphere of extremism that allowed him to get where he was, and similar incidents in recent memory in various European countries.

I guess it goes back to issues of agency and self-determination (related but not the same as what gyac brought up re Muslim women), that Muslims are more circumscribed by their religion/racial identity than white people from Christian cultures.

If the fucked up kid framed it as a political act, it becomes a political act whether or not the kid is politically clueless and only wanted to give some justification to cover his wanting to kill someone.

The "kid" had been frequenting a boxing club in Toulouse that has been investigated for some time as a radical Islamic base: strict separation of sexes, halal food required, etc. Why was a fucked-up kid from Normandy in Toulouse so much? That's 700km from home.

fair enough, I walk it back

I mean he could be, but there is an ecosphere of extremism that allowed him to get where he was, and similar incidents in recent memory in various European countries.

it also is kinda similar to something bamcquern brought up a number of years ago, about how cultural expectations (both within a marginalized group and from the dominant culture) lead to (I'm paraphrasing here) self-fulling prophecies. In bamcquern's example (about public education in America), it was about the expectation that black boys were just going to grow up to be thugs, and how some public schools operate with that assumption and how that encourages the boys to behave that way.

Yes, sorry, just coming back--Euler, I acknowledge I didn't know any of that about the attacker. I googled the news story but I didn't see any English lang articles with that detail. But I think gyac and sarahell have said it better than I could itt.

thanks i.o. -- gyac did the heavy lifting here

I'd still like to hear gyac's reply on whether they think Samuel Paty was discriminating against his students, not because I think that position is absurd, but because it would help me understand the threads of this thread better.

Could not Paty have taught the exact same lesson without physically confronting his Muslim students with the cartoons? What would have been be lost by that approach?

First of all, why? Was he "asking for it" by exercising his right, the exact right he was trying to teach in his civics course?

Second of all, he warned his students about what he was going to show. They were able to not look or even leave the classroom. The student who is at the root of this situation reacted angrily nevertheless and told her father, who posted the first video that went viral.

Not gonna speak for gyac of course but I think that when ppl talk about racialization/marginalization of a group this involves entire societal structures and not reducible to the actions of any one individual. I don't entirely know what I think of this teacher's concrete actions (he might have been doing "the right thing" AND feeding into that oppresion at the same time, even!), but to evaluate that seems pretty facile when he was slaughtered in a horrible manner and whatever disagreements I may have had with his actions obv I don't think (and don't think anyone itt thinks) that was right or just or ok.

Sort of a tangent on this thread as well and perhaps a bit navel-gazing but on the question of the "American" and "French" attitudes towards integration in general it strikes me that one thing that doesn't tend to get brought up is how communities, and specifically activist groups within them, feel on this topic. A lot of what I often see derided as "Americanized thinking" is really just down to listening to and engaging with what those groups say, and have been saying for ages (certainly predating the wokening of the US).

Yes that’s a fair summary of what I mean, Daniel, the structural element is important.

I'd still like to hear gyac's reply on whether they think Samuel Paty was discriminating against his students, not because I think that position is absurd, but because it would help me understand the threads of this thread better.

Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari)
Posted: 8 January 2015 at 12:31:21
There's a strong possibility that many of their cartoons would have fallen foul of British laws about inciting racial and religious hatred. Many would have been equally as at home in a Neo-Nazi publication as they were in a libertarian satirical magazine. It's clearly possible to separate the belief that they have a right to publish from a belief that other organisations should republish as a point of principle, though.

xp In the unlikely event Euler's question is serious, no, I don't think Paty was "asking for" his murder and beheading. Rational people understand that crime to be barbaric and grotesquely disproportionate to Paty's actions in the classroom.

That said, imagining there been no murder or other reprisal, would Paty's actions be defensible as good teaching? To me, they look more like a vicarious exercise of state authority over a captive audience than a thoughtful effort to teach concepts of free speech to a multi-cultural group.

Paty was in a position of power with respect to his younger, minority students. He chose to use that power to show them images he knew would be offensive, as his caveats and precautions illustrate. What was it about the content of his lesson that required him to dramatically present the images? Even in the USA, we've all heard of the Hebdo cartoons, so I assume everyone in that classroom knew what was being discussed. Being told they could hide their eyes or leave the room (in other words, disclose their personal religious views to everyone else there) seems manipulative and theatrical. What was gained for greater understanding of free speech by creating that situation?

This is an interesting discussion to me as a person of no religious faith living in the American South, where I encounter hateful, coercive Christianity in various forms every day and see constant efforts to erode the separation of church and state, especially in local school systems. In principle and in practice, greater separation of church and state would be very welcome to me. But I can't reconcile French state policy in this area with my ideas about liberty, equality, or fraternity.

I was being serious, inasmuch as the view that bringing up the consequences of an act as a reason not to do that act is rightly criticized in other cases.

My kids have all been through the course of civics in middle school that Samuel Paty was giving. No, not with him at his school, but the rough structure of this course is shared by all instructors. We just talked about it at dinner, and my kids say the entire point of this course is to understand laïcité and its role in combatting religious extremism. Paty was just doing his job. I gather many here think that he should not have done his job, because this course and possibly the concept of laïcité itself is at odds with a multicultural society. I appreciate gyac's responses on this point, which acknowledges that there is a role for laïcité. But how to thread the needle here? Is banning blasphemy the right way to go? Why give religion that much power? The French take is that religious communities, and sub-communities of all kinds, undermine equality. Surely there's something right there: community networks that exclude other groups convey advantages to its members. But some groups just want to separate: in the case of religious groups, they feel that they're called to separate. How is that compatible with a civil society based on values other than capitalism (which I think undergirds the approach to civic society of the English speaking world)?

*They were able to not look or even leave the classroom.*

Was anyone in the situation expecting that the Muslim students would be cool with the rest of the class seeing it, even if they chose not to? I wouldn't have thought that it's solely the Muslim students *seeing* the cartoon that was the problem, they are probably well aware what it depicts.

O I think Calz probably covered that upthread

imagining there been no murder or other reprisal, would Paty's actions be defensible as good teaching?

Somehow it seems like focussing minor criticisms on the teaching methods on a teacher who was executed verges into victim-blaming territory. Beheading Paty was a barbaric, indefensible, criminal, and inexcusable act. Immediately shifting one's thoughts to finding reasonable objections to what he did in the classroom implies that those objections were wholly justified, but simply expressed disproportionately.

If you want to search for some rational grounds upon which to explain this act, then look to systemic injustice against immigrants. Parsing the finer points of Paty's teaching tells us nothing useful about the problem or its remedies.

"The French take is that religious communities, and sub-communities of all kinds, undermine equality"

This seems (imo, and outside France) to be a very white-privileged perspective though ie from the pov of white non-muslims who have the privilege not to need to form sub-communities (for protection, for support, to stay alive)? Like saying "all lives matter", you come at equality from a very different direction dependending whether you have power or are under siege.

That's fair too! I think of the French take as an experiment: a way to try to achieve equality. Other nations who seek equality (not very many) can try other means, like encouraging subcommunities to individually strive for power against other communities including the majority, and see how that works. I'm not familiar with any diverse nation that has even begun to succeed in equality, so it seems to me like experimentation is a good thing.

The experimentation is necessary but most of the attendant pain is going to be felt by the minority groups being experimented upon.

How long is this experiment scheduled to last? Some of the lab rats might want to know.

(xp)

It was state-of-the-art in Robespierre's time, tbf.

Like, I don't condone this kid's actions and I believe he should be prosecuted. I also believe "we must thoroughly denigrate your core beliefs in order for you to be properly French" isn't an experiment in equality; it's an experiment in suppression. These are not irreconcilable beliefs.

(I do get why other Europeans say France is the European country the most like the US now)

You mean like making a great performative song and dance of following their sacred Revolutionary principles and the precepts when it suits them and ignoring them when it doesn't?

Kind of; more thinking along the lines of the general "everyone is welcome as long as you can turn yourself into a White man" ethos

How is showing extremely offensive cartoons important in teaching about combatting religious extremism? Would it be necessary to show extremely racist cartoons to kids to teach them about combatting racism? What if you let kids of those races leave the classroom before you show the racist cartoons?

DJP, France has terrible racism, but I don't see why its values, to which it tries and fails to reach, are White. They are exclusionary of those who fail to live up to them, so yeah, if you think blasphemy should be banned then this isn't a good place to be, but is thinking that blasphemy should be banned a non White value? That surprises this non White person.

The Yellow Kid, showing the cartoons that offend a particular religious group is to demonstrate the exercise of the basic French right to speak freely against religions. It sounds like you don't think that value is important. And that's fine! Values aren't generally universally valid: some cultures have different values than others, and these values can clash.

Blasphemy is not banned in the UK by the way. (Well, it is in Scotland and NI, but the last prosecution for blasphemy in Scotland was in 1843).

I don't think blasphemy should be banned. I also don't think citizens of an allegedly democratic country should be forced to embrace blasphemy as contingent upon their citizenship.

What was the freedom of speech argument forthis cartoon, since we’re here? What aspect of Islam is being critique here? As I said upthread and which poster Euler absolutely refuses to acknowledge, said national values are absolutely not on offer to everyone in France, and it’s disingenuous to present those ungrateful Muslims could integrate fully if only they chose to.

I don't think the murderer was protesting systemic injustice

*pretend, ffs

Crüt making a snide and useless point, quelle surprise.

Also DJP, rights in general have to be fought for because some people think that the right is wrong. Those who believe that blasphemy is wrong may want the law to make blasphemy illegal. The right to blaspheme is indeed aiming to suppress the supremacy of religious belief over free expression. The aim is to establish a religiously equal society, where no particular religious group has political power over any other. It's ok if you think that's not valuable!

xp to DJP : you're not forced to embrace blasphemy, you're just required to acknowledge it as a right. My citizenship test will probably be a one-hour interview about laïcité, but I will not be asked to piss on a crucifix or on a hijab.

In most Western countries people are not legally prohibited from using discriminatory language in most situations, I'm not sure that getting schoolkids to listen to a list of racial slurs would be a helpful way of explaining that fact to them

gyac, that cartoon is racist rather than religiously aimed.

What national values are you insisting are not available to everyone in France? I would like to respond, but I don't understand what you have in mind.

the right to free and open expression of their faith

I'm thinking that citizenship test will be a breeze.

Also DJP, rights in general have to be fought for because some people think that the right is wrong.

As a Black man in America who has forebears who were lynched, that never occurred to me.

gyac, that cartoon is racist rather than religiously aimed.

Try maybe taking 5 seconds to think about the people you are responding to and their contexts before typing, it may help your points come across better AND would be a good exercise in empathic thought.

I don't know everyone's contexts! Do you remember that I am a Latino American? I wouldn't expect so. I'm sorry for being condescending there. I'm trying to get at the roots of the objections (aside from "Euler is an asshole", well...). I'm also trying to keep cool through the zings, which as ever serve to show who can be ignored.

Like gyac, you obviously just want to zing me, but it's not like I'm committed to the view that every Charlie Hebdo cartoon is about religious freedom. Why would I be?

xps

If you want to search for some rational grounds upon which to explain this act, then look to systemic injustice against immigrants.

I don't want to search for rational grounds for an indefensible murder. The horror of the act speaks for itself.

Parsing the finer points of Paty's teaching tells us nothing useful about the problem or its remedies.

That depends on which problem we are examining. I'm suggesting that laïcité itself is problematic, not because of Paty's murder or any other act of terror it might incite, but because it seems to be, at least in some of its manifestations, discriminatory and racist.

I apologize for my bad taste in raising these points now. Thanks to Euler's explanations, I understand that laïcité has roots in French history that long predate Islamist terrorism. A thread about terrorist attacks in Europe is probably not the best place for my criticisms, and this isn't the best time to make them.

radical Islamic base: strict separation of sexes, halal food required, etc.

If separation of the sexes and religious traditions regarding the slaughter of animals is radical Islam, then you might need to brush up on your world religions.

Yes, I should be living in fear of my life, every shop in my neighbourhood sells halal food.

I don't know everyone's contexts! Do you remember that I am a Latino American? I wouldn't expect so.

Yes, I do because we became Facebook friends to share Marvel Puzzle Quest rewards.

the right to free and open expression of their faith

Pretty hard to argue with this

Unless you're Catholic obv

But aside from that, my earlier point remains: if the French were able to extricate the obvious racism from the secularist standpoint and its role in society, then there wouldn't be nearly as many issues about the country's Muslim population.

It's also instructive that the countries in which France had the biggest colonial presence tend to be majority Muslim countries. So first, the Western power murders and plunders a country, then tells its inhabitants that their religion is shit? Come the fuck on. What I see happening in France is just a continuation of racial supremacy campaigns and exploitation of resources, namely cheap labor, all swept under the rug of supposed enlightened, progressive values. It's abhorrent.

no one should be murdered in cold blood even if their actions are abhorrent and insensitive

oh “thou shalt not kill” huh? Ok hegemon

Samuel Pety is not an avatar for French colonialism

I’m not sure what part of “this kid should be tried for murder” has been ambiguous in this discussion

no one should be murdered in cold blood even if their actions are abhorrent and insensitive

Tbf he's a stiff now.

xp

I’m being very silly because this story is so horrible and because i hate mainstream French attitudes to race and religion so much

even otherwise very liberal leftie friends of mine there will say things like burkas are offensive and are justified in being banned, that girls shouldn’t wear hearscarves in school, etc, i find it incredibly depressing

no one should be murdered in cold blood even if their actions are abhorrent and insensitive

― trapped out the barndo (crüt), Monday, October 19, 2020 2:20 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I never said that they should, and I also never made Paty a metonym for French colonialism. We're talking about Islam in French society, as well as this specific, recent incident.

(xp) It's all part of a noble experiment, Tracer.

Tracer, as you can imagine, I also am completely undone and depressed by left-leaning people spouting such Islamophobic dreck.

Let me know when the results are in

xpost it’s wild. France really is an outlier with this stuff.

someone in another chat made the point that the question of islamophobia in french society should be considered separately from this issue. like, while it is a real problem, it's not a good explanation for why this incident occurred.

Evidently not as much as you'd think judging by the comments of some non-French itt.

i think that's a good approach. this was a fanatic who was punishing blasphemers. there is a larger context here -- the norm of forced secularism comes down harder on muslims and other religious minorities -- but that is kind of a separate issue. the vast majority of muslims don't react this way to islamophobia. and not all murderers should be seen to have rational motives.

is it possible too much is being read into a single gruesome murder

the right to free and open expression of their faith

in the USA our version of this argument over free expression of religious beliefs is whether Hobby Lobby can prevent their employees from obtaining contraceptives under the ACA, or a bakery that opens its doors to serve the general public can refuse service to a gay couple.

I don't think this discussion is being driven by the attack on the teacher so much as by the discovery that some ILXors don't seem that fussed by (or averse to) Islamophobic comments and attitudes.

yeah these are always thorny issues

Who'd have thought it? In ILX of all places? Tut tut.

I mentioned him on the French borad, but Fethi Benslama (no idea if he was translated into English) has written some insightful stuff on this topic, at the crossroads of politics, history and psychoanalysis, as he puts it. Here's an interview (in French) from 2015 for the curious:

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/11/12/pour-les-desesperes-l-islamisme-radical-est-un-produit-excitant_4808430_3224.html

Might be intelligible when run through Google Translate as well, which has greatly improved in recent years.

sorry folks, i really shouldn't post to these threads when i'm angry, i'll hang back.

I don't see why its values, to which it tries and fails to reach, are White.

I'm glad we're moving off this conflict (are we?) but I did want to come back to this because I think there was a big leap here and I didn't see it addressed?

It's not that equality is a "white" value, it's that the values that lacite reifies are those of the ruling, law-making class, which is...white people without religiously or culturally complicated identities? It sort of refuses to acknowledge that anyone else exists, in order to purport that everything is a flat plane and all people are equal. But nothing is equal to whiteness and the in-group identity! Extremely problematically so. It's like...saying "I don't see color" instead of addressing the harm of racism and white supremacy.

the right to free and open expression of their faith

in the USA our version of this argument over free expression of religious beliefs is whether Hobby Lobby can prevent their employees from obtaining contraceptives under the ACA, or a bakery that opens its doors to serve the general public can refuse service to a gay couple.

ding ding

Beautifully put, in orbit :)

"It's not that equality is a "white" value, it's that the values that lacite reifies are those of the ruling, law-making class, which is...white people without religiously or culturally complicated identities? It sort of refuses to acknowledge that anyone else exists, in order to purport that everything is a flat plane and all people are equal."

Yeah this is really good, seconded.

Thank you, because it seemed so simple that I was afraid I was being stupid by belaboring it.

Haha it is like, basic identity stuff that semiotics students learn when they're teenagers but I've rarely seen it articulated so well. And sometimes I guess ya gotta to get back to the basics when there appears to be such a fundamental divide in agreement.

gyac's big post upthread, which i've just now read, is fantastic too.

Euler I really don't detect a desire to 'zing' you there!

xp absolutely not, it was succinct and otm

nv said it early this morning, basically, just a slightly different facet of examination:

and the extent to which this doesn't create a cultureless space but a space containing only state acceptable cultural signifiers, including but not limited to brand logos for example

― Notes on "Scamp" (Noodle Vague)

It's just a matter of whose culture gets to be "neutral."

One might even say "secularisation cannot eliminate its long Christian tradition"... like Macron approvingly did two years ago, when meeting with a bunch of bishops!

https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/8879/macron-accused-of-tampering-with-la-cit-after-church-state-remarks

Macron letting the cat out of the bag there.

I remember reading at the time something like 4 out of 5 Catholics voted for Macron

Of course, notorious melt Robespierre reined in the dechristianizers, secularism can only go so far.

cult of the supreme being should be the state religion of France clearly

Don't knock it till you've tried it.

It's just a matter of whose culture gets to be "neutral."

That's an essentially accurate observation of an underlying truth and defining a problem is usually a basic step toward solving it. However, no matter which way I turn that truth, I can't see a solution falling out of it that resolves the essential conflict that rises out of fundamentally clashing cultural values. The particular Islamists who encouraged this crime do not want toleration or neutrality, but enough power to create a hegemony for their own religiously-inspired or religiously-justified ideas.

If it is their culture that gets to be 'neutral', then the result would be far harsher laws suppressing other cultural norms than the French laws against the display of religious symbols in public schools. Full and free expression of secular humanism would absolutely not be allowed. I don't see that outcome as preferable, according to my culturally hegemonic 'western' beliefs.

So, when it comes to whose culture is considered 'neutral' in this power struggle (because that is what the execution of the teacher was about), I am going to side with the French Republic over the Islamists who perpetrated this crime every time. At least the Republic allows avenues for the redress of wrongs and may conceivably arrive at a compromise solution amenable to the majority of muslims in France.

But does it need to be framed as an either/or-type situation with no hues in between? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think anyone here is playing ISIS's advocate.

Aimless... the idea that there are enough pro-murder Muslims out there to enact some fanatical Islamic Republic in France is..... un peu bizarre, n'est-ce pas

Indeed they are not, and that “opinion” is conspiracist nonsense at best. We’re dealing with France as it is, not France as it might exist in some flatulent old edgelord’s novel.

While you're at it, why don't you side with the Land of Oz in their struggle with the Wicked Witch of the West?

A bit tired this whole situation is expressed as a clash of civilizations when it's once again just the story of kid humiliated by a culture that will never give him a decent job, who needed to see a psychiatrist that was never hired for him and fell in the hands of cult that knows too well how to weaponize the ange of angry young males.

I don't feel so bad for how simplistic and dumb and useless some of my posts upthread where now, cheers VHS!

We did that part too but it was 7 hours ago so you have to scroll a bit.

VHS, did you read that Benslama interview I linked to upthread? You may find it interesting. Also, you should visit Je déteste tout more often.

Yeah it's true, I keep forgetting there's a french board here.

and yeah sorry, i'm responding to the situation more than the board recent posts.

Tbf it doesn't see much action.

the idea that there are enough pro-murder Muslims out there to enact some fanatical Islamic Republic in France is..... un peu bizarre

The reason I am specifically addressing pro-murder Muslims is not because I think they predominate within the Muslim population of France. I expect they are much less than 1% of the muslims in France. I am addressing them because this is the "Terrorist attacks throughout Europe" thread and that tiny handful of pro-murder muslims recently committed an act of terror, specifically to emphasize that any act they regard as blasphemy deserves death. It was a political act, aimed at imposing a form of power that most of us would not regard as legitimate: impunity in sentencing people to death.

It seems equally bizarre to think that the root cause of this murder was a law prohibiting the display of religious symbols in a well-defined subset of public spaces. Racism, xenophobia and economic ghettoization are the real problems to address. Discussing this as an unacknowledged consequence of semiotics seems very bizarre to me.

Terrorism is a language of the powerless - it doesn't make it right - but looking at the full picture of power is important - and yes that includes many decades of religious intolerance in France

Basic critical theory around identity (which you'd think French people would have an edge in) since at least the 1970s has established that the people who benefit from ostensibly 'neutral' spaces are those who already hold power

But frankly we can take it back to 1870s, with Anatole France's famous observation that the rich and poor in Paris are treated perfectly equally: they are both disallowed from sleeping under bridges

Maybe now you're going to say that my argument is that Anatole France caused this atrocity? Whatever man

You are not connecting any dots, you are fixating on one dot and going “Eh? Eh?” in a higher and higher vocal register

OTM

Terrorism is a language of the powerless

Which is why I described this as a power struggle. The Black Lives Matter movement is also a power struggle and will not achieve its ends until the Black community has been ceded a more significant portion of the nation's political and economic power, but they express it rather differently.

for now

agreed

it's actually surprising that assassination has not played a larger role in US politics

Er, not recently but...

You are not connecting any dots

I... is this to me?

*repeats in a squeakier voice*

is this to me???

No, I think you're providing the dots.

xps Well, the KKK was really into it for a long time.

It's more difficult to carry out these dasys, yer assassinating.

*quietly stows airhorn*

From my understanding, in France hate speech is not protected by freedom of expression, you can discuss freedom of expression and the Charlie Hebdo events without showing the caricatures themselves. The moment you show these caricature, in an educational context of all places, not only you enter n-word or holocaust denial territory, you are just showing who is boss. No one should die for doing such a thing, but that teacher's behaviour is more or less the norm and it both shows the incredible patience most muslims in France have, and how freaking little they are cared for. The only consequence of such topics and discussions are that kids no matter how religious they are, it's that they will understand 'well this is the situation, see? we can't get along, how interesting, here's who right and here's who's wrong' and the bullying keeps going on and on and on because once you oppose a teacher you oppose la France and you oppose freedom of speech.

So of course the Muslim Brotherhood wins and shit like that happens. I'm seeing absolutely nothing from the left or right in France that shows any desire to change course because France is oh so great and La République is les droits de l'homme yada yada yada, the only sensible voices on this are immigrants sharing similar experiences but they are not a norm whatsoever.

I wouldn't give a shit really, I've long accepted the inherent racism in republican ideals, some of my family there is racist but they are far, it's that this poisonous view of society keeps creeping in Quebec and that I can't fathom.

So yeah Aimless I'm a bit peeved by your assumptions, the situation is not that one person should take a side within a power struggle, it's hitting 17 years olds in the back of the head for making the wrong choice over and over when really there are other societies that have proven you can give enough individual freedom for someone to build their identity along the way. Since, the most powerful side in this case is 'french culture' as a whole, the onus is on them to make them feel accepted and not navigating some sort of no man's land.

lol Tracer

I presume you are not peeved when I make the assumption that (quoting myself) "racism, xenophobia and economic ghettoization are the real problems to address." Not having seen the Hebdo caricatures, I have to take your word that they constitute hate speech. Nor do I know how the teacher conducted the discussion about them. I have not read a description of how that lesson was taught, but have seen it asserted that the lesson being taught was within the curriculum.

My major assumption is that France needs to work much harder and more visibly on alleviating the real problems of economic stagnation within and xenophobia against muslim communities. That's pure justice. But I also consider that this act was not merely a blind lashing out, but a demonstration of intent and no society can afford to concede the legitimacy that intent, no matter how legitimate the grievance.

Well yeah, I am not for murder. I don’t think many people are.

From my understanding, in France hate speech is not protected by freedom of expression, you can discuss freedom of expression and the Charlie Hebdo events without showing the caricatures themselves. The moment you show these caricature, in an educational context of all places, not only you enter n-word or holocaust denial territory, you are just showing who is boss. No one should die for doing such a thing, but that teacher's behaviour is more or less the norm and it both shows the incredible patience most muslims in France have, and how freaking little they are cared for. The only consequence of such topics and discussions are that kids no matter how religious they are, it's that they will understand 'well this is the situation, see? we can't get along, how interesting, here's who right and here's who's wrong' and the bullying keeps going on and on and on because once you oppose a teacher you oppose la France and you oppose freedom of speech.

So of course the Muslim Brotherhood wins and shit like that happens. I'm seeing absolutely nothing from the left or right in France that shows any desire to change course because France is oh so great and La République is les droits de l'homme yada yada yada, the only sensible voices on this are immigrants sharing similar experiences but they are not a norm whatsoever.

I wouldn't give a shit really, I've long accepted the inherent racism in republican ideals, some of my family there is racist but they are far, it's that this poisonous view of society keeps creeping in Quebec and that I can't fathom.

really good post VHS that sums up a lot of the realities

a discussion about the importance of enlightenment values to colonialism and their ongoing complicity in framing a colonial world view probably belongs in another thread, but it's central to the development of modern western polities

Nations can have their national cultures, even if they mean erasing those of recent emigrants. Lots of people who have immigrated to my country have had to give up eating the occasional dog to fit in.

On the other hand, we don't discuss freedom of speech and Miller v. California in high school classrooms by showing hardcore porn.

emigrants immigrants

Yeah, that was the problem with your post.

That nations should be able to choose a tolerable range of behaviors in their populations? I wouldn't expect to be able to immigrate to the UAE and espouse atheism. That's for their population to decide. As I see it, looking out 80 years, when much of the Mideast, the Sahel, and North India becomes uninhabitable, this isn't going to get any better.

we're going to need to guard the dogs

Just the occasional dogs tbf

they'll be coming over here, marrying our pets, imposing their cultures

Still, we're never going to get a better chance to ask the man himself whether a Smiths reunion is on the cards.

heavens

lol Matt

Just the occasional dogs tbf

Within certain cultures eating a dog is not distinguishable from eating a chicken or a snake. When cooked, it is food and it is well within norms. The attitude of Americans towards dogs seems rather comical to them I'm sure. This is a perfectly valid illustration of differing cultural norms.

Its weakness in the context of this discussion is that eating dogs is very far from central to the cultural identity of those societies and is relatively easy to dispense with, as there is plenty of other foods available. Religious matters are much more fraught. Orthodox jews do not simply give up eating by kosher standards in order to 'fit in'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CbFAZ2ztlE

some day you go through the rain, some day you feed on a tree frog

something 2 think abt

It's a dog-eat-dog world, y'know?

Aimless: I'd disagree. Eating anything that moves is central to mainland Chinese culture. It's why the Taiwanese discuss the total absence of birdsong in mainland China after their visits.

I just don't make a distinction between culinary habits and other elements of culture like religion. It's all just culture. If a nation wants to remain religious, or remain secular, or if it thinks cats and dogs are protected animals, it's all just cultural fictions.

i'm stiiiiiiiiill

in a dreeeeeeeeam

SNAKE EAAAAAAATERRRRRR

Gonna hide under a cardboard box now

What is with assholes claiming they can take a supposedly neutral stance while still spreading pretty statistically useless and othering ideas about others? I wonder if it might have something to do with...western chauvinism?

I just don't make a distinction between culinary habits and other elements of culture like religion. It's all just culture. If a nation wants to remain religious, or remain secular, or if it thinks cats and dogs are protected animals, it's all just cultural fictions.

― Sanpaku, Tuesday, October 20, 2020 12:01 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The offense here is not that these muslims aren’t adapting to French society, they are. It’s just that French society refuse to give them the benefit of the doubt, muslims in France see that other religions are generally better tolerated and don’t bear the same brunt of securalism. If the islamic veil is contrary to french ‘values’ and banned, why the hassidic practice of shaving women’s hair wouldn’t? If the muslim brotherhood is harrassed for espousing extremist views, why is it that the ultra-catholic can safely ally with the RN?

A better analogy using dog eating would really be that some people are allowed by the state to eat dogs and some others aren’t. No one should be asked to adapt to hate speech, and if a teacher had offensive discourses towards jews or protestants and lgbt, or whatever, it would be met with a ton more scrutiny, not freaking heroism.

^^^

A drawing of a historical figure can be hate speech, but not in every case, and certainly not just because a religious group prohibits it amongst its own followers.

2 French women of Algerian descent were stabbed by two European women in the presence of their children + were racially and Islamophobically abused prior to the attack.

This is escalating fast, with govt officials referring to French Muslims as 'the enemy within'. https://t.co/eM5sckuBWl

— Ryma Tchier 🇩🇿 (@rjtchier) October 20, 2020

Terrorist attacks.

A drawing of a historical figure can be hate speech, but not in every case, and certainly not just because a religious group prohibits it amongst its own followers.

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Wednesday, October 21, 2020 9:22 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Correct, but in this case it absolutely is. It’s not just a drawing, it’s caricatures, and it’s not just a historical figure, the person himself has spiritual meaning.

a spiritual meaning to people of that faith. He was an actual human, military leader etc.

Sure, discussing and debating the merits of Mahomet is okay, it is done in french classes. However, when you show the caricatures the only point is to transgress a spiritual rule.

Can an art teacher show a class pictures of Piss Christ?

Wow, so you don’t actually know anything about Islam?

Don’t make me tap the sign


It’s complicated. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better summary of the cartoons themselves than this old ilx post by an acquaintance:

Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari)
Posted: 8 January 2015 at 12:31:21
There's a strong possibility that many of their cartoons would have fallen foul of British laws about inciting racial and religious hatred. Many would have been equally as at home in a Neo-Nazi publication as they were in a libertarian satirical magazine. It's clearly possible to separate the belief that they have a right to publish from a belief that other organisations should republish as a point of principle, though.

xpost Explain please

Your question about piss christ would indicate that you think that’s an equivalent blasphemy. It isn’t even close.

Piss Christ of course being done by an adherent of Catholicism in a religion that doesn’t prohibit depictions of Jesus, so totally comparable.

Like we’re talking about a culture that takes the commandment against idolatry so seriously that basically none of their art, for centuries, is figurative.

I don't think it's possible to commit blasphemy to a religion you don't follow.

That’s some sovereign citizen shit right there

bs

I don't think it's possible to commit blasphemy to a religion you don't follow.

“I don’t belong to any society other than the one I imagine in my own head”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blasphemy

1a: the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God
accused of blasphemy
b: the act of claiming the attributes of a deity

for a mere man to suggest that he was … divine could only be viewed … as blasphemy
— John Bright †1889

2: irreverence toward something considered sacred or inviolable

I don't see anything about the beliefs of the person committing the act in those definitions.

Blasphemy in the sense that you are committing a sin that gets you punished within the laws of that religion--sent to hell/burned at stake etc. A non-believer has no spiritual reason to refrain from breaking a particular religion's law, only a social one.

But let's be all Webster's

What, you mean let's understand the meaning of the words we're using?

yes, the social reason not to openly engage in blasphemy is in fact what everyone has been talking about on this thread for days. Thank you for catching up.

I thought we were talking about beheadings

Can’t believe the guy with nothing useful to contribute to any thread is continuing that streak here

it's a living

Oh, now you can see my posts.

Your question was: do you have any thoughts on this?

I think you know the answer

You’re not getting enough attention at home, got it.

too much actually

just catching up on the revive and this is a really interesting discussion. feel very enlightened by some posts itt.