What The New York Times missed about Samuel Paty’s beheading
I seldom seem to get real news from news channels these days. The most recent atrocity in France, for example, in which teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded in broad daylight, came to my attention not via the home page of the papers I reluctantly follow, but via a comedian on Youtube.
The clip, below, shows this comedian, Andrew Lawrence, predicting that the usual media houses would, in effect, blame Mr Paty for his own execution.
Mr Paty’s crime in the eyes of his killer was to show cartoons of Mohammed during a class discussion about freedom of speech. Soon after the lesson, angry parents besieged the school with complaints about Mr Paty’s teaching, some calling him a “hateful thug”. He was murdered in the street a few days later.
With Andrew Lawrence’s prediction in mind, I looked at the New York Times homepage to see what they’d reported. Was Mr Lawrence’s satire in danger of imitating life?
To its credit, the NYT found the honesty within itself to name the beheading (a step ahead of the Guardian’s original title on the event, which mentioned nothing about how Mr Paty had died). But it nevertheless, in my view, went rather too close to “full Andrew Lawrence” (so to speak).
Adam Nossiter, one of the paper’s award winning writers, describes Mr Paty as having “incited anger” among Muslim students. His description insinuates that teaching freedom of speech was, in part, causal for Mr Paty’s murder, rather than the deranged beliefs of his assassin. After all, as Mr Nossiter’s logic implies, if Mr Paty hadn’t incited anger, no one would have cut his head off.
I am curious, however, as to why Mr Nossiter painted the causal arrow in the direction he did.
Why, for example, had he not concluded that it was fundamentalist Islamists who had incited Mr Paty into teaching the value of free expression? Why, from this starting point, had he not concluded that the onus was on Islamist extremists to stop beheading infidels in order to eliminate the need for the infidels to show cartoons? In Mr Nossiter’s deterministic world, operating under moral anti-gravity, the onus is on freedom loving people to relinquish their freedom in order to avoid being decapitated.
The New York Times has gone to great lengths, for the most part, not to denounce those who behead people, but to denounce those who denounce those who behead people.
Mr Nossiter’s second article on the event plays to the same tune by showing more concern with the reaction to Mr Paty’s death, than with Mr Paty’s death itself:
“…politicians, especially on the right, jostled to sound the alarm against “the enemy within”
Would Mr Nossiter be more comfortable with a less rightwing phrase like “alternatively motivated friends”? Or, “acquaintances with difficult-to-meet needs”?
What do we call people who behead others, and who live in the same communities as those they behead, if not enemies? And, how, living in those same communities, are these murderers not “within”? And if cutting off peoples’ heads in the pursuit of completely reordering society to a totalitarian ideology, doesn’t qualify for raising the alarm, then what does?
In the spirit of Mr Nossiter’s earlier ontology that Mr Paty cut his own head off, he closes his piece, not by reflecting on the need for free expression, or on the terror that Mr Paty must have endured in his final moments of life, but on emphasizing that showing cartoons of Mohammed is in poor taste. He quotes one lady,
“Obviously these caricatures are wounding for Muslims…I’m not so sure about presenting these caricatures, without some sort of justification”
The above words, still faithful to Mr Nossiter’s inverted moral world, again emphasise that Mr Paty should not have “wounded” Muslims with his cartoons, and that, having done so, he, in part, provoked them into executing him. I wonder if Mr Nossiter, in a closing article about a woman who suffered rape, would publish, in closing, an interview with a man, saying, “but she was wearing a pretty short dress, wasn’t she?”
The interviewee insists also that there should be some kind of “justification” for showing such images, as if someone being murdered for showing such images is not justification enough. Mr Nossiter offers no push back on this, either to the interviewee, or in his write up thereafter. As with the earlier thought on rape: would Mr Nossiter ever claim that a woman should have a suitable justification for wearing a miniskirt?
Mr Nossiter, moreover, misses a crucial, if not the crucial facet of the story. The school that Mr Paty taught in is not located in a no-hope, violent and desolate Parisian banlieu, where we might expect to find extremism. It is, on the contrary, positioned in a modestly well-off area that serves a middle class catchment. It is in this leafy setting that a teacher found himself mobbed by angry religious fanatics for doing his job. The power held by this mob was sufficient to compel a meeting between parents, the headteacher, Mr Paty, and an official from the education authority. The meeting, if I have read between the lines correctly, culminated in a cautionary investigation into Mr Paty’s conduct.
The above events suggest two things:
- The fanatical minority in France is significant
A middle class school in France where we’d expect to find an affluent, well educated and “moderate” Muslim parent body, instead turns out to contain enough religious zealots to bend the entire school to its wishes. Assuming that the school is 10% Muslim (in other words, representative of the country at large), and given that this particular school is not unusual in any other respect, it suggests that perhaps any, or every, school in the country contains similar extremism. The wider dynamics of Mr Paty’s death, therefore, do not support the contention that political islam is confined to a tiny Muslim minority (as is often claimed by those who present Islamophobia as the real problem, and who claim that Islamic fundamentalists are too few in number to take seriously).
On the contrary, the story of Mr Paty’s school suggests that fanatics are present across a broad cross section of institutions and that, within such institutions, self identified moderates are either in silent agreement with the fanatics, or too scared to speak out against them.
Moreover, we must keep in mind that Mr Paty is only known to us because his gruesome death made news headlines. We therefore don’t know how many schools censor their teachers through witch hunts that don’t end in decapitation and don’t make headlines. Likewise, we don’t know how many teachers self censor to avoid the mob’s wrath to begin with. In the latter case, the schools would appear “conflict free” simply because they have already submitted to Islam.
2. The French establishment is complicit
The school requested (or was subjected to) the outside intervention of the French educational authority, which one might expect to take a strong stand against religious fanaticism. But, that authority, rather than protect Mr Paty, sided with the fanatics against him, which in turn sent a clear message to other teachers about what they would face if they followed Mr Paty’s example. Mr Paty died, in part, because the very people who should have protected him, instead volunteered him to the wolves. Only after his death did they find the courage to label his aggressors as they should have been labelled at the start. A retrospective action, like this, only playing out after catastrophe, reminds teachers that putting their proverbial heads above the parapet, will likely result in the literal loss of their heads.
The above two points of consideration were lost on Mr Nossiter. And the fact that they were says much about him and much about the newspaper that published him.
It is no surprise that satire should have forecast Mr Nossiter’s words.
