“Love your enemies, and bless those who curse you, and do good to those who hate you.” Could it be without knowing it that SUD Education recently adopted these words from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, to demonstrate that secularism is not the adversary of religions, quite the contrary…? Last Thursday, November 16, as reported by Charlie Hebdothe teaching union organized a training course on secularism with a nuanced title (“Secularism, a misguided principle”) to which speakers who were members of the Collective against Islamophobia in Europe (CCIE) were invited.
It should be remembered that this Collective is a new version of the CCIF, the Council against Islamophobia in France, the dissolution of which was recorded by the Ministry of the Interior at the end of 2020 due to its links with Islamism and its involvement in the campaign of hatred and lynching that targeted Samuel Paty. It is therefore with a mixture of astonishment and anger that this news reached us. A month after the assassination of our colleague Dominique Bernard, a teaching union finds nothing better than to invite the collective whose ideas contributed to the assassination of Samuel Paty, and this to train in secularism…. teachers !
Since their exile across Quiévrain, the members of the CCIE know they can count on a hard core of resistance fighters in France, of which Sud-Éducation welcomes among the most ardent representatives. Because beyond the organization of this course, the union cultivates a most disturbing proximity with representatives of the indigenous, decolonial sphere, the slayer of so-called state Islamophobia. This is certainly its strictest right in our democracy, but let us feel real embarrassment when, at a time when our secular school is the target of fanatics from all walks of life, the red carpet is rolled out those who only dream of bringing it down.
Nietzsche asserted that the opposite of truth is not lies, but conviction. It appears that in Angoulême, ideology has claimed another victim: decency. SUD is indeed not its first attempt. We can thus mention the recent release of the work published by the anti-racist commission of the union To enter into anti-racist pedagogy. What could be better to fight against racism than to collaborate with Nacira Guénif, who assured in 2017 that “that the insult ‘you Jew, my apologies’, often used in Arabic ‘has passed into everyday language and does not mean the hatred of Jews.
To restore faith in the school of the Republic, what a wonderful idea to promote the ideas of Fatima Ouassak, who proposes “Let all the libraries burn if this can ease a little of the pain and sadness of the families of police victims, and all children from working-class neighborhoods.” 250 years ago, didn’t Voltaire warn us “of the horrible danger of reading?” Perhaps we should offer Fatima Ouassak a course to revise our classics?
The sowers of chaos and their useful idiots
The strategy of the CCIE ex-CCIF, like its indigenous allies or fellow travelers, is in no way about allowing the advent of a fairer society and an emancipatory Republic. It only aims to lead to its increased fracturing, by fueling the fantasy of an institutionalized Islamophobia and a liberticidal secularism created with the sole aim of persecuting French Muslims. These sowers of chaos have found an unexpected relay in certain teaching unions.
Let us remember once again: secularism is the shield that protects freedom of conscience, that of all citizens and more particularly that of children and adolescents whom the school has given itself the task of helping to grow. , to make your own choices, to form your opinions to build yourself as a free and enlightened individual.
That Islamists hate this is, after all, normal. But that knowledge providers and professors of the Republic are giving them short shrift, in the name of defending the wretched of the Earth, is much more problematic. It is a betrayal of our mission, it is spitting on the graves of our fallen colleagues.
The State and all republican institutions must absolutely mobilize and act to prevent this destructive ideological entryism. Because what happened in Angoulême will happen again and prosper. This vision of secularism presented as “open” and “accommodating” to religions aims to empty the principle of secularism of its meaning, and therefore to make it disappear.
So, let’s re-arm ourselves intellectually. Let’s deploy honest and scholarly training on secularism for teachers. Let us defend this principle which allows us teachers, and our students, to be free. We no longer have a choice, at the risk of the Republic appearing as the future vanquished of History.
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