Friday April 5, a 15-year-old teenager died after being attacked by a gang of teenagers in Viry-Châtillon (Essonne). Tuesday April 2, a 13-year-old girl, called a “kouffar” (“disbeliever” in Arabic), was beaten up in front of her school in Montpellier. At the end of March, the principal of a high school resigned after receiving death threats when he asked a student to remove her veil. At the same time, threats of attack flooded the mailboxes of some 170 educational establishments. A series of incidents which took place in just a few weeks in French public schools, and which went beyond the borders of France.
The Austrian daily Kurier mentions in particular the “brutal violence” which falls on “French students”. In Italy, La Repubblica draws a parallel with Finland, where a shooting in a college near Helsinki left one dead and several injured in early April. And headline: “Shootings, fights and ambushes: from France to Scandinavia, violent adolescents are scary”. The transalpine newspaper is alarmed by “increasingly uninhibited and uncontrolled violence”. Same story with the Swiss channel ROI which evokes “unbridled violence which frightens and questions”.
The school, which has become “dangerous”
In an article published Sunday April 7, El Mundo goes even further, affirming that “the school, pillar of the French Republic […] has become a dangerous place, where students and teachers feel threatened.” Like part of the foreign press, the Spanish newspaper cites the name of Samuel Paty and mentions the assassination of Dominique Bernard last October. Before to summarize: “Teaching is a risky profession in France.”
The day after the resignation of the principal of the Maurice-Ravel high school, the New York Times depicts in particular a France “deeply marked by the assassination of two teachers by Islamist extremists in recent years”, where “the question of the encroachment of Islam in the public school system remains an extremely sensitive subject”.
A speech which echoes the cry of warning launched by Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator : “French schools are giving in to the Islamist threat.” For the British writer, who has denounced the rise of Islamism in Western countries for many years, the culprits are to be found among “the imbecile progressives (who) continue to show their support for Islamic outfits.” And to give the example of a 2021 campaign, funded by the EU, which promoted the headscarf. At the end of October, Gavin Mortimer called, in The Expressthe executive to “pull itself together to better defend republican principles”.