We’re in a suburb near Paris. I’ve taken the tube all the way to the end of the line, then jumped on a bus for half an hour. I’m now standing in front of what looks like a pretty well-run secondary school, teaching kids from 11 to 15 years old. A young woman I studied with is now a teacher here. In the days following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, two boys from classes she teaches in, were placed taken into police custody.
On the day after the shooting, it was decided by the French ministry of education that a minute of silence would be observed in all secondary schools across France, to honour the victims. My friend got the news via an email sent after 8am on Thursday morning, shortly before she was to start her first class of the day.
She retells what happened next: “It was really early on, before the hostage situation and all the rest took place. I asked the kids if they knew what Charlie Hebdo was. Most of them didn’t, but one said: ‘It’s a newspaper that spoke badly about Muslims.’ So we talked about it. I was supposed to do a civics lesson on the values of the Republic, simply because it’s on the curriculum. I talked about the values of the Republic that had been threatened by the attack, I told them about laïcité [French term for “secularism”] for instance.
There are three or four Muslim kids in that class and they felt uneasy with the notion. They said: ‘Miss, if one is not supposed to discriminate [against] people because of their religion, why are we being told that what happened is our fault even though these guys are not Muslims, even though what they did puts our religion to shame?’ I let them talk because it looked like they really needed to talk. And even the kid who had said Charlie Hebdo had spoken badly about Muslims ended up saying that it wasn’t a reason to kill someone.”
Next day, my friend found out that two kids from two of her classes – boys, 14 and 15 respectively – had been taken into custody and interviewed by the police. One of them was the same kid that had said Charlie Hebdo “had spoken badly about Muslims”.
“Apparently, one kid lost it with a teacher assistant who told him off. He said Al Qaida should blow up the school. It was a similar story with the other kid. He said he agreed with the terrorists”, she explains. Because of measures dictated in the Plan Vigipirate attentats, an emergency set of instructions that come into force after terrorist attacks, school directors are obliged to report pupils for comments that could constitute “apologie du terrorisme” (“terrorism apology”: any action defending or glorifying terrorism).
“Of the two kids, one happens not to be Muslim. It’s important to make this clear, because of the implicit assumption is that he is. The other is not really the type to have political views close to jihadism. In fact, he’s not the type to have political views at all. He’s just the type to be 14”, she explains.
During those days, tensions in the school mirrored those of the entire nation: a 12 year-old girl was also temporarily excluded from school for saying in the playground, that all Muslim kids at school – and all Muslims in general – are friends with jihadists.
On 14 January 2015, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, France’s education minister, spoke at the Assemblée nationale, saying that in the wake of the shooting, 200 incidents had been reported in schools across the country. “Schools are in the front line. We will punish firmly, create educational dialogue, including with parents. Even in schools were no incidents took place too much questioning came from pupils”, she declared, labelling as suspicious the very act of discussing what had taken place .
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http://www.precariouseurope.com/lives/forced-to-be-charlie
Topic: Deadly attack on office of French magazine Charlie Hebdo