Summary
In October 2020, Samuel Paty, a French teacher, was murdered following a false accusation by a 13-year-old student who claimed he’d shown anti-Muslim bias. The girl had made up the story to cover the fact she had been suspended from school for bad behaviour.
In reality, Paty’s lesson on free speech included optional viewing of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but he hadn’t excluded anyone. The student’s story triggered a social media campaign led by her father, who, along with others, is now on trial for inciting hatred and connections to Paty’s attacker, an 18-year-old radicalized Chechen.
The school will be named the Samuel Paty School from next year.
I agree with the premise of this statement, although this was about someone saying “religion of peace” to mock the Muslims who say it, I don’t believe that’s bigotry, it’s just irony. Also, who knows, maybe Catholics or some other religion commit more of these acts, but it’s difficult to know through the news alone, and religion of peace is already a Muslim stereotype, fully justified or not.
For the record though, I also follow your stance about not being nice to bigots, unjustified hate should only stay in the mind, but that possibly has the risk of radicalising someone further.
And I think it’s totally fine to criticize religion, especially organized religion that instrumentalizes people for their own political gain. For the sake of free speech that has to be possible.
But this specific mockery imo comes from a very particular crowd that comments this under every article that is about a Muslim read person committing a crime. And then if you base your observation on news articles there’s unfortunately a long history of institutional racism that creates a bias in our perception through overreporting in the media and overemphasis in law enforcement.
Maybe to bring across my point, if a Zionist settler/soldier does some terroristic/genocidal, we also don’t establish a connection between their actions and Judaism as a whole, because we would be rightfully accused of antisemitism. In the same way, the actions of a few extremist individuals shouldn’t hold hostage the other 99.9% of the 1.5bn Muslims who live peacefully. I think I wouldn’t care too much and would agree that it’s just mockery if this wouldn’t be so common to read on right wing platforms. I don’t want to let any malicious actors shift the Overton window in here to where it is in most other social media.