StraightTalk - The Batley Grammar School Incident

"It has been five months since Samuel Paty, a French schoolteacher, was brutally murdered by an Islamist terrorist. His killer, an 18-year-old Jihadist who spent his days chatting with ISIS terrorists in Syria, had never met Paty. Paty came onto his radar after a controversy erupted about a lesson in which he showed his class cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed from the Charlie Hebdo magazine. He was attempting to explain France’s secular traditions, and why those cartoons had led to an earlier terrorist attack on the magazine’s offices. For his attacker, this was an affront too far. While it is considered blasphemous in Islam to depict Allah or the prophet in pictorial form, France is not an Islamic country that adheres to universalist demands by a section of its population. That did not save Monsieur Paty however. His killer determined that he must die for a sin against his religion. In Europe. In 2020. Paty’s murder unleashed a wave of national conversation about the need to uphold France’s liberal traditions. President Macron seized on the moment by passing laws designed to protect France from the minority within the French Muslim community who sought to impose their religious will on the rest of the nation, their fellow Muslims among them. Macron was rightly praised around the world for his approach. Alas, the UK did not have to wait long to face a similar situation. In an almost identical scene, earlier this week, a teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire showed his students what is believed to have been a Charlie Hebdo cartoon. Yesterday, a loud mob of protesters descended on the school to demand action against the teacher. The scene was such that the school was forced to delay start times for the safety of its pupils. Despite the action being in breach of COVID rules, the police refused to arrest the ringleaders or shut down the protest. In contrast, just two Saturdays ago, women who gathered for a vigil on Clapham Common to honour the memory of the murdered Sarah Everard were forcibly removed by a police force, albeit in a different part of the country. Incredibly, the school invited some of the group inside, where the protestors laid out their demands: Fire the teacher, ban any such materials, and issue an apology for the affront to the Muslim community. In an unconscionable act of cowardice, the school caved in without even conducting a proper investigation into what happened. An apology has been issued. The materials banned from ever being shown again. And the teacher suspended pending an inquiry to determine his fate. In France, the reaction of many was to tackle those who sought to demand that wider society bends to their whims. The UK on the contrary appears to be engaging in the soft bigotry of low expectations, although it is encouraging that both the Secretaries of State for Education and Communities have decried a situation where the school has had to move to online learning today to avoid continued protests and the teacher has been placed under police protection. When we teach our children about the horrors of Nazi Germany, we do not shy away from showing them contextualised propaganda images of appalling anti-Semitic cartoons. We do it not to mock Jews or because we agree with the cartoons, but because we want to engage in a broader discussion about what is and what is not acceptable in our societies. There is no carve-out for Jewish children who are offended. And there are no protests, demands for firings, or mealy mouthed apologies. And this despite the images of the 1930s ending up in the horrors of the Holocaust. It is time to take a similarly adult attitude about the cartoons conversation. If the teacher in question had shown a cartoon to denigrate Muslims, then there is no place for that in British society. But if, as seems more likely – and there have been no suggestions to the contrary – he was utilising it as a tool for discussion on the boundaries of free speech and religious objections, that is another matter entirely. Such an activity is legitimate in the context of debates about the roles of religion and the state in contemporary Britain. If we are to live in a genuinely equal and inclusive society our call should be simple, and must be shared by a cadre of our fellow Muslim citizens proclaiming: 'yes I’m offended by this as a religious Muslim - but I accept that in a modern liberal democracy I cannot impose my offence on the rest of the population and understand that the context, rather than absolutes, matters.' A little bit of nuance will go a lot further in bridging divides than angry responses of the Batley variety."