Muslim pupils ‘offended’ by Renaissance painting of nudes
Muslim pupils who expressed outrage after their teacher presented a Renaissance painting of nude women in class will be disciplined, France’s education minister has said.
Staff at the Jacques-Cartier middle school in Issou, west of Paris, refused to work on Monday, saying they feared for their safety given the recent murders of two teachers by jihadi terrorists.
Dominique Bernard was stabbed to death by a Muslim man in his school’s playground in the northern town of Arras in October.
In 2020 a civics teacher, Samuel Paty was stabbed and beheaded by a terrorist in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, 12 miles from Issou, after he showed his pupils a caricature of Mohammed in a class on free speech.
In an email sent to parents on Friday, teachers said they were exercising their right to stay away from classrooms over the “particularly difficult situation” and “an increase in cases of violence” as their daily reality.
The school’s head teacher recently asked the education ministry for more staff and resources to deal with deteriorating discipline at the school, saying that fights and death threats and threats of rape had become common among pupils.
Last week a Paris court convicted six teenagers over their role in events that led to the beheading of Mr Paty, who was their teacher at the middle school in Conflans when he was killed by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old of Chechen origin.
In another sign of school-religion tensions, the state this week said it would withdraw funding for the country’s biggest state-subsidised Muslim high school. In its teaching of Muslim ethics, the Averroes school, in Lille, was found to be violating French republican values.
On Tuesday, Jordan Bardella, leader of the hard-Right National Rally party, warned that “freedom of expression is under threat in France from an all-conquering political Islam that is imposing on our society its laws, its way of life and its prohibitions”.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/muslim-pupils-offended-renaissance-painting-143800176.html
