French Principal Retires After Facing Death Threats Over Headscarf Incident

There’s a big story in France right now about a high school principal who decided to retire after being sent multiple death threats online by angry Islamists. The principal in question recently had some sort of altercation with a group of female students wearing head scarves in school. Since 2004, France has banned the headscarf and other religious head coverings under its policy of laïcité, or secularism. There are various stories about exactly what happened in this instance.

Officials say the incident occurred on Feb. 28 at the Lycée Maurice-Ravel when the school’s principal asked three students to remove their head scarves on school grounds. Two of the students complied, but a third refused, causing an “altercation,” according to the Paris prosecutor’s office…

The student told investigators that the principal had pushed her and hit her arm, but the Paris prosecutor’s office said that a complaint she had filed accusing the principal of assault had been dropped over a lack of evidence. The principal filed a separate suit accusing the student of intimidating a public official, the prosecutor’s office said…

French officials have not publicly identified the principal or the student. The regional education authority for Paris said that the student dropped out of the school shortly after the incident.

Obviously the people sending death threats believe the student’s version of events and that is worrisome to a lot of people in France because it’s reminiscent of what happened in 2020 when a school teacher named Samuel Paty showed Charlie Hebdo cartoons in his class. Rumors were spread about Paty by a 13-year-old. Those claims turned out to be false (she wasn’t in class that day) but they inspired other students to track Paty’s movements and to provide that information to an Islamic extremist to murder and beheaded the teacher. The six teens involved were charged and convicted for their part in the slaying last year.

Also last year another French school teacher was stabbed to death by another Islamic Extremist. So this is why death threats against teachers in France are taken so seriously. Already, three people connected to the threats have been arrested:

The Paris prosecutor’s office said it had opened an investigation into the death threats and “cyber-harassment” faced by the principal. Three people have already been arrested, and one of them will face trial next month, the prosecutor’s office said.

Partisans on the left and right seem to agree that the principal’s resignation under threat is bad news.

“We can’t accept it,” Boris Vallaud, the head of the Socialist deputies in the National Assembly lower house, told television broadcaster France 2, calling the incident “a collective failure”.

Marion Marechal, the granddaughter of far-right patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen and a popular far-right politician herself, spoke on Sud Radio of a “defeat of the state” in the face of “the Islamist gangrene”.

Maud Bregeon, a lawmaker with President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, also took aim at “an Islamist movement”.

“Authority lies with school heads and teachers, and we have a duty to support this educational community,” Bregeon said.

Meanwhile, an activist group called the Collective for Countering Islamophobia in Europe has released a video of the student telling her version of the story, though her face is blurred. The subtitles are in French but you can turn on auto-translate and get English subtitles. She claims the principal hit her in the arm but, again, this claim has been investigated and dropped by prosecutors so take it with a big grain of salt.

Here’s a France 24 report about the resignation. The Prime Minister announced yesterday that the government would sue the student.