VERSAILLES
\nA school in France will be named after Samuel Paty, a teacher who worked there until he was murdered by a militant for discussing Prophet Muhammad drawings in class, local authorities said after a unanimous vote in favor of the change.
\nPaty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was stabbed and then beheaded near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on October 16, 2020 in an attack that horrified France.
\nPaty\u2019s attacker, 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoullakh Anzorov, was shot dead at the scene by police.
\nHe murdered Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
\n\u201cBy naming the Bois d\u2019Aulne school Samuel Paty College, we incarnate the French ideal, the republican hope that knowledge brings progress, by giving it the face of a humble, devoted and enthusiastic man, the face of Samuel Paty,\u201d said Pierre Bedier, president of the Yvelines department where the school is located.
\nNew name plates would be put up in the course of the current school year, his office added.
\nSome parents\u2019 associations had called for the name change to be delayed, arguing that children who were deeply shocked by the 2020 events could be traumatized all over again by revisiting those memories.
\nThey wanted the change to be delayed until after mid-2025 when all pupils who knew Paty personally will have left the establishment, to no avail.
\nThe children \u201chad to live through something unimaginable,\u201d they said in a message to the town\u2019s mayor.
\nPaty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.
\nHis killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.
\nAfter the magazine used the images in 2015, Islamist gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VERSAILLES A school in France will be named after Samuel Paty, a teacher who worked there until he was murdered by a militant for discussing Prophet Muhammad drawings in class, local authorities said after a unanimous vote in favor of the change. Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was stabbed and then beheaded near […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438136,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-438109","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n