If you wanted to set a precedent, you wouldn’t go about it any differently!
To lose a sense of proportion, you wouldn’t go about it any differently!
When you want to exploit a situation for personal or political reasons, you wouldn’t go about it any differently!
Each of the adults involved, directly or indirectly, did their job, certainly, but according to personal, professional, or even political goals. Everyone seems right from their point of view. But, in fact, everyone is wrong!
Can you imagine what must have been going through the mind of this 8-year-old kid who sees all these “serious” people bustling around him, asking him in a more or less inquisitive tone whether he did, or did not, say, “I am with the terrorists”? And if so, why did he say it?
What if we let all these adults play like kids and moved on to something else?
As for the 8-year-old kid, he might think: “With adults like that…”
Just a reminder: The National Observatory against Islamophobia has stated that “the fight against radicalization should not give rise to collective hysteria.”
The facts as reported by various local press titles:
The day after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, French schools were called to observe a minute of silence. The student in year 3 refused to participate, stating to his teacher: “I am with the terrorists.”
Statements that the child confirmed during an informal hearing Wednesday at the police station in his neighborhood in Nice, where he was summoned with his father, following a report made by the school principal.
Their lawyer, Me Sefen Guez Guez, “shocked” by the summons, sparked controversy by tweeting excerpts of this hearing on his personal account (under the pseudonym S. Ibn Salah) on Wednesday.
The Minister of Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, defended the school on Thursday. “Not only was this team right to behave in this manner, but their follow-up work, both educational and social, is a useful effort,” she declared from the courtyard of the Élysée.
On the occasion of the minute of silence, “the child made inadmissible remarks in class and a ’cause for concern’ was forwarded to the child protection unit,” specified the Nice school district on Thursday. The primary school principal also filed a complaint against the father for “intrusion” into the establishment and for “threatening behavior.”
“The school’s educational role was not carried out,” accused Me Guez Guez on Thursday, who went to the central police station in Nice with the father and the child to file a complaint against the school principal. He accuses him in particular of having hit the boy’s head against a board and slapped him.
The father firmly defended the little boy. “He responded impulsively, he says he doesn’t know, he apologizes.”
“We summoned the child and his father to try to understand how an 8-year-old boy could be led to make such radical statements,” explained Marcel Authier, the departmental director of public security.
The hearing did not reveal the origin of these statements. According to the French Association of Youth and Family Judges, such a procedure of summoning a child for an informal hearing is not abnormal.
“An eight-year-old child making such statements is in danger. The teaching staff and the police did exactly what they were supposed to do,” reacted UMP deputy Eric Ciotti, president of the General Council of the Alpes-Maritimes and head of child protection, during an urgently convened press conference on Thursday.
