Sometimes a story does not receive the attention you think it should. Sometimes the news is too familiar or too far away to warrant a real response. There is, in any case, so much else going on and the bandwidth of our attention is limited. And so the decapitation of the teacher Samuel Paty in a small town to the north of Paris has not commanded quite the attention in this country that you might have expected.
Paty, you will recall, was targeted by a Chechen-born terrorist who had developed a murderous obsession with the teacher. His ‘crime’ had been to show his pupils a depiction of the prophet Mohammed during a lesson exploring the concepts of liberty and freedom of expression. This had provoked complaints from some Muslim parents and sparked a campaign, online and off, to have Paty sacked.
Perhaps a weary familiarity has deadened our reactions to these atrocities. Perhaps, too, the evident madness of Paty’s death is enough to render it, in some sense, so exceptional that it can be discounted or otherwise ignored.
And perhaps it also reflects the truth that a single terrorist is a less frightful, less intimidating, less repulsive figure than a gang intent on murder. Arising from nowhere, he is unpredictable and thus in some sense off the books; an assassin who cannot be anticipated. As such, it becomes easy, perhaps too easy, to shovel him into a folder marked ‘one of those things’; an example of the randomness of the universe. Fate is a capricious thing.
And so we become hardened against horror. If we are not wholly inured to it, we know it must still be kept in perspective. For most of us, most of the time, life carries on. As of course, it must. Yet this is not quite good enough either. It requires us to blink and shift our eyes from the reality of the world as it is.
Samuel Paty has been martyred and it is widely, perhaps even tritely, suggested he is a martyr for free speech.
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