The assailant’s reasoning could not be more warped and far removed from the original issue.  Samuel Paty was teaching a course on the freedom of speech to his young students and used the cartoons as a case study; we have to note that France, since the time of Descartes, has heralded the spirit of freedom of expression – the spirit that produced Sartre, Levinas and many other leaders of thought today.

What is depressing about this tragedy is how ignorance and closed-mindedness could overpower reason and intellect. Along with the rest of the country, French Muslim leaders as well as the community the assailant came from have condemned the attack, labelling it as barbarism. This was an example of how hatred and anger could manifest into savagery without any prior understanding of what the real issue was all about in the first place; a burst of enmity based solely on hearsay – the assailant was so fixated on the fact of a teacher showing insulting pictures that he completely disregarded the context and subject matter.

What happened in France is not an isolated incident. Like COVID-19, it is a pandemic, but one that infects the mind. Its spread is propagated through the advance of technology, especially social media, and a significant lack of culture, namely responsibility and critical thinking, accompanies it.

Even with all the antihoax programs, constant public relations and government efforts against misinformation, people all around still fall for false claims, deception, fraud and the occasional “your phone number has just won a cash prize”.

The spread of any information would be useless if received by a closed mind, a mind that ignores any information except that that aligns with predisposed beliefs. Raw fervor is instantly instigated when the information received challenges that belief, however ungrounded it was.

To tackle the source of the problem, that is to ensure that the mind is open and critical from the outset, from a very young age is indeed easier said than done. In France, philosophy is taught from an early age, yet it faces some of the extreme challenges, such as the attack on Charlie Hebdo and, much more recently, on Paty.

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