Today is the five-year anniversary of the murder of French teacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist terrorist immigrant.

You may not remember Paty’s name, if you ever even heard it. His case got limited attention in the U.S., probably owing to a general lack of interest in what most consider “foreign news.” The larger reason, of course, is that the story of Paty’s murder is the kind media elites in the Anglosphere are eager to keep away from public scrutiny.

For readers adept in French, there is a long and minutely detailed treatment of Paty’s case on the Radio France website. If your French is limited or nonexistent, the Wikipedia page, which now includes some of the essential details missing in the initial reporting, is also worth a look. It illustrates, in terrifying detail, all that is going wrong in the West’s response to the threat of Muslim immigration and Islamism.

Paty’s murderer, a Chechen refugee named Anzorov, frequented online jihadi communities and posted terrorist threats online. All of this was known to French security services, but they took no action to stop him. After police shot and killed Anzorov at the crime scene, hundreds of supporters gathered at his funeral to chant “Allahu Akbar!” in unison.

The terrorist refugee discovered Paty through online slanders and lies posted by a parent of one of Paty’s students, who claimed that Paty slandered Muslims in his class. The student in question, it turns out, did not even attend the class during which she alleged Paty made those statements. In fact, Paty never slandered Muslims. He did precisely the kind of thing a good teacher should do: he used the controversy surrounding the publication of irreverent Mohammed cartoons in the French periodical, Charlie Hebdo, to discuss the parameters and complexities of free speech in France.

The publication had lampooned Islam in precisely the same way that it approached sacred figures of Judaism and Christianity and was in complete compliance with French laws regarding freedom of expression. (There had never been anything approaching a violent response by French Jews or Christians to such caricatures.) Paty, it should be noted, gave students the choice to opt out of the discussion if they preferred not to engage with it.

An important question extending from these facts is almost never entertained by the media and intellectual classes: If a Muslim student in France feels so personally offended by the country’s culture of free expression that she and her parents are driven to materially aid murderers, doesn’t this suggest they have not successfully assimilated to the culture in which they live?

We never trouble ourselves to make similar claims regarding offenses suffered by French Jews and French Christians to similar poking from the same irreverent secularist sources. Anyone who knows anything about the history of France knows how long and deep the atheist critique of religion runs there. Voltaire and Diderot wrote many lines more witheringly critical of Christianity than anything Charlie Hebdo or any other French periodical has written about Islam. And yet somehow, French Jews and Christians never produced any zealot murderers like Anzorov. Perhaps there is something different about Islam?

The school where Paty worked did almost nothing to protect him. The father of the student who lied was at some point contacted by Anzorov, and the two men had several conversations of unknown content before the murder. When Anzorov showed up in the area in search of Paty, several Muslim students helped him to locate and identify Paty.

These details testify to a terrifying fact: Anzorov was but the deadly tip of an Islamist iceberg in France. He was the one most directly responsible for the murder, to be sure, but he was crucially and materially aided in essential ways by a local community of extremist Muslim immigrants. They also desired to see Paty physically harmed or dead and who evidently neither understood nor respected French law and French culture. A reasonable person might well ask what place such people can have in France.

If Anzorov had been apprehended rather than shot and killed, Paty’s family would have been treated to the dreadful experience of the monster who beheaded their loved one living out the rest of his life in prison with three squares a day and a warm bed, as France does not have the death penalty. That’s assuming he would not have received a lighter sentence, which is not infrequent in murder cases in France.

The accomplices to Paty’s murder were treated to mere slaps on the wrist instead of being punished in a fashion befitting their crimes. That France did not have the will to punish them appropriately is an indication, not only of the spinelessness of too many of the people running the show there, but of their refusal to recognize that they are in a cultural struggle against Islamism. If France does not wake up promptly to this danger, its future is bleak. In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, the novelist gave a perfectly plausible fictional account of how Islamism could destroy the land of Abelard, Pascal, and Montaigne.

The self-satisfied leftists who might laugh at Houellebecq’s account and accuse him of exaggeration should learn the full details on Paty’s case. Then they should visit a few of the many neighborhoods in Paris and other French cities where large numbers of Muslim immigrants dwell. They should take note of how many of them share the views of those who aided Paty’s murderer. It might be harder to sustain their mocking attitude in the face of those details.