The first is from Hafsa Askar, vice-president of the Lille branch of the National Union of Students, who in December 2017 had tweeted “all the whites ought to be gassed, this subhuman race.”  Nothing happened to her for expressing this genocidal wish; just imagine the national uproar if a French woman had tweeted a similar sentiment about Muslims or blacks.

The very day of the Notre-Dame fire, Askar tweeted “I don’t give a damn [“je m’en fiche”] about Notre-Dame. I don’t give a damn about the history of France. Go right ahead, use my name.” Later, having received many angry responses from French people, she shut down her Twitter account.

The second is from Majdi Chaarana, former president of the Lyon branch of the Union of French Students, and now a member of its National Committee. He tweeted “Quelqu’un a des nouvelles de Quasimodo? Sa maison crame.” “Any news from Quasimodo? His house is on fire.” These displays of nastiness, written while Notre-Dame was still engulfed in flames, did not go over well among the French. My informant, an ex-Muslim now in Paris, reported:

Thousands of Muslims have demonstrated their joy [at the burning of Notre-Dame].
Numerous  French Muslims have taken to social media to express, in a half-Arab half-French  patois, their joy at this tragic event. I will let you see for yourself.

Rokhaya Diallo is a French citizen, both Muslim and black, who describes herself as a “writer, journalist, film-maker, television host” and “militant.” She’s a stout Defender of the Faith of Islam; when the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed in 2011 for mocking Muhammad (just as the paper always did with Jesus and Moses), Diallo refused to denounce the attackers and instead criticized Charlie Hebdo, demonstrating her indifference to freedom of speech. In her own television appearances and in her writings, her every third word is “racism,” and her every fourth word is “islamophobia.”

She believes that the French are inherently racist, that there is a “racism sanctioned and spread by the state,” and it is her duty to endlessly discuss race, racism, racists. Her mind is neither wide nor deep. Her spoken and written pieces usually begin in one of two ways: “As a black woman…” or “As a woman who is both black and Muslim….” She has been interviewed by Al Jazeera on “Race,Religion, and Feminism in France.” She has written a few books. You can guess their titles. That’s right: “Racism. A Guide.”

She has also published “Afro,” which consists entirely of photographs of black Parisians who are described as “unafraid” to wear Afros, as if they were in any danger; “France Belongs to Us,” (“Us” being non-whites, that is, blacks and Arabs, staking their claim to the country), “France: One and Multicultural,” and “How To Talk To Kids About Racism.” You can see Diallo on television debate shows, constantly interrupting her interlocutors, and speaking a mile a minute, never answering but merely drowning her critics in a torrent of verbiage, here and here.

She now appears regularly at the Washington Post, writing about Racism and Islamophobia. Did those at the Post who thought she would be a fresh new voice worth hearing not realize that she has only these two topics — racism and islamophobia — and has nothing new to say about either? Recent pieces for the Washington Post have been “French Islamophobia Goes Global,” and ”Don’t Let France’s World Cup Victory Erase The Issues of Black French People.”