Here are a few instructive tweets from members of the French Student Union:
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 [tweet] 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.”
After the Notre-Dame conflagration, Diallo, who is always so free with her comments, tweeting away like nobody’s business, and appearing on all sorts of talk shows, never listening to her interlocutors, always cutting them off to make some inane claim, had no comment to offer about the fire. Her last tweet about the country which has given her so much, and which she so clearly despises for its supposed “racism,” was “Nique la France” (“Fuck France”). That sums up Diallo’s appeal to all the malcontents, both Muslims and anti-white racists, who take whatever they can from the French government and French people, and who, in return, offer only resentment, contempt, and hatred. No comment from someone who always has a comment is itself telling: Notre-Dame is not her concern. It’s not part of her France. Its destruction doesn’t move her. Days later, Rhokaya Diallo still has yet to express a syllable of sympathy.
So that’s how many French Muslims have reacted to the partial destruction of Notre-Dame. Some of them have been cheering the news, in tweets using the smiling emoji to express their happiness. Some Muslims who are leaders in local chapters of the Union of French Students have expressed not solidarity with, but contempt for, both the French, and for France. “I don’t give a damn about France,” tweeted Hafsa Askar, Vice-President of the Lille branch of the Union of French Students. “I don’t give a damn about French history.” Yet she complains about being made to feel that she is not part of France. And she added in another tweet that “jusqu’a les gens ils vont pleurer pour des bouts de bois vs. aimez trop l’identite français aloes qu’on s’en balek objectivement c’est votre desire de petits blancs.” Roughly translated: “[I don’t give a damn about France] and that includes the people who cry over sticks of wood you love your French identity while we don’t give a shit objectively it’s just your lower-class-white delirium.”
The Notre-Dame fire, which touched so many in the Western world, offered a perfect opportunity for Muslims in France to express sympathy for, and solidarity with, the French people, to show that they could identify with the supreme symbol of French civilization, and to mourn the damage caused by the fire. Instead, many Muslims chose to celebrate online the destruction, with thousands tweeting their pleasure, along with smiling emojis to emphasize the point. Some even suggested the fire was retribution for jokes having been made about Mecca. Then there were the Muslim officers of the SNEF, the Union of French Students, who went beyond mere expressions of pleasure, and made jokes about the church in flames, calling it Quasimodo’s place. and loudly proclaming that they didn’t care about the church, or France, or the French, whose sorrow was mocked as the hysteria of lower-class whites (“petits blancs”). This could have been a moment for Muslims, beyond a handful, to demonstrate fellow feeling; instead, it was a display of Muslim resentment and hostility and Schadenfreude that will not, in France, be forgotten.