This by Karen Attiah is deeply irresponsible:

“The attack was a national trauma, for a non-Muslim population that fears Islam. On the other hand, many Muslims find themselves on the receiving end of discrimination and Islamophobia.” 1/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/03/macrons-centrist-tolerant-facade-is-crumbling/

She sets it up so that a beheading of an innocent man in the street was traumatic only for non-Muslims? Implying it wasn’t traumatic for Muslims as well because...their lives only make sense through the prism of Islamophobia? That manages to be insulting to everyone involved 2/

The idea that you would only be traumatized by this because “you fear Islam” is preposterous. She is actually making the damaging conflation between Muslim identity and Islamist terror that she would accuse Macron of doing.

Why qualify the experience of violence that way, in effect reinforcing the othering and exclusion of French Muslims from the nation at large?

I’m trying to imagine a foreign columnist writing about America: “The attacks on 9/11 were a national trauma—for non-Muslims...”

And just to force the new American conversation all the way into France, she actually accuses Macron of [white] “fragility” for his response to consecutive public beheadings:

And finally, after having helped spread around the world a dangerous rumor that Macron was assigning Muslim schoolchildren special tracking numbers, she flips that incredible mistake into a form victimization? C’est incroyable:

By contrast, the NYT editorial yesterday on France and terrorism did a *much* better job for an American readership: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/macron-terrorism-france.html?referringSource=articleShare