“When I heard about the Charlie Hebdo attack I was frightened to go into school. One of the teachers laughed when she saw me and said, ‘Are you pleased they got what they deserved?’ I felt sick.”

Linda Weil-Curiel is an expert on FGM and an outspoken critic of Islamism and the cultural relativism of the Left. She commented: “Everyone starts off by saying, ‘Let’s not get confused, what Islamic State is doing is not Islam, it’s barbarism. Islam is not that, it’s peace and love and everything.’ But it is not, of course. And nobody will acknowledge the truth.

“Because of the veil, the feminist movement became divided. Some said it’s their freedom if they want to wear the veil. After all they’re former colonies and the French cannot impose their views on all these populations. The new generation says it is freedom to wear the veil.

“The generation of Muslims who settled here in the Fifties and Sixties were  assimilated, and the children were raised like any French child. Nobody asked for halal food or swimming pools where the girls were separated from men and boys. But after the Islamic revolution under Khomeini we have had a sort of Islamic revival among young people who were intoxicated by Islamism.

“As the suburbs became more turbulent, the elders were given power to bring social order. Then the imams began to have influence within neighbourhoods and on social issues.”

Annie Sugier, president of the Ligue du Droit International des Femmes (International League of Women’s Rights), disagrees on issues relating to Islam and the role of women within it, though LDIF aims to promote universal rights for women whatever their culture or religion.

“It is always violent people who create the agenda. It is happening now, it happened with Hitler and Stalin, with Napoleon, with all these people. The first wave of feminism was destroyed in the end by the fascists,” says Sugier. “Now the third wave will be destroyed by Islamists imposing their agenda.”

For Ana Pak, who escaped the Islamists ruling Iran, those who capitulate to these murderous fundamentalists cannot claim to be progressive. “Those who defend Islamism are not feminists at all,” she says, “because feminism means the emancipation of women from patriarchy, marriage, religion and any of the chains that keep us constrained.”

If French feminists could see Islamism as a reactionary, anti-feminist ideology rather than the cri de coeur of the oppressed they might be able to do more for the real victims — the women, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who suffer under Islam or are killed by terrorists.

“Islamophobia was a word that was invented and used by Islamists to shut down debate, and prevent people from being liberated,” says Ana Pak. “It is used against Muslim women. How can this be sane?”

Meanwhile, feminists and others on the Left in France and elsewhere in Europe — the very people that should be ensuring Islamist fascists can never come to power — instead find ways to defend them.