According to many feminists I spoke to, PIR, co-founded by Houria Bouteldja, is both anti-Semitic and anti-feminist, and yet presents itself as progressive and leftist. “Bouteldja wrote that homosexuality is not an issue for the suburbs. She thinks Muslim women should follow Muslim men,” says Carbunar. “Bouteldja’s response to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo was to blame the victims for their fate.”

Writing about that massacre, Bouteldja declared: “I hold a grudge against Charlie Hebdo for making all of us carry the heavy burden of its inconsistency. I blame them for having missed the essential part, probably the only thing that matters: we are human, not doormats. I blame them for having stripped satire of its meaning, for directing it against the oppressed (which is a form of sadism) instead of against power and the powerful (which is a form of resistance) . . . I blame them for not having listened to these damn ‘Islamo-leftists’. I resent them for if they had heard us, perhaps we could have saved them from themselves, and maybe they would still be with us.”

“Charlie Hebdo was rooted in anarchist, extreme leftist grounds,” says Carbunar. “That’s where it came from and it was who was reading it, basically. But the Left then abandoned them after the massacre.”

Clearly, the problems of French society are complex — but the jihadis are not complex at all: they simply wish to destroy Western civilisation. Why then do some feminists apparently cast aside their principles of social justice and equality and not recognise that the Islamists who carry out such attacks simply wish to finish what the Nazis began?

I asked Thierry Shaffausser, an activist firmly situated on the hard Left, a campaigner for workers’ rights who describes himself as a feminist, what he thought was behind the Paris massacres. “There are many political responsibilities, including our own foreign politics in the Middle East,” he said. “My main fear is that violence leads to more violence and that bombing Syria will leave the local population in extremist hands. All the terrorists were French. Our country has produced its own terrorists.”

Why is that?

“France is increasingly tense and harsh with its minorities. France rejects the concept of minorities and wants to impose the idea of universalism, which means erasing differences,”  Shaffauser said. “At the same time, social inequalities increase, and the far Right is topping the polls. Daesh may provide an alternative political model for people who have been failed by the so called universalist republic.”

According to Shaffauser and others on the Left, the actions of the jihadists can be traced back to colonialism and secularism. “We have a law saying that schools must teach the positive effects of French colonialism. We have laws against wearing the veil. French Muslims are the second religion but they don’t have enough mosques in which to pray,” Shaffauser claimed.

Christine Delphy, a renowned feminist intellectual and co-founder of the journal Nouvelles Questions Feministes (New Feminist Issues) with Simone de Beauvoir in 1977, is a long-term member of the feminist organisation Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF). With such impeccable credentials one might assume that Delphy would be opposed to misogynistic practices such as the requirement for women to cover up in order to appear “modest” — but no. Delphy believes that feminists who consider the veil to be a symbol of women’s oppression are Islamophobic.