On Friday night the text messages began pouring in to Jeanne-Helene Roy. Paris was under siege.
An associate professor in the University of Akron’s modern languages department, Roy is a scholar of French literature. But the messages came because she spent part of her childhood in France and taught for a time in Paris. She had lived very close to Le Petit Cambodge, a Cambodian restaurant which was one of the half-dozen locations where terrorists killed a total of more than 120 people.
“I was completely shocked,” she said.
After getting the news, Roy was up all night and into Saturday morning trying to track down friends in France, all of whom proved to be unharmed.
“Some people took longer than others to find,” she said. “They put a sort of roadblock on the country, but a lot of people were just trying to get out of town.”
Authorities had urged people to stay at home, But Roy said, “you don’t want to be home if it’s right by someplace where a bomb just went off.”
Roy said the events had left her “in a state of grief, of panic.”
She often goes to France and is not afraid to go back again. But she attributes part of her attitude to what she called “sort of living internationally.” She is Jewish and a French national with a U.S. passport, so she is well aware of all the places terrorism can go.
When talking about the latest Paris attacks, she more than once referenced the January killings by Islamic extremists at the offices of French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo.
“We know there are Islamic extremist forces behind this,” she said of the latest attacks. But she does not let it deter her personally and even sent her 13-year-old son to Israel for two weeks in the spring.
Instead, she is afraid of what the attacks may mean for France — and for moderate Muslims. It was not long after the attacks that the hatemongering began, especially online.
“I have many friends who are [Muslims],” she said. “I lived in North Africa. They’re normal people, so assimilated and mainstream, and a lot of this comes down on them, too.”
In France, she said, “the far right in the past decade has really been gaining ground and they’re a very outright xenophobic, anti-immigration party. It’s hard to say they’re loving this but they’re having a picnic, you know, sowing more seeds of hate.”
So the act of hate for which ISIS is taking credit is spurring hate from another direction.
“It’s very sad,” Roy said.
Rich Heldenfels is a Beacon Journal reporter. You can contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.