A Swedish journalist who writes for the newspaper Expressen was caught celebrating the tragic fire that engulfed the iconic Notre Dame cathedral in Paris earlier this week.
Expressen‘s Alex Schulman posted an image of the cathedral on fire on Instagram with the caption “at last” using the “stories” feature which posts an image for up to 24 hours, Nyheter Idag reports.
Schulman was slammed on other social media sites for celebrating the blaze by several accounts, including that of Swedish-Assyrian journalist and filmmaker Nuri Kino who is well-known for his reporting on human rights.
“Finally? What have you longed for? That a cathedral should burn up? I hope this is a misunderstanding,” Kino wrote on Twitter. Schulman has so far not replied to Kino’s criticism, having not posted about the fire at all on Twitter.
The post comes months after Schulman had bemoaned the loss of “dignity” and “humanity” in politics after commenting on the nomination of U.S. Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Schulman is, of course, not the only one to have celebrated the fire which destroyed the spire and the centuries-old roof of Paris’s most iconic cathedral.
Harvard University art and architecture professor Patricio del Real also seemed to celebrate the destruction this week, telling Rolling Stone magazine, “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation.”
During the fire, many social media users watched the footage live through live streams on social media platforms. While many reacted with sadness and anger, well over a thousand Facebook users on one particular live stream were shown to have reacted with laughter.
Schulman was not the only journalist to welcome the event, either. Sarah Sahim, who writes for a number of publications including Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, and the Independent website, took to Twitter to say, “Notre-Dame burning is cosmic karma for all the historical sites and artefacts France destroyed and stole when being colonialist scum.”