French Blairite government divided on ‘burkini’ ban

Woman bathing in 'burkini', ANP photo

Burkini ban divides French government

Today, 00:32

The French Minister of the Interior Cazeneuve does not believe in banning burkinis. In an interview with the newspaper La Croix, he said that such a prohibition does not work, is contrary to the constitution and only increases tensions in the population.

Cazeneuve thus goes against the opinion of Prime Minister Valls, who believes that banning non-revealing clothes on the French beaches is in fact a good thing.

Last week, the French Council of State provisionally stopped the burkini ban in the southern French resort Villeneuve-Loubet. The highest administrative court in the land ruled that the ban violates the freedom of religion and individual freedom.

Sarkozy launches French presidential bid based on anti-Muslim hysteria: here.

In a fundamental attack on freedom of religion, a French Muslim woman was detained and fined by police solely because she was wearing a Muslim headscarf. Siam, a former flight attendant from Toulouse who was vacationing with her family in Cannes, was on the beach when police received a call criticizing the “ostentatious” character of her headscarf: here. As for the French witchhunt against women’s clothes supposedly being ‘secularist’, a person defending the police action against that headscarf-wearing woman shouted: ‘Here we are all Catholics!’ (Would that person also have agreed if police had attacked a Roman Catholic nun wearing nun’s clothes?)

While the liberal democracy of Israel tells women to get dressed, that of France undresses them. Both outcomes represent a defeat for women and their freedom of movement in the public sphere. Allison Kaplan Sommer, Aug 29, 2016 7:33 PM: here.

The rise of Islamophobia in France grew out of elites’ need to manage working-class resistance, by Nick Riemer: here.