Viral pics add fuel to debate

French burkini

NICE, France, Aug 24, (Agencies): An angry debate over a ban on burkinis in France was further stoked Wednesday as images of a veiled woman surrounded by police on a beach in Nice went viral.

The series of photos published by British media showed a woman dressed in leggings, a tunic and headscarf lying on a beach surrounded by four police officers.

At one point the woman removes her tunic — it is unclear if she was ordered to do so or did so of her own accord — while a policeman appears to write out a fine. The photos, whose source is not clear, caused a furore on Twitter, where many interpreted them as the woman being forced to undress by police.

Underneath the tunic, she was wearing a sleeveless top.

“Question of the day: How many armed policemen does it take to force a woman to strip in public?” Andrew Stroehlein, European Media Director of Human Rights Watch, wrote on Twitter.

De Haas

Scene

A comment by an activist named Sihame Assbague, retweeted more than 7,000 times, said the scene has made France “the laughing stock of the world”.

“I am so ashamed”, wrote French feminist Caroline De Haas.

The hashtag #WTFFrance was trending on French Twitter.

Nice is one of about 15 French towns which has banned the wearing of the burkini — a full-body Islamic swimsuit which covers the head — on beaches, with authorities declaring it to contravene French secular values and threaten public order.

But the vague wording of the bans, which refer to beachwear that conspicuously demonstrate a person’s religion has created confusion.

Beachgoers have been left to puzzle over whether it refers solely to head-to-toe swimwear, which some non-Muslims wear for protection from the sun, or to being fully clothed and having one’s head covered on the seashore.

A mother of two told AFP on Tuesday she had been fined on the beach in the resort of Cannes for wearing leggings, a tunic and a headscarf.

“I was sitting on a beach with my family. I was wearing a classic headscarf. I had no intention of swimming,” said the 34-year-old who gave only her first name, Siam.

France’s highest administrative court, the State Council, will on Thursday examine a request by the Human Rights League (LDH) to scrap the ban, enforced on some 15 beaches in the country.

Lower courts have supported the decision by French mayors, with a tribunal in the Riviera city of Nice — where a crowd was mowed down in July in a grisly truck attack — said the burkini could “be felt as a defiance or a provocation exacerbating tensions felt by” the community.

Complex

Burkinis vs bikinis. Beneath the clash over how to dress, or undress, on the beaches of France simmers an issue that for decades has divided the nation, and grown more complex in this time of terrorism.

At least a dozen towns have banned body-covering burkini swimwear favored by some Muslim women, the latest skirmish in a longrunning duel between some members of France’s large Muslim population and the secular establishment.

The burkini will finish in the closet at summer’s end, but the refueled debate over the French principle of “laicite,” or secularism, is unlikely to go away. And Muslims who feel they lost ground over an issue as shifting as the sand aren’t likely to forget.

The July 14 truck attack in Nice that killed 86 and the July 26 murder of a priest saying Mass in northwest France appear to have lowered the bar of fear, and tolerance.

A 22-year-old French Muslim woman living in Marseille was accosted while shopping in a grocery store with her mother by several people who had seen her on a TV news show explaining why she wears a burkini to the beach.

“’You aren’t at home here. Go home. This is fundamentalism,’” she said the group told her, recounting the event to The Associated Press, which chose not to identify her by name for her own protection.

The incident reflects just how threatening the subject of head-totoe swimwear has become, and stoked the debate on secularism — still volatile more than a century after the 1905 law on separation of church and state that established it as a principle of the French Republic.