‘Burkini’ bans spark backlash, confrontations

France stunned by images of police making women disrobe

PARIS — Armed police surrounding Muslim women on beaches and ordering them to remove their modest clothes or leave. Calls from onlookers to “go back to where you came from.” Public humiliation and ostracism with echoes of the morals police of theocratic countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia, not a country that sees its values as a paragon of Western freedoms.

Those uncomfortable images have come to dominate the ongoing debate over identity and assimilation as France’s coastal municipalities attempt to enforce new bans on the “burkini,” the full-body bathing suit designed to accommodate Islamic modesty codes.

On Wednesday, photographs flashed across the globe on social media of French police officers forcing modestly clad Muslim women on beaches to pay fines, leave or disrobe. A storm of criticism erupted, followed by some political backpedaling a week after the nation’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, had denounced the little-worn burkini as a tool of “enslavement.” ‘Not respectful’

At least 20 municipalities on the Mediterranean, as well as several in northern France, have enacted bans against the garment on the grounds that it is not “appropriate,” “respectful of good morals and of secularism” and “respectful of the rules of hygiene and security of bathers on public beaches.”

Organizations including the Collective Against Islamophobia in France and the League of Human Rights have challenged the restrictions in local courts, but so far the rules have been upheld.

Now that the bans, which are vaguely worded, have apparently hit not just women wearing burkinis but others in a wide range of modest clothing, some French organizations and politicians that previously had said little have begun to worry that the new rules are discriminatory and unenforceable.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who met with the French Council of the Muslim Faith after an urgent request from the organization, said that the enforcement should not “stigmatize” people or “set one against another.” Social media in action

However, it was a series of photos of a similar episode in Nice that set off the social media firestorm. The photos showed four armed municipal police officers, wearing ballistic vests, approaching a woman wearing an informal turban, a large blue shirt and leggings.

The photos show them surrounding her and appearing to issue a citation and stand around as she took off her shirt. She was wearing a tank top under it. The pictures were circulated in the British newspaper The Daily Mail and later in The Guardian. Both publications said the police had told her to take off her shirt.

In response, some Twitter users posted photos of nuns wading into the water wearing their habits and wondering whether the French police “would make these ladies take their clothes off, too.”

Others shared photos of a man wearing a wet suit and a woman wearing a burkini, noting that the wet suit was deemed appropriate by the French government.