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Commentary By Nicole Gelinas

'Burkini' Bans Show France Still Doesn't Know How to Fight Terror

Culture, Public Safety Culture & Society, National Security & Terrorism

In Iran or Saudi Arabia, religious police have long persecuted women for showing too much hair or leg. In France, religious police are now persecuting women for not showing enough hair or leg — that is, for wearing full-body bathing suits at public beaches.

“These “burkini” bans don’t fight terror. They only remind French people that France has no idea what to do about terrorism.”

These “burkini” bans don’t fight terror. They only remind French people that France has no idea what to do about terrorism.

This month, David Lisnard, mayor of Cannes, the generally relaxed Riviera town, decreed that women couldn’t wear full-length wetsuits on the beach, because people might harass such women, “disrupt[ing] public order.”

It’s late in the season to worry about what people wear seaside. The real reason for the ban is that a month ago, an Islamist terrorist attack in the nearby city of Nice killed 86.

Lisnard says “the burkini is the uniform of extremist Islamism, not of the Muslim religion.” Half a dozen other mayors followed suit, including Nice itself on Friday. One national assemblyman from northern France, Daniel Fasquelle, forthrightly noted that “there are no burkinis in Le Touquet at the moment,” but said he didn’t want to be “caught off-guard.”

Lisnard and Fasquelle are conservatives. But Manuel Valls, France’s socialist prime minister, agrees with the bans. He said beaches “must be preserved from religion.” He also ruminated that the burkini isn’t “a new type of bathing suit, a fashion,” but “a political project that goes against society” and that forces the “subservience of women.”

The case against burkinis is flimsy. There’s no evidence anyone wearing a burkini to the beach, or anyone forcing a woman to wear a burkini to the beach, has carried out any of the past two years’ terror attacks.

To the contrary: in Nice and Orlando, recent terrorists were deserted by wives chafing at control.

Sure, some Muslim men doubtless force or pressure women to cover up, restricting freedom even though they don’t create a terror risk. But clumsy political diktats won’t change their minds. Instead, their wives and daughters will stay in the house.

And not all women who choose to conform to an extreme conservative culture are repressed. “I have worn the hijab for 10 years,” said Egyptian beach-volleyball player Doaa Elghobashy at the Rio Olympics. “It doesn’t keep me away from the things I love to do.”

Maybe Elghobashy is so repressed that she doesn’t realize it. But it’s risky for a government to disbelieve what adult women who aren’t in any apparent harm actually say.
Especially at the beach, where people have lots of reasons to wear what they wear, or don’t wear.

Nigella Lawson, a non-Muslim British chef, has worn a burkini to protect her skin from the sun. Some women don’t like their stomachs, or their legs. Some women like their bodies, but don’t want men staring at them.

One can take the secularists’ theory to absurd lengths. If we don’t all go topless, have the terrorists won?

French politicians who are worried that women aren’t baring enough breast or thigh are themselves revealing something else: they have no idea what to do about the terrorist risk. As pols want to free Muslim women’s bodies, they are severely restricting the movements of everyone.

Just last week, Paris canceled its annual food-truck festival — at least the seventh major event to be axed this summer because of security risks. Want to walk underneath the Eiffel Tower as part of your commuting or exercise routine? You now must go through a lengthy security cordon just to get near it.

The cordon only traps people in metal barriers as they wait, and makes them more vulnerable to attack. While you’re in line, you can read the prohibition against “racist” or “violent” literature in this once-public space.

This would be like if New York forced people to walk through metal detectors and have their bags X-rayed to walk from the Fifth Avenue side of the outdoor Rockefeller Center plaza to the Sixth Avenue side, and told them what kind of books they could carry on their walk, too.

Even as politicians make a show about giving people free movement on the beach, people have lost their free movement on the streets.

No wonder people booed Valls at a ceremony for the Nice victims.

Some people may think Muslims wear too many clothes. But like the fabled emperor, the political class has no clothes on when it comes to protecting French people from attack.

This piece originally appeared at the New York Post

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here

This piece originally appeared in New York Post