21st Century Wire says…
The ‘Burkini Ban.’ Whatever the French state’s proclivities towards knee-jerk reactionary politics might be, having French police force Muslim women to remove their clothes on a public beach is definitely NOT the right answer.
Far from being a dramatic climax to this conversation, it’s only the beginning…
If she is truly keen to diffuse the current situation, the Muslim female author featured below, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, might do well to look at little closer into the string of so-called ‘terrorist’ and ‘ISIS-inspired’ attacks across Europe this year. Are they all as advertised? Nonetheless, she’s made many important points in her essay – many of which are the fundamental building blocks of civil liberties in a modern nation state. She also nails home the residual cause and effect dynamic set in motion by French colonialism. Sure, French mainstream ‘intellectuals’, leisurely journalists and political geniuses can ignore these important arguments, as they are now, but only at their peril.
It’s crucial to note here that one of the main exhibits held-up by the French state and its reactionary media – to justify the emergence of the newer, nastier version of itself, now permanently suspended in a ‘state of emergency’ – is the notorious Nice Attacks. The only problem with this pop-up mainstream narrative is that all available evidence indicates that the French authorities not only had foreknowledge of the alleged ‘terror’ suspect, but they also stood down in the moments before the attack – effectively letting the chaos ensue on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Later we learned how the truck driver cum-terrorist whom authorities had attributed the incident to was hardly Islamist material, in fact, quite the opposite. According to multiple media reports and witnesses, the Tunisian driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was described in the media as “a violent loner who liked to drink, lift weights and go salsa dancing,” and was subsequently revealed to be a career criminal, prolific thief, drug addict and bisexual sex adventurer who was a regular on the local dating app scene – and was completely on the police radar, and had no previous indications of radicalization – making the official story even more improbable. Bouhlel fits the ideal confidential police informant profile, or the ideal patsy in a private contractor-run operation.
In other words: French security services would do well to investigate its own police informant cells and ‘security drills’, rather than infuse this newly contrived ‘Clash of Civilizations’ narrative with a level of toxicity that will almost certainly provoke a real civil war in Europe. Or, perhaps that what their masterplan to begin with.
Isn’t it funny how western feminists, by subscribe to the mindless media-driven group think of ‘regime change’ in Syria – are by default backing the very same jihadist takeover of Syria that we saw in Libya. That wouldn’t be very good for the millions of women in Syria. Neither is forcing Muslim women to disrobe in European public spaces. You see, basic logic is now completely abandoned by politically confused and ill-informed feminists and ‘left’ activists in the west.
Oh, and by the way… what good is it for the French to be up in arms about women wearing burkini swimming apparel – when the French government itself, along with NATO member states, have been supplying weapons and training to listed Islamist Terrorist organizations in Syria (French President François Hollande admitted this already in a Le Monde interview)?
Time to wake up. If you haven’t already worked it out, this sequence of high profile ‘terror’ events and the corresponding vapid media commentaries are being weaponized to trigger a hyper-reactionary culture designed to manipulate and divide factions of the public against each other.
On it’s present trajectory, this current situation in France, and Europe, can only get worse…
Dear white people of France: being forced to undress wasn’t exactly the liberation I was longing for
.
Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan
The Independent
I’ve been putting off writing this post. I was hoping I wouldn’t need to, hoping I wouldn’t bother. Hoping that I’d see outrage fill people’s timelines and all the usual feminist social media spaces so I wouldn’t feel forced to write something, anything, explaining my outrage.
But here I am. Here I am writing about feminism and Muslim women again and namely responding to the deafening, choking, claustrophobic silence from White Feminists.
What we are seeing in France is part of the continued criminalisation of being Muslim. Particularly the criminalisation of visibly Muslim people – particularly Muslim women. What we are seeing is a vulgar display of White Feminism codified and legislated by the state. We’re seeing women being forced to conform to something held up as ‘liberty’ with no irony at all. Women are coerced – with the threat of force – to take off their burkinis at the beach. A Muslim woman was ordered off the beach in Cannes and fined for simply wearing her headscarf. We know already, of course, that the French implemented the ‘burqa ban’, we know that headscarves ‘and other religious symbols’ are banned in state schools and there have been multiple incidents of school-girls being forbidden from wearing ‘long skirts’ to school – not when they’re worn as a fashion statement, but when they’re worn by Muslim girls because then it suddenly becomes a ‘religious symbol’.
Cannes, in France, has banned the burkini because it “could risk disrupting public order while France was the target of terrorist attacks” and because burkinis are “not respectful of [the] good morals and secularism” of France.
We’re going to need some space to unpack this one, bear with me.
So first of all, correct me if I’m wrong but I thought this was a pretty black and white thing we feminists were agreed on. An article of faith if you will: Thou Shalt Leave Women To Do As They Will With Their Own Bodies. France, often posturing itself as the beacon of feminism because apparently feminism was born of the French Revolution (don’t know if all the working-class women and women in the colonies heard about that liberation, sorry guys!) should surely know this article more than most. And yet, here it is – the French state itself – forcing women to wear or not wear certain clothes! Incredible!
Recently I saw a spate of articles about the hijab in Iran. In Iran women are forced to wear the hijab by law and can be publicly admonished, fined or even arrested for ‘inadequate’ covering. Now, I’m sure many more feminists – and I’m guessing particularly those in Europe – would be quick to agree this is Not Okay. Surely the best thing is for women to be free to choose to dress however they want – be it wearing a headscarf or a miniskirt. Yet, it seems that oppression is only when brown men tell you how to dress; when white men do it it’s called liberation…
Now, if you’re about to comment saying, “Dear me TBH I’m afraid its just not that simple”, you’re bang-on-the-money absolutely spot on correct it’s not.
WATCH: UK TV talk show clip on burkini ban.
And that brings me to my second point. The bans in France are specifically targeted at Muslim women. The idea that the burkini could be linked to terrorism somehow and therefore a ban on it justified seems ludicrous, and yet this is the stage we’ve reached. The extreme policing of Muslim women’s dress is somehow an acceptable ‘anti-extremism’ measure. More than that, Muslim women are posited always as victims of their dress who require liberation from the French authorities. And here’s the catch: this French desire to liberate Muslim women and the positing of Muslimness as ‘oppositional’ to Frenchness has a long and bloody history.
Oh yes, here I go again.
French colonies in North Africa were the ones with large Muslim populations, but also the ones with some of the longest and bloodiest battles for independence – see Algeria. That sort of history and that sort of war is not a good start for making you the experts on legislating on Muslim dress. In fact, you might argue that it gives you a slightly biased picture of history and one that’s full of images of you battling your unruly Muslim subjects who for years you have depicted as the very opposite ‘sorts of people’ as you are and therefore as savage, animalistic, backwards, ignorant, male despots and female victims. So, when, from the 1960s and 70s and 80s those same colonies, now independent, saw people begin to migrate to France – because oh, I don’t know maybe there’d been a long history of war and repression which kind of made opportunities not so great over there – this long background of antagonism and racism can’t have disappeared…
Continue this article at The Independent
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