Such targeting and marginalisation can only lead to increased religious intolerance; as the presidential elections of 2017 loom and debates surrounding Islam in France become ever-more intensified, France needs to find a way of moving towards a more inclusive model of national identity.
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Valls saw an “incredible reversal” in comments that he said presented the burkini as “an instrument of women’s liberation”, citing one respondent who said her sister “could finally play with her children on the beach instead of sitting in the shadow”. “We stand by the article”.
The Corsican town of Sisco introduced the ban last month after a reported brawl on the beach, which kicked off after a woman in a burkini was photographed by a stranger.
One said: “French Muslim women would be justified to request asylum in the United States. given how many persecutions we are subjected to”. “I am afraid of having to wear a yellow crescent on my clothes one day, like the Star of David for Jews not so long ago”.
A burkini ban was enacted by the village officials on August 16.
The article, which appeared on Friday, painted an “unacceptable image of France because it is false”, Valls wrote in the French-language online edition of the Huffington Post.
“What I contest with the greatest vigour is that the journalist gave the floor to women of the Muslim faith, claiming that their voices are somehow muzzled, to portray France as a country that oppresses them”, Mr Valls wrote.
In his Huffington Post column, Valls offered an impassioned defence of France’s secular values and the bans on the burqa and burkini, saying they were above all carried out in the name of gender equality.
A woman wearing a burkini, a full-body swimsuit designed for Muslim women, at a beach in Tunisia on August 16. “It is a provocation by radical Islam which is on the rise and which wants to impose itself in the public sphere”. This was the question, absolutely not anecdotal, that was at the center of the debate around the burkini and the burqa.
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“We are fighting for the freedom of women who should not have to live under the yoke of a chauvinist order”. It does not need to be hidden to protect against some kind of temptation.
