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	Workers Vanguard No. 1096	23 September 2016

France

Down With Burkini Ban!

PARIS—Even the beaches have become a battleground for the frenzied anti-Arab racism of the French bourgeoisie. The rulers’ scapegoating of Muslim immigrants and their children for the ills of capitalist society was further fueled in July by the criminal attack in Nice by an alleged supporter of Islamic terrorism, which killed 86 people (see statement by the Ligue Trotskyste de France reprinted in WV No. 1093, 29 July). This summer, a number of French coastal cities and resorts have decreed a local ban on the burkini, a swimsuit covering the body except the face and feet and mostly used by Muslim women (but also by Orthodox Jewish women and others).

It started in the town of Cannes on the French Riviera, where on July 28 the local mayor from the rightist Republican Party decreed a ban on swimsuits violating “the principle of secularism.” A similar ban on the burkini was decreed at Villeneuve-Loubet near Nice airport on August 5. A week later, a nasty brawl took place in Sisco (Siscu), a small town in Corsica, between families of North African origin and other local residents, apparently over the use of a tiny beach. Three days later, Sisco’s Socialist Party (SP) mayor decreed a ban on the burkini—although no burkinis had been sighted by anybody on the contested beach.

Throughout France, swarms of local cops descended on beaches to levy fines and force women to remove their clothes or go home. While most of the mayors banning the burkini are on the right fringe of French bourgeois politics, some are members of the ruling SP. SP prime minister Manuel Valls has enthusiastically championed the racist, exclusionist, anti-woman bans. The government had already banned the headscarf in public schools and fought to extend this discrimination into the private sector (see WV No. 1025, 31 May 2013). Now Valls has come out for expelling veiled women students from universities.

Earlier this month, the prime minister published a column denouncing the New York Times for printing accounts by some Muslim women of their oppression in “secular” France, calling the Times’s description of France “intolerable.” (To be sure, it is the height of hypocrisy for the Times—which loyally serves the imperialist bourgeoisie of the U.S., world capital of racism and anti-Muslim bigotry—to lecture the French or anyone else about tolerance.) Valls denied that France is forcing Muslim women “to leave their country to study, find work, make a career,” but this is exactly the pressure that observant Muslim women are facing. What’s next—are we going to see racist signs reading, “No dogs or Muslims allowed”?

On August 26 the State Council, France’s highest administrative court, decreed the Villeneuve-Loubet ban illegal; it stated that the mayor had exceeded his police powers, striking “a serious and manifestly illegal blow” against fundamental rights. The State Council’s decree led local administrative courts to lift similar bans on the burkini. But on September 6 the Sisco ban was upheld with the claim that the burkini represents a risk to public order. On September 12, the administrative court in Nice upheld the ban for two towns, based on complaints by some local residents. In other words, when there is a local anti-Muslim mobilization, Muslims are blamed. In fact, the racists and cops take their cue from the government at its highest levels.

A London Guardian (24 August) article by the designer of the burkini, Aheda Zanetti, an Australian Muslim woman, described the idea behind the garment: “It was about integration and acceptance and being equal and about not being judged.” About the anti-Muslim backlash in France, she comments: “They are demanding women get off the beach and back into their kitchens.”

The headscarf is a symbol and a tool of women’s oppression, which is why we have always opposed it. But the anti-burkini decrees are an incitement to pogroms against Muslims as part of the “war on terror,” whose underlying purpose is to militarize society and repress the population. The measures unleashed first against an isolated minority population have in their sights the working class as well as the oppressed. This was starkly demonstrated during the recent workers mobilizations against the anti-union El Khomri law (see WV No. 1087, 8 April), which were subjected to relentless police assaults, mass arrests and prosecutions and the “anti-terrorism” state of emergency. The current furor stigmatizing Muslim women is a gift to the government, not least by shifting attention away from the recent class struggles and instead highlighting ethnic divisions, in the tried and true spirit of divide-and-rule.

As Marxists, we fight against all discrimination and state persecution of minorities. We opposed the 2004 ban on the headscarf in French schools and the 2009 ban on wearing the burqa (head-to-toe veil) in the streets. Now an amendment inserted into the El Khomri law provides legal means to facilitate firing women wearing the headscarf from their jobs. Today Lutte Ouvrière and other fake-socialist organizations denounce the burkini bans. But in 2003, supporters of these groups spearheaded the expulsion of two schoolgirls in a Paris suburb for wearing the headscarf—of course in the name of “secularism” and women’s rights.

It is grotesque to pretend that the French capitalist state wants to emancipate women from religious backwardness. In fact, these racist measures only deepen the social segregation and isolation of Muslim women. The principle of secularism, as it arose during the French Revolution, came out of the fight to rip the emerging bourgeois society from the stranglehold of the Catholic church. But in France today, it is simply a code word for anti-Muslim bigotry. The Valls government is intruding on the personal rights of Muslims—while of course opposing any encroachment on the privileges of the Catholic church. Down with the anti-Muslim crusade! Cops out of the mosques! Dress code police, get off the beaches!