Tag: Nice

Of All the Bad Things about France’s Burkini Ban, This Is the Worst…

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There are several reasons why burkini bans like the one currently being enforced in Nice, France are a seriously bad idea.

One, is that they inevitably lead to ugly, embarrassing, unhelpful stories like this one involving a hapless Muslim woman being fined on the beach and forced by uniformed officers to expose her arms. You can see why locals might feel very strongly about Islam after the Islamic-State-inspired massacre of 85 innocents in the Bastille Day truck attack. But unfortunately it has the doubly negative effect of making the local authorities look petty, vindictive and helpless, while serving to exacerbate local Muslims’ sense of grievance, alienation and victimhood.

Another – as Douglas Murray eloquently argues here – is that it’s just a silly distraction from the real issues. Burkinis don’t pose a public safety threat – unlike, say, a burka you can’t hide an AK 47 under them because they’re too tight fitting. Picking on an item of clothing enables the authorities to give the false impression that they’re really getting tough when actually they’re brushing the real problems (mass immigration; Saudi-funded Wahabist indoctrination etc) under the carpet.

But easily the worst is that it gives progressive blowhards like James O’Brien the chance to demonstrate how inclusive and caring and unIslamophobic they are with virtue-signalling analogies like the one he inflicted today on listeners to his whiny-bitch LBC radio show.

O’Brien, a privately educated leftist with a fake-proletarian accent, brow furrowed permanently in a state of baffled rage and righteous concern, had this to say on his show:

“How would you feel if a nun at gunpoint was told to take off her habit?”
“Sister Mary Frances was my headmistress when I was six years old. I would find that so outrageous, so absolutely outrageous that Sister Mary Frances would be told to take off her habit when she took us on a school trip to Wales. How would you feel, hand on heart if nuns were being told in France to take off their habit on beaches?”

Yes, of course we can all see the flaws in his argument. (You only have to ask yourself who you think should get more scrutiny at an airport check in: a nun or a woman in a burka). At the same time, though, O’Brien does have a point.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Muslims Were the Real Victims of the Nice Terror Attack, the BBC Explains

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More bad news from Nice: we learn from the BBC that local Muslims have been getting the cold shoulder from theirkuffar neighbours. “People who yesterday would embrace me warmly are now cold towards me,” says one.

And all because of the unfortunate and terribly unfair coincidence that the man who mowed down over 100 people in a truck just happened to be called Mohamed, of Tunisian descent, and allegedly yelling “Allahu Akbar” as he went about his murderous spree.

“The worst affected by these attacks are us, the Muslims. We have seen an increase in abuse and threats,” complains local man Ahmed Mohamed.

Another – Abdul Moniem – has some sage things to say about not pointing the finger of blame.

“You have to distinguish between different types of crime. Are these crimes that relate to terrorism? Or are these individual criminal acts? In this case what happened was a terrible crime and shouldn’t be treated as terrorism. The criminal who carried out this attack did not pray or fast…he had social and relationship problems. It was this that led him to hurt people.”

The BBC is very concerned about this outbreak of ‘Islamophobia’. That would be why it sent a reporter – also called Mohamed – to down to investigate.

But I’ve a strange feeling that not many of you reading this – unless, perhaps, your name is Mohammed, or you are LBC’s resident faux-Cockney dhimmi James O’Brien, or you work for the BBC yourself – are going to be shedding bitter tears for Nice’s Muslim community right now. In fact you may well suspect that reports like this are very much part of the problem not the solution.

This is what Douglas Murray argues in a Spectator piece entitled We need to tackle attacks like the one in Nice from the root.

It’s really not much different from the pieces he wrote after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Paris massacre. But then, barring a few details – innocents mashed with a truck rather than, as at Bataclan, either shot, blown up or tortured by having their testicles cut off or their vaginas stabbed – the situation remains just the same as it ever did: with the chattering classes, the politicians, most of the media, and virtually the entire Umma still in denial of the nightmare problem facing us.

That problem, gloss it how you will, has something to do with Islam.

Read the rest at Breitbart.