French police make woman remove clothing on Nice beach following burkini ban

There need to be limits, and while it is very difficult for everyone to agree on where they stand, and easy for us to mock the "Leaders need to do SOMETHING!", they only have so many tools to try and improve the situation. Banning the burkini is one of them (that I don't find particularly useful, but anyway).

Once burkini has been banned, you can respect the law and/or protest against it. If you choose to protest it with civil disobedience, you go to the beach and refuse to leave, this is going to happen. So this woman might have decided along the way that it was better to take some clothes off than to leave, or perhaps she was fined and was trying to talk herself out of it. Who knows? We lack sufficient information.

But I don't think it is justified to classify this as "police forcingly undress and shame woman", and make the moral parallel with islamic police making women cover themselves. Pkgundert's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12352409) gives some reasons. You could also read that and cynically say that France is here also practicing tyranny.

The fact is that the context of this news is that France is in state of emergency, and this woman chose to practice civil disobedience in Nice barely a month after the Nice attack.

For comparison, as you say you are american: ranked against all terrorist attacks in USA [2], Nice would end up ranking 3rd or 4th.

Perhaps that's what the terrorists want. But the fact is that the tension is already there, and there would have been problems even without the police:

>“The saddest thing was that people were shouting ‘go home’, some were applauding the police,” she said. “Her daughter was crying.”

[1] http://www.politico.eu/article/german-tourists-prank-trigger...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...

Islam with its barbaric, medieval, vicious ideology (e.g. kaafirs are against Allah, Muhammad is above any criticism, apostates should be killed, extreme injustice inflicted on Muslim women and so on) is at crossroads with the freedom loving, liberal and secular western world.

The religions should have no place in modern public life. But religions want to control every aspect of human life. Thanks to the fight put up by and sacrifices given by the freedom lovers, liberals and modern free-thinkers from the western world, mainstream religions have been rendered harmless/toothless to a significant extent, except Islam.

The liberals/critical thinkers have attacked earlier and do attack now also various bad and evil aspects in other religions (Christianity/Judaism/Hinduism) and our free society never suppresses their thoughts. Islam should not be an exception and hence Islam should not be given special treatment. Else we may have to lose the hard earned values that we cherish so much.

But we are seeing that some Islam apologists (whether bought and paid for or not) are hunting down any thoughtful and legitimate criticism of Islam, its prophet Muhammad, its scriptures and so on. They are using various types of pressure tactics for this. For example, labeling any criticism of Islam as racist attacks on Muslims or Islamophobia or hate speech or right-wing practice.

e.g. Geert Wilders is labeled as right-wing fanatic by such Islam apologists. Geert Wilders has been a liberal free-thinker (e.g. his support of gays/homosexuals).

The freedom lovers, liberals and humanists must understand this threat posed by the vicious ideology of mainstream Islam.

The west now must invest large amount of efforts and resources to fight this vicious ideology of Islam. We must realize that this is an ideological war and must be fought on the ideological war-front. This can and must be done by supporting liberal minded humanists (like, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins) who are exposing the viciousness of the ideology of Islam and upholding the modern humanist values like freedom of expression and separation of 'mosque and state'.

edit: added point about Geert Wilders.

The ban of the burkini is a misguided attempt to alleviate that tension.

Although this is very sad to write, nowadays in France being very publicly muslim increases that tension.

Using burkinis that contrast your being covered whilst the rest of the people on the beach/pool are semi-naked is included in being very publicly muslim.

Also, there is a big element of context in this article. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12352798.

X might be the best course of action on where we are, the problem being the short-sightedness that took us to this place in the first place (thinking like in chess - you limited your better options with earlier moves).

EDIT: Of course, if the enemy is better at the long game, and succeeded in taking us to here, what's to assure us that we evaluate correctly X as the best course of action, instead of them nudging us to it?