Armed French policemen force woman to strip

Photos posted online show armed police officers approaching a woman lying on the beach wearing what appears to be black leggings and a blue head-covering and matching top. The three police officers forced her to disrobe and wrote her a ticket for not wearing, according to Agence France-Presse, “an outfit respecting good morals and secularism”.

“I was sitting on a beach with my family”, the mom recalled.

However, ordinary citizens are allowed to wear the headscarf in public. “Tomorrow, the street? Tomorrow, we’ll be forbidden from practicing our religion at all?”

“The saddest thing was that people were shouting “go home”, some were applauding the police”. One witness even said Siam’s daughter, who was nearby as this was happening, was crying.

As with the burqa ban of 2010, which prohibited full-face veils, the burkini ban has been criticized for stoking anti-Muslim sentiment and Islamophobia, feared to be on the rise after major terrorist attacks in both Paris and Nice.

Nevertheless the local Socialist mayor, Ange-Pierre Vivoni, banned the garments, describing the measure as necessary to “protect the population”.

It is not known if this woman was fined.

On Tuesday, in another similar incident, a mother-of-two in Cannes said she had been fined on the beach for wearing a tunic, leggings and a headscarf.

Earlier this month, authorities in Cannes and Villeneuve-Loubet, on the French Riviera, also banned the swimwear, said a BBC report.

Some people expressed anger on Twitter, comparing the burkini controversy to debate over skirt length and other restrictions on female swimwear in the 1920s. “It is the expression of a political project, a counter-society, based notably on the enslavement of women”.

Siam says that did not know about Cannes’ burkini ban.

I feel especially strongly about this, because on the same day that Siam was being humiliated on the beach, I was being referred to Dulwich Community Hospital to make sure that my heart wasn’t exploding because of the heat (spoiler: it wasn’t). So who is better, the Taliban or French politicians? “No man in this entire world can tell us what to wear or what not to wear”, Zanetti said.

But the ban has boomeranged and boosted sales and interest in the Islamic swimsuit, particularly from non-Muslim women.