August 31, 2019

FRANCE: Muslim Women Defied Burkini Ban And Wore The Islamic Full-Body Swimsuit To Public Swimming Pools. A Feminist And Muslim Association Compared The Ban On Burkini To The Holocaust ๐Ÿ˜ฑ

Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany
written by John Silk
June 24, 2019

Muslim women have pushed back against a ban on burkinis at a public pool, provoking a firm response from the far right. National Rally leader Marine Le Pen said the all-encompassing swimsuit has "no place in France."

With the summer weather heating up, the debate surrounding the banning of the burkini in France has reemerged. Muslim women defied a local ban over the weekend and wore the Islamic full-body swimsuit, breaking the rules of a swimming pool in the southeastern city of Grenoble by doing so.

Women who wore the swimsuit, which covers the entire body except for the face, hands and feet, were issued a fine of €35 ($40).

The Jean Bron Swimming Pool is among several in France that have banned burkinis, and it saw many women breaching the rules as part of an organized protest.

"Operation Burkini" was created last month by members of the group Citizen Alliance of Grenoble in order to defend Muslim women's rights. The women are demanding that public pools, which currently require men to wear swim briefs and women to wear bikinis or one-piece swimsuits, change their regulations to accommodate burkini wearers.

'Burkini has no place in France': Le Pen

Far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen has criticized the activists and called for a firm response from local authorities.

"It's time to say loud and clear that the burkini has no place in France," she tweeted on Monday.

The center-right head of the greater Paris region, Valerie Pecresse, also raised concerns about normalizing the full-body swimsuits.

"If we accept the burkini, in a few years, all the young girls from poor neighborhoods will be bathing covered up, for moral reasons or to protect their reputations," she told Radio Classique.

Two of the women who took part in the protest held a very different view.

Speaking to the BBC, Hassiba and Latifa said they should have the same rights as everyone else.

"We have a dream: to have fun in public swimming pools like all other citizens, to accompany our children whenever they want to have a swim while it is very hot in the summer here in Grenoble.

"We must fight against discriminatory policies and prejudice in France, as we are actually deprived of our civil rights of access to public services and city-owned infrastructures," they told the BBC.

The Citizen Alliance said, via Facebook, that the action was part of a movement that began over a year ago with a petition signed by more than 600 Muslim women. They are pleading with Grenoble Mayor Eric Piolle to change the rules regarding public swimming pools.
(original article written in French. I used translator to share with you.)

La Voix Du Nord
written by Bruno Renoul
July 7, 2019

The president of a feminist and Muslim association in Tourcoing has compared on Facebook the ban on burkini to the extermination of Jews.

Zakia Meziani, president of the feminist and antiracist association Identitรฉ plurielle and former candidate EELV in the cantonal elections in 2015, protests against the ban on burkini (full swimsuit) in municipal swimming pools. While associations have tried to impose force to impose Villeurbanne or Grenoble, Zakia Meziani reacted on his Facebook page to a survey of Figaro questioning his readers on whether a law was necessary on the subject.

๐Ÿ‘‡ IN OTHER RELATED NEWS ๐Ÿ‘‡

Furnaces holding the remains of burned bodies at the Buchenwald concentration camp near Jena, Germany.

Credit: U.S. Army Signal Corps/Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum
LiveScience
1.32 Million Jews Were Killed in Just Three Months During the Holocaust
written by Laura Geggel, Senior Writer
January 4, 2019

Operation Reinhard, known as the single largest murder campaign during the Holocaust, was worse than historians imagined. In a mere three months, at least 1.32 million Jewish people died — close to one-quarter of all the Jewish victims who perished during World War II, a new study finds.

The finding is based on an old data set that tallied the number of Jews who were forced from their homes onto trains, which then took them to the death camps in Poland known as Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Once there, the majority of these victims were killed in gas chambers.

But Yitzhak Arad, an Israeli Holocaust historian, managed to compile data about the murders. Arad collected Reichsbahn data on 480 train deportations from 393 Polish towns and ghettos, recording "the location, number of victims of each transportation and final death-camp destination," Stone said. "The data set has been sitting around for years, but hardly anyone has ever studied it, possibly because the subject is so sensitive."

Almost every victim who arrived at these three death camps was murdered, so the data set served as an extraordinary proxy for murder rate, Stone said. After crunching the numbers, Stone found that a minimum of 1.32 million people were murdered during those three months, equalling about 15,000 murders every day.

In all, between 5.4 million and 5.8 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, Stone wrote in the study.
UPDATE 8/31/19 at 8:14pm: Added tweet below.
UPDATE 9/3/19 at 2:22pm: Added tweet below.

No comments: