When the liberation of Muslim women looks like violence | Toronto Star p.A11 | August 29 2016

“The disturbing images of the enforcement of “burkini bans” capture the paradox of using state violence to “fight against” alleged Muslim violence against women; of employing state coercion to supposedly emancipate Muslim women from their ostensible sartorial “enslavement.” The stigmatization of Muslim women as the most visible carriers of what is demonized as a terrorizing and retrograde religion has also increased private aggression against them: in 2013, 80 per cent of anti-Muslim attacks in France were against women. … [T]he spectacles of clothing policing on French beaches look eerily familiar, evoking memories of France’s period of colonial rule in North Africa. French colonial administrators were obsessed with rescuing Muslim women from their “backwards” garb, staging elaborate de-veiling ceremonies to initiate Muslim women into liberation and to demonstrate the benefits of French colonization.”