Manuel Vall’s concerns about the meaning of the proliferation of Islamic veils in France are quite understandable. The prime minister is right in asserting that Islamic communitarianism is challenging French secularism.
You can not reduce the clash of civilizations to a swimsuit.
Much less solid, however, is his idea of banning burkinis, the bath costume of pious Muslim women. Because there is something hysterical about it.
You can not reduce the clash of civilizations to a swimsuit. And those who raise the scandal about burkinis do not raise an eyebrow (and perhaps enjoy) when churches are converted into mosques, a priest is butchered or when twelve cartoonists are slaughtered in Paris for portraying the Prophet of Islam.
Islamic rejection of Europe is often fed by our sloppy and shallow secularist mindset. Do French want all Muslims to wear bikinis?
It is not difficult to imagine how the clash between a stripped world, ours, and a world that covers itself, theirs, will play out. Narcissistic France relies solely on the placid socialistic materialism where the highest good is pleasure. France has removed any reason why people should care about anything other than their own personal bliss and security.
The summer of 2016 will be remembered as one of the most violent ever. “Islamism wants our death”, wrote Le Figaro's Natasha Polony. “Our physical and civilizational death (…) But fortunately for us, we oppose the killers with our beautiful spirit of resistance: in the face of danger, we continue to live as before. The proof? Three million French and tens of millions of Americans, Britons, Germans ... roaming the streets, their phones in hand, [aiming] to drive virtual characters called Pokemon. Not just children. Also adults.”
Muslims see France as weak and attack it precisely because French ground their lives in material comfort rather than in faith and culture. Muslims see French capitulation to violence as the manifestation of the spiritual poverty of a people for whom the highest good is physical gratification and nothing exists that is worth fighting and dying for.
This is also the meaning of the French indifference to violence against Christians and Jews in Middle East.
Postmodern Europeans have sacrificed values and beliefs that ensure survival for pleasure, a trade-off that can end only in extinction. This is the root of French hysteria about the burkini. The shameful trading of survival for indulgence.