Burkini reveals more than it covers

Islamic terrorists are a threat to us - to Europe, to the developed world, and to just about any part of the realm the Islamists decide at any moment they don't like.

But although bombs can break our bones, clothing can never hurt us. That's the slightly altered popular mantra we might hear drifting across our English-speaking dreams. Those things we supposedly "know."

A new element has entered the unsettling story this summer. This element is a long, all-covering "bathing suit" for those super-modest Muslim ladies who would go about with even their faces covered, if they (or, more truthfully, their male family "protectors") had their way. Thus, my friends, begins the story of the burkini.

It seems that the burkini was designed by a female designer in Australia, ostensibly so Muslim women can go swimming without showing their beautiful selves to anyone, particularly infidels. Unlike some of the coverings Muslims are insisting upon in the cities, the burkini covers everything except the face (and the lunch bill).

Since the European burkini situation changes from moment to moment, with various French mayors (even in Cannes) banning it, with courts reinstating it, with civil rights groups defending it, and with both the left and the right lampooning it, we can only deal, here and now, with the most general and most burning philosophical questions:

Is the wearing of the burkini a threat to France that should be nipped at the bud, or is it just another silly obsession of the French, who often carry their vaunted secularism in public places "un peu" too far, and the burkini exercise is just another example of their prejudice?

The foreign press has, in large part, ruled for the burkini. The New York Times called the whole controversy "farcical," and a large number of major American papers disdainfully called it an anti-Muslim binge.

Yet, at the same time, like the disturbing warnings of a new world moving toward us, unaccustomed new words and concepts began to dominate the headlines: "identity politics" ... "parallel societies" ... "civilizational jihad" ... "alternative ID." Was it really all about culture? Or were we being slowly and mockingly de-civilized, our beliefs defrocked?

Even Germany - whose until-then popular and implacable Chancellor Angela Merkel had famously invited just about all the poverty-stricken world to come to Germany, and a million Middle Easterners and Africans, mostly Muslims, did - is pulling back after some of the "blessed ones" welcomed into the richest society in Europe turned around and insulted and raped during last New Year's Eve debauchery, and later turned to murder.

The Germans, still guilt-ridden from World War II, have begun to speak out. "We don't want parallel societies; we don't want ghettos," Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin. Lorenz Caffier, a conservative leader from the country's northeast, said, "The burqa does not belong to Germany." Another politician, from Berlin, nicely summed it up as a "cloth cage."

Finally - after a thousand "Oh mys!" - Chancellor "Y'all come" Merkel began to have second, third and fourth thoughts. But, curiously enough, she addressed most of her critique to Germany's Turkish population, 3 million of them, who came in the 1960s and onward. Integration? Assimilation? Some, and yet ...

The recent attempted coup in Turkey against the until-now moderate Islamist government there found Berlin sitting on intelligence that 6,000 informants were spying on Germany's Turkish community and probably informing on it to Ankara, according to the reliable Financial Times.

This was underlined by Chancellor Merkel's unprecedented warning to Germany's Turkish population to "develop a high level of loyalty" to their new homeland. And, indeed, there you have the core of the problem, from the ski jackets and snow boots of the high Alps to the bikinis and burkinis of the beaches of Cannes and Biarritz.

The problem is, indeed, loyalty and allegiance to a state, to a set of ideas but, above all, to the laws of the state that you have chosen to enter - and the state that has been generous enough to permit you to enter. The problem is how to assimilate and integrate, in Europe's cases, when immigrants persist in wonderful old habits like the repression of women, like clitoridectomy, like child marriage, like stoning to death girls who marry the man they love.

Oh my, I'm running out of space, but I rather think you've got the idea that the burkini represents all of this.

In short, we're all in hot water over thoughtless, anti-historical immigration. And you can't swim very fast with heavy clothing pulling you down.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2016, Universal