How The New York Times Covers The Story Of The Skirt

The New York Times tried to cover the story of the skirt in a semi-accurate manner. But  in its on-line series about “women in the world” it shed any pretense of objective reporting. See here.

Even in its initial report, there was a telling absence of context. In France the Muslim population is constantly trying to test the authorities, and the laic state. Men tell girls what to do; things are planned; a war is on. When a Muslim girl  is denied the right to wear a hijab to school, she will put on a headband so wide that it  amounts to a hijab in order to see if that, too, will be banned. And now some girl has decided to put on a very long skirt which, with other articles of clothing, are designed to flaunt her Islam-ness, her willingness to submit to the dictates of Allah, and to try to force the laic state to accept this ostentatious flaunting of her faith. The French school administrators, and the teachers who now have to endure the permanent insurgency of Muslim students and their parents and others who manipulate and direct those students, are not having it. This low-level war is not understood by the reporters and editors of The New York Times. Their knowledge of France is superficial; they have not been following Rioufol or Zemmour or Finkielkraut  or a dozen others; they have, in their minds, composed a little Moraliity Play, where in this corner, forever wearing black trunks and forever to be booed, are the “extreme right” of Marine Le Pen, and those awful islamophobes who so irrationally and comically, the Times thinkis, raise hell over the most harmless and innocent behavior by Muslims, including that modest dress code that only someone deeply prejudiced, someone hyseterical, someone on the “extreme right,”  could possibly oppose. That’s how The New York Times sees things, and a reporter for the Times who, in France, dared to sink below the surface, and came to understand exactly what is going on, and how inaccurate and dangerous is that received view of his editors, would be unlikely to be able to convey this to readers. At least not yet.

For the view of an intelligent French defender against the “communatauristes” (“communitarian” being a word for Muslims, and their willing collaborators, who favor the demands of the (that is, one particular)  religious “community” over the laws of the Republic) , see Natacha Polony here. Polony recognizes the “trap” being set by these communatauristes who wish to misrepresent the defenders of the laic state as hysterics, upset about something as trivial as a long skirt, when the well-informed know perfectly well what is really at stake. At The New York Times, there are not, apparently, any of those indispensable well-informed.