French Mayor Rejects Burkini Ban: Live the Way We Do or Don't Come

"...go in Saudi Arabia and be naked and see what will happen to you."

8.31.2016

A top French court has overturned a ban on the burkini, the full-body swimsuits some Muslim women wear to the beach, but not everyone is in board with the decision.

One mayor is sticking with the ban, telling visitors to his Riviera town, "If you don't want to live the way we do, don't come."

"You have to behave in the way that people behave in the country that accepted you, and that is it," Cogolin Mayor Marc Etienne Lansade told CNN.

"If you are accepted in Rome -- do like Romans do," he said, adding, "Go in Saudi Arabia and be naked and see what will happen to you."

Lansade will continue the ban, despite the court's ruling. Other mayors of beach towns will enforce their bans of the burkini as well.

The court made its ruling after more than 30 French towns banned the "swimsuit" as a response to the growing threat of Islamic terrorism.

Human rights advocates argue that outlawing the burkini is "Islamophobic" and they will continue to sue over the ban. "The Collective Against Islamophobia in France, one of the plaintiffs in the burkini case, plans to sue each municipality maintaining the ban on the full-length swimsuit," writes CNN.

"These mayors don't want to lose face in front of extreme-right voters," Marwan Muhammad, the group's president, told CNN.

"The CCIF will methodically remind them of the law."

Mayor Lansade will enforce the ban until September 15. "I don't think that many of them do that (wear a burkini) because they want to -- but because they have to," he told CNN. "We have to protect those people."