Burkini ban enforced on the beach in Nice, France.

Burkini ban enforced on the beach in Nice, France.

PROVOCATIVE French writer Anne-Elisabeth Moutet has a different take on the burkini ban.

Writing in The Sun, she argues if you’re upset by burkini cop image, you’ve been “sucked in by Islamist propaganda”.

THEY are the pictures that whipped the world up into a righteous fury.

One shows a woman wrapped in a DIY burkini on a beach in Nice, France, surrounded and visibly interrogated by no fewer than four armed policemen.

The next shows the woman having to take off her tunic under the watchful eye of the cops, looming threateningly over her.

“Forced to strip”, went one headline, retweeted tens of thousands of times.

The chorus on social media was deafening. The poor woman only wanted a bit of sun and a swim, dressed as she pleased, and is subjected to this disgusting affront.

It has become a frequent collective howl, the outrage at secular France’s decision to ban burkinis on more than a dozen beaches to calm religious tension.

Yet the pictures also tell another story.

Look closer, especially at the photo taken before the police show up.

One shows the woman seemingly sleeping, alone, lying directly on the sand.

She has no book, no sun cream, no beach bag. Her clothes are not suited to swimming.

Another shows her sitting quietly, looking around, as if waiting for the police to come. Hoping for the police to come?

As one French Muslim journalist, Ahmed Meguini, tweeted under the picture: “It’s 35C! Off to the beach for a nap in the sun in my ski outfit, like, totally normally.”

The pictures — sold worldwide by an agency — are not credited. They are, however, professionally shot.

The photographer was there long before the incident.

A belief shared by many is that this “victim” and the snapper wanted the police to intervene — the photos are brilliant Islamist propaganda.

They will provoke and inflame, foster a resentful mindset among French Muslims and encourage the narrative of “victimisation” that cripples action on Islamic extremism.

Among those furious at the pictures is the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France (CCIF) — an activist outfit that has taken the French State to court in a series of high-profile cases.

Its attempts to have the burkini beach bans declared illegal have lost in local courts but yesterday, it won the right to make a case in front of the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court.

But the truth is that most French citizens at both ends of the political spectrum support the bans.

This includes French Muslims, especially women.

They agree with Laurence Rossignol, France’s Socialist women’s minister, who suggested burkinis were designed to “hide women’s bodies in order better to control them”.

To liberal Muslims — still the majority in France, where the burka has been banned since 2010 — the burkini is the latest of encroaching advances made by the ultraconservative Salafist Muslims.

Other demands include school meals to be halal and for municipal swimming pools to segregate boys and girls.

The French have been the victims of many acts of terrorism in recent years.

Burkinis serve as a painful reminder of an unwanted and extreme take on Islam.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a writer and broadcaster

This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission.