"Islamic" Bus

The skirt was too short and the driver of the bus forbade a girl to board. The disturbing episode did not dramatically occur in an obscure country where Sharia law is in effect, but in Paris, where the driving of public transport vehicles which traverse the suburbs of Paris has been entrusted to Islamists to win the favor of the multi-ethnic periphery and avoid the rock-throwing on the part of the worst troublemakers.

And so it happens that one of these fundamentalists refused to pick up the 29-year-old daughter of the Algerian poet Kamel Bencheikh. “Think about dressing properly,” he told her. And he closed the doors again. The episode occurred last Tuesday and did not raise the alarm that it should have. Indeed, it has almost been shunted aside in the French press and by the government, whose Transport Minister, Elisabeth Borne, has long presided over the Paris public transport company (RATP), offered no words of comfort were for what Elise had to suffer.

Only a few members of the Républicans protested, as reported on Facebook by Bencheikh. The daughter, together with a friend, was “at the Botzaris stop near the Buttes Chaumont park” in the 19th arrondissement. It was just past eleven o’clock in the evening . “When the bus arrived,” recounts the Algerian poet, “the driver stopped, looked at them, and left without opening the doors”. The girls did not give up and ran until they reached it a few meters later, when he had to stop because the traffic light had turned red. And, when they asked the driver why he hadn’t let them board, he frosted them: “Think about dressing as you should.”