Word: french
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...speech at Versailles, Sarkozy denounced the burqa, the all-enveloping garment worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women as "not welcome on French territory." Obama's speech in Cairo took a different tack. His concern was not the hijab - the Muslim woman's head covering - so much as a woman's right to wear it if she so chose. Western countries, Obama said, cannot dictate the dress of Muslim women. "We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism." (See pictures of the women of Cairo...
...face veils that leave only a slit for the eyes. The Irish have banned the burqa from classrooms, and in June, the Michigan Supreme Court gave judges the power to direct how witnesses dress for court, after a Muslim woman refused to take off her niqab while testifying. The French, however, have gone beyond practical arguments, saying that face veils don't just gum up processes in courts, surgeries and schools, but are an affront to the republic itself and its traditions of secularism. In 2004, France banned head scarves from schools and public buildings. "In our country," said Sarkozy...
...heroic status in the Egyptian press appears in large part to derive from her determination to wear the headscarf in what has been painted as a landscape of cruel, racist taunting. Her death has also become the latest weapon in the controversy over remarks made last month by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in which he equated the most conservative style of Islamic women's dress, the burqa, with subservience. "This is cowardly act supported by many western politicians like Sarkozy ... We should stand against such an inhumane act," wrote one man on the message board of a Facebook group titled...
...chagrined French reaction (and TIME.com's coverage of the 2008 poll) shows, the Expedia survey gets a lot of attention. This year's best-ranked tourists - the Japanese were followed by English, Canadian, German and Swiss travelers - are likely to point proudly to the outcome as a paragon of scientific accuracy. But this third annual bruising of French pride should be taken with a pinch of salt. There are several aspects of the survey that make its methodology suspect - and results significantly skewed. The poll ranks 27 nations' travelers over nine behavioral categories. But it questioned just 4,500 respondents...
...Moreover, because the lingua franca of international hotel staffs is English, notoriously monolingual Americans, Brits and Australians probably rank higher than they should. The French readily volunteer that their practice of foreign languages leaves much to be desired, but even the harshest Francophobe would mock the poll's finding that the average Yank tourist is the better polyglot. At least that's what French travelers might argue...