Jacqui Lambie Says Sharia Law “Involves Terrorism”, Doesn’t Know What The Fuck It Is

Jacqui Lambie was kind of amusing for a while — she ripped on the government with a refreshing honesty, and her on-air call for a guy with a large dick was pretty great — but in the last few days she’s gone from “the laid-back one wearing yellow” to “Pauline Hanson 2: Electric Boogaloo” by throwing herself whole-heartedly into the treasured national pastime of Muslim-bashing.

Lambie’s been extremely vocal in recent days about the “threat” radical Islam poses to decent, VB-swillin’ ‘Strayans like you and me, calling for the burqa to be banned and posting an inflammatory picture on her Facebook page of a burqa-clad woman holding a gun — a woman who, according to the photographer who took the thing, was Afghanistan’s first female policewoman before she was shot by the Taliban in front of her son.

Given her strong and loud opinions on Islamic extremism, no doubt Lambie’s been tenaciously burrowing into texts and testimonies explaining what extremist Islam is, right? Know your enemy and all that. In an interview yesterday with Insiders‘ Barrie Cassidy on the ABC, Lambie was questioned on what she understands Sharia law to mean, and all that sweet, sweet knowledge got some airtime.

Look, being ignorant of the finer tenets of Sharia law isn’t, in and of itself, a bad thing. But if you’re claiming that Sharia law is a threat to Australians and “involves terrorism”, it might be worth your time to bone up on what Sharia law actually is. Maybe by cracking open a dictionary, or typing the words “Sharia law” into fucking Google.

If you do that, you quickly learn that Sharia law is a religious framework that governs various aspects of how one practises Islam, much as the Jewish religion is largely based on the practise of 613 laws, or “mitzvot”, that dictate or recommend what practitioners of the faith should and should not do.

Sharia Law does contain some elements that, if read literally, would lead a person to extremist thoughts and actions, much in the same way that if we all took the Bible seriously word-for-word we’d stone to death anyone who shaved their face, wore polyester, or was gay. Obviously, though, the vast majority of Christians, Jews and Muslims ignore those scriptural tenets of their faith which promote violence or archaic forms of justice and punishment, because most people are reasonable goddamn human beings. Calling for everyone who “practises Sharia” to either give it up or get out is the equivalent of calling for the practise of Islam to be punishable by forcible deportation, which is a pretty bold statement to make if you’re someone whose knowledge of other religions would be genuinely and noticeably improved by reading a fucking Junkee article.

In that little Exorcism-vomit of hate disguised as an interview, Lambie also got pretty hung up on the Australian constitution — a document which, by the way, explicitly bans the Commonwealth from “prohibiting the free exercise of any religion”. It’s kind of nice how Lambie doesn’t limit her gross ignorance to the legal doctrines of other cultures, but generously extends it to the one in which she operates as a fucking Senator. Because if there’s one thing we need more of in this country, it’s people who use their positions of immense power to say shit-ignorant and hateful things about concepts they know nothing about, in order to defend concepts they know nothing about — more popularly known as the “I Don’t Like It” school of governance.

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Feature image via ABC News/YouTube.