Culture

Jacqui Lambie Is Very Worried About All Those Ebola-infected Suicide Bombers That Definitely Exist

Ohhhhhh, dear.

by Alex McKinnon  22 October 2014

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It must be terrifying being Jacqui Lambie. Not only is she utterly convinced that Sharia law = terrorism, she’s got it into her head that ISIS are plotting to infect Australia with Ebola with suicide bombers because Islam or something, I dunno.

At the Foreign Affairs and Defence Budget Estimates Committee this morning, Lambie took the opportunity to grill Vice Chief of the Defence Force Admiral Ray Griggs on the likelihood of such an eventuality, summed up by most defence and terrorism experts as “what? Is this a joke? Am I on the Chaser? I’m on the Chaser, aren’t I? Hi Mum!”

Mmmkay. Couple things. Firstly, given Lambie’s obsession with Sharia law and Islam in general, it’s fairly safe to assume she means ISIS and other Islamist extremist militant groups when referring to “Australia’s enemies”, which are overwhelmingly based in Iraq and Syria.

Ebola, for those keeping track, has predominantly taken hold in three western African countries: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The distance between Syria and Guinea is about 5,500 kilometres, making it kind of unlikely that Ebola is going to create an army of contagious Jihadist zombie super-soldiers any time soon, but distance probably doesn’t mean much to someone whose conception of the world outside Tasmania seems to be “over there”.

The “Ebola terrorist” angle has been spruiked by a couple of click-here-be-scared news outlets, most notably the Daily Mail in the UK, which cited a video from an outfit called Project Veritas showing a “terrorist” crossing the Canadian border as proof that ISIS could bring Ebola into the USA. The “terrorist” in question was a white guy in an Osama bin Laden mask, so presumably some NSA intern watching the attempt via satellite called off the drone strike after remembering that Osama bin Laden is dead. Project Veritas are also a prominent pusher for enhanced voter verification laws, which have basically become code for making it harder for black people and poor people to vote so Republicans don’t have to worry about them.

In that same article, the Daily Mail quoted Middle East security expert Andreas Krieg saying “it would be logistically very difficult to get an IS fighter to West Africa, come into contact with Ebola, wait to find out if they were infected, then leg it to London”, but they waited until twenty paragraphs in to tell you that part because journalism.

Also, “have access to bodily fluids”? What does this mean? Bodily fluids are fairly prevalent among carbon-based life forms; even I, a soulless golem fashioned from clay and unwillingly brought into this torment-riddled world by a wicked sorcerer, am aware of that. You can’t fly with bottled water anymore; I think airport security might notice someone getting on a plane with a jar of someone else’s Ebola-filled spit.

Upon hearing of Lambie’s “investigations”, Bill Shorten reacted with a slight variation on the perpetual sad weariness that he carries with him everywhere like a shroud.

Someone call a Royal Commission into Bill Shorten’s utter negligence in the face of the looming ISIbola outbreak. This Has Gone On Too Long.