Ban Everyone “Between Greece And India”: Australian Politicians Respond To The London Attack
This is... extremely dumb.
It didn’t take long for Australian politicians to exploit the tragedy in London yesterday for their own political purposes.
Coalition MP George Christensen used the attack to argue against “political correctness”.
Pauline Hanson asked her followers to “#Pray4MuslimBan”.
One Nation has the only policy that protects you from the growing threat of Islamic terror. #Pray4MuslimBan
LINK https://t.co/3fS0zjv6Mg pic.twitter.com/0jv1KLQfRh
— Pauline Hanson (@PaulineHansonOz) March 23, 2017
But it was another Queensland MP who took things to the next level. Last night Bob Katter, the independent MP for Kennedy in north Queensland, called for a ban on anyone “between Greece and India, and North Africa” from entering Australia.
Katter was speaking on Sky News, and he was criticised by fellow panellist Rachel Corbett who described the plan as “ludicrous”.
.@RealBobKatter calls for ban on people from between Greece & India, exempting Sikhs & Jews #WestminsterAttack MORE: https://t.co/w7qq3F3U6C pic.twitter.com/YrxLVCPQFX
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) March 23, 2017
There’s no evidence that such a plan would actually prevent terrorist attacks. The London attacker, for example, was born in the UK.
Katter’s plan is a lot more specific than previous calls for a Muslim ban in Australia, but it also raises a bunch of questions.
First of all, it’s not clear if the ban would be inclusive of Greece and India, or if it just applies to the countries between them. At first glance it sounds like it makes more sense if it applies just to the countries in the middle, but there are 170 million Muslims living in India, which is about 10 percent of the global Muslim population.
But if we’re including India, we would also have to include Greece, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense in this context. Hmm, this is tricky.
So let’s look at what countries would definitely be included in the ban. Starting from Greece and moving east we’ve got Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, George, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Katter Zone.
Katter also added North Africa into his ban, which would throw in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
That’s quite a lot of countries. But even after going to all that effort, Katter’s plan fails to capture the half a billion Muslims living in India, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Sorry dude, your super-ban doesn’t even do what you want it too!
What about Israel? They aren’t a Muslim country? Well, Katter has a plan for that. He wants to exclude any “Christians, Jews or Sikhs” from his ban. How is he going to know who is a Christian or who is a Muslim? Some sort of Bible vs. Quran quiz? We don’t know.
The exclusion list is pretty weird considering it would only apply to about 20,000 Sikhs but ignores the millions of Bahá’í in the Middle East.
Look, I’m just going to say it: it’s an incredibly dumb plan made even more dumb by virtue of how oddly specific it is. It would almost be funny if Bob Katter wasn’t an actual politician.
The idea of a broad Muslim ban was unthinkable a few years ago, but now we have One Nation, Katter and Coalition MPs like Christensen pushing for it. The good news is if they can’t come up with something actually coherent it might never fly.
Oh, I left out the best part. Bob Katter’s grandfather moved to Australia from… Lebanon. Yes, that is between Greece and India.