When Will Ebolaphobia Become a Hate Crime?

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When will Ebolaphobia become a hate crime?
by Fjordman

I have been following the stories about the Ebola virus for some time. I am unsure what to make of it, since I am not a medical health professional or a virologist. The single most worrisome thing I have read about the nasty Ebola virus in recent months is the claim that the number of Ebola cases in West Africa has been doubling approximately every three weeks. This is just an estimate. We do not actually know the full number of people infected with Ebola in Africa. However, let us assume for the sake of argument that this number is correct.

Since many people do not understand basic mathematics, they do not understand the principle of exponential growth. Several thousand people have already died of Ebola during this outbreak. If you start out with 500 people infected with the deadly virus, this will have grown to 1000 people in three weeks. After another three weeks, this will have doubled again to 2000, and then to 4000. Three weeks after that, you have 8000 people infected with Ebola. Then you have 16 thousand, 32 thousand, 64 thousand, 128 thousand, 256 thousand, 512 thousand and then 1024 thousand.

If you assume that the number of infected doubles every three weeks, that number could in principle go from 500 people infected with Ebola to more than one million in the space of 33 weeks, less than eight months. Some scientists do in fact suggest that we could face one million Ebola cases by early 2015. This will not necessarily happen in real life. Yet the fact that this is even theoretically possible should cause some concern. Merely 25% of this number would mean that we might have to deal with a quarter of a million Ebola cases at some point in 2015.

Will it really become that bad? Not necessarily. As my friend Ned May pointed out, diseases sometimes grow less deadly as they spread. There is no more powerful and faster evolutionary pressure than a deadly disease. Even the deadly flu virus that between 1918 and 1920 killed more people than the First World War eventually grew less lethal. That being said, even the Spanish flu did not kill up to 70% of those infected, as Ebola does. Fortunately, Ebola does not spread as easily as the flu does. Otherwise, it could have been the new Black Death. Moreover, the Spanish flu only grew less deadly after it had already killed tens of millions of people.

So far, with the exception of a few health workers in Europe and North America, Ebola largely remains confined to West Africa. However, that could change. Some observers caution that panic about Ebola is spreading faster than the virus itself. Sub-Saharan Africans are also a resilient bunch of people. If most Europeans or Asians had been living under the hygienic conditions that many people do in Africa, they would have been dropping dead like flies, even in the absence of Ebola. Especially if they ate fruit bats.

Maybe the Ebola threat is hyped; maybe not. However, even if it is hyped, the Ebola virus exists. The threat is real even if it is occasionally exaggerated. What worries me is how slow Western authorities are in dealing with this potential threat. They have so far issued some screenings of questionable efficiency at certain airports and some limited travel restrictions. Even this they seem to do reluctantly and only after popular pressure.

The doctrines of anti-racism, tolerance and diversity seem to mutate and spread to every section of Western societies. Perhaps this mental virus is what should concern us the most. If we still had a healthy society with a functioning immune system, we could be dealing more rationally with the viruses that confront us. Both physical viruses such as Ebola and ideological viruses represented by the Jihadist doctrines of the Islamic State (ISIS). The number one priority would have been to quarantine those affected and restrict travel from those regions and countries where these diseases are most widespread. That is simply common sense. Sadly, Western ruling elites in this age seem to be devoid of common sense. Their First and Only Commandment is: Diversity and open borders über alles.

On November 5 2009, Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, murdered 13 people and injured more than 30 others at Fort Hood in Texas. Mr. Hasan, as a devout Muslim, has openly bragged about his Jihadist beliefs and the specifically Islamic motivations for his massacre. Despite this, the United States Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies classified the shootings as an act of workplace violence. The mass murder must not be linked to Islam, because that would be Islamophobia.

After the Fort Hood massacre, General George Casey, the Army’s top officer in the USA, was in November 2009 mainly concerned that diversity could become a casualty of the incident. “I’m concerned that this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” Casey told CNN. Asked on NBC whether Muslim soldiers are conflicted in fighting wars in Muslim countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, Casey said: “I think that’s something that we have to look at on an individual basis. But I think we as an Army have to be broad enough to bring in people from all walks of life.” The bottom line is the military benefits from diversity, he said. “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,” Casey said. President Barack Hussein Obama also mentioned military diversity in his radio address which was focused on Fort Hood.

To Western elites, Multicultural “diversity” is more important than life itself — literally.

Abby Haglage is a reporter at The Daily Beast, a major American news and opinion website with millions of readers. She wrote an article about the apparently horrible thought that people from West Africa might face certain restrictions on traveling to Western countries when a deadly and escalating epidemic of one of the world’s nastiest viruses is plaguing West Africa. Haglage dubbed this “Ebola racism.”

If Political Correctness had existed in the fourteenth century, would European cities have been chastised for their “plague racism” for restricting access to people from areas affected by the Black Death?

When Western writers can use the term “Ebola racism” without irony, how long is it before Ebolaphobia becomes a hate crime?

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15 thoughts on “When Will Ebolaphobia Become a Hate Crime?

  1. Ebola Virus v. Phobia Viral it is going to be interesting to watch these two play out, but at this early stage it looks like the diversity of incompetence is first off the line.

  2. They’re starting, as Alex Griswold reported at the Daily Caller, describing an exchange between Alex Wagner and Joy Reid at MSNBC. First, there’s the predictable claim that any and every criticism of Obama is obviously racist. Then they go on to insinuate that any effort to keep Ebola carriers out of the U.S. is racist because it would mean keeping black Africans out. (People like Wagner and Reid would also say it’s racist to attempt to defend our southern border because any such effort would disproportionately affect Latinos.)

    From the Daily Caller report:
    “That stuff is incredible,” Wagner said, referring to criticisms from Republican lawmakers, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly. “He is their president, Joy. I mean, it’s not even thinly veiled racism at this point.”

    Reid agreed: “No, and I’m glad you called it a racial stew because it is kinda like the perfect storm. You have an African, God forbid, flies into the United States and you have all of these sort of issues of immigration sort of thrown into it.”

    Reid ….: “I couldn’t believe that Marsha Blackburn brought the border into it because I hate to tell you, the planes don’t walk over the border with the Guatemalan children, they fly into the airport.”

    She also hated O’Reilly’s suggestion of a travel ban. “Of course somehow the Obama administration should have in the plane and picked out all of the African nationals to make sure they couldn’t get in. You know what? The Obama administration had nothing to do with [Thomas Eric Duncan] coming here. He came here to visit his family and his fiancée.”

    http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/16/msnbc-calls-gop-ebola-criticism-not-even-thinly-veiled-racism-video/

    Moral of the story: Being racist is the very worst of all possible evils — worse than inflicting a horrendous disease on your fellow citizens.

  3. The Left is composed of Lysenkoists and lunatics who think agit-prop and political allegiance trumps a deadly virus. Even the old time Russian Communists weren’t that stupid. But the American Left seems to have inherited the bottom of the gene pool.

    That being said, the Left better hope it doesn’t spread because it will take down Obamacare along with the economy and hence their socialist empire. Anyone who is familiar with our medical system knows it’s not designed to handle hemorrhagic viruses. It takes special facilities and highly trained specialists to deal with it. It’s one thing to deal with Hep III or AIDS which they are used to but this beast is far different. Go read the USAMRIID handbook:

    Link:
    http://www.usamriid.army.mil/education/bluebookpdf/USAMRIID%20BlueBook%207th%20Edition%20-%20Sep%202011.pdf

    It can also been seen by the fact that both patients were moved to dedicated facilities. Want to bet that the doctors and nurses in Dallas are terrified of it after seeing two of their own infected?

    As far as Dr. Frieden goes, he’s destroyed his credibility by placing loyalty to the Left above the care of Americans. His interviews and then subsequent grilling on Capitol Hill have only served to scare people by his evasiveness and inconsistencies.

    And if it spreads, people will be looking to blame – it will start with Obama, Dr. Frieden(aka Dr. BigGulp) along with all the open border advocates in and out of office. Once the bodies pile up these fools will not be able to spin their way out.

    • This administration has explicitly placed the health of the West African economy above the health of American citizens. It’s hard to explain that priority without invoking Obama’s evident belief that the United States must have cheated and stolen from other parts of the world in becoming prosperous — and therefore the citizens of the United States must be punished by the importation of Third World diseases.

      Obama says, bizarrely, that we should not take more vigorous efforts to keep (more) Ebola out because “the place to fight Ebola is in West Africa.” In other words: We have no moral right to make serious efforts to fight it here as long as there’s more of it in Africa. Maybe “the place to fight Ebola” will be here only when there’s more of it here than there.

      The most benign interpretation of the administration’s policies is that the open-borders ideology trumps everything else. Any acknowledgment that there might be serious reasons to control entry into the country would go against the efforts to import as many Democrat voters and as much non-European-based culture as they can.

  4. In UK an idiot has already demanded that West Africans be brought to Europe so that they can be treated by NHS and simply saying that a few people in Britain getting “ifected would show true soliderite with our bruthers and sissters in Africa!”

    Yes this is true!

  5. Curiously, the BBC, Britain’s leader in PC propaganda, has decided that people from West Africa not having been screened and declared free from Ebola will not be given access to BBC studios and will instead be interviewed either via phone or skype. That’s discrimination isn’t it, it’s an example of Ebola phobia, surely, why it might even be racism. The BBC says it has a duty to protect its staff; you can imagine the BBC’s attitude would be to a government decision to ban flights from West Africa on the grounds that it has a duty to protect its population – I can hear the self righteous objections already…

  6. Ebola has been reported in the South African cricket team. Also ebatsmen and several efielders.

  7. When a self-Ebola- infected-suicidal-terrorist wanders amok in the US for a few diarrhea days before dying on a subway we shall have clarification of Islam, border security, immigration and some notions about competence and loyalty in our government.

  8. http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/101614-722174-islamic-burial-rituals-blamed-for-spread-of-ebola.htm?p=full

    “. . . Islamic burial rituals are a key reason why health officials can’t contain the spread of the deadly disease in West Africa.

    “Many of the victims of Ebola in the three hot-spot nations there — Sierra Leone and Guinea, as well as neighboring Liberia — are Muslim. Roughly 73% of Sierra Leone’s and about 85% of Guinea’s people are Muslim. Islam, moreover, is practiced by more than 13% of Liberians.

    “When Muslims die, family members don’t turn to a funeral home or crematorium to take care of the body. In Islam, death is handled much differently.

    “Relatives personally wash the corpses of loved ones from head to toe. Often, several family members participate in this posthumous bathing ritual, known as Ghusl.

    “Before scrubbing the skin with soap and water, family members press down on the abdomen to excrete fluids still in the body. A mixture of camphor and water is used for a final washing. Then, family members dry off the body and shroud it in white linens.

    “Again, washing the bodies of the dead in this way is considered a collective duty for Muslims, especially in Muslim nations. Failure to do so is believed to leave the deceased “impure” and jeopardizes the faithful’s ascension into Paradise (unless he died in jihad; then no Ghusl is required).

    “Before the body is buried, Muslims attending the funeral typically pass a common bowl for use in ablution or washing of the face, feet and hands, compounding the risk of infection. . . .

    “Ebola victims can be more contagious dead than alive. Their bodies are covered in rashes, blood and other fluids containing the virus.

    ” “Funerals and washing dead bodies in West African countries have led, to a great extent, to spread the disease,” a World Health Organization spokeswoman recently warned. . . .

    “Last month, Red Cross workers in Guinea were attacked by family members while trying to bury Ebola dead safely. In Sierra Leone, moreover, a family took Ebola-ridden bodies secured in body bags from the Red Cross, opened them up and exposed all members of the family to Ebola. They all contracted the disease.”

    No cremation allowed, just dump the body in the ground.

    • Did I read it here in the news feed, or possibly somewhere else, that Germany had an Ebola patient that died a few days ago. His body was immediately cremated. Whoever made that decision is now up on “human rights” violation because the man was a muslim and his religious burial rights were not honored.
      And that is just how crazy we have become.

  9. @William palmer: That scenario and variants have kept me awake for weeks. With our porous borders, they wouldn’t even have to get to the US, just be among the people heading north for a while, then there will be a whole lot of them, and we will let them all in and expose thousands at once.

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