On his radio program yesterday, Bryan Fischer reacted to the arrest of Ahmad Khan Rahami, who is a suspect in a string of bombings that took place in New York and New Jersey last weekend, by reiterating his call to ban all Muslim from immigrating to the United States, which he justified by once again falsely claiming that the U.S. had imposed a travel ban during the height of 2014’s Ebola outbreak.
“I have been suggesting for a number of years that we need to suspend Islamic immigration,” Fischer said, “because I honestly do not see an alternative. I’ve said before that Islam is like the Ebola virus of culture; it causes a culture to bleed out from the inside. When we had that Ebola crisis, we had to suspend immigration from any country where there was an Ebola outbreak because we could not know who was a carrier and who wasn’t until it was too late, so you just had to be careful with everybody.”
Fischer’s analogy is total nonsense, especially when you recall that during the outbreak, he accused Obama of intentionally refusing to impose a travel ban because he wanted the disease to come to America as punishment. As we pointed out before, the United States never imposed any sort of travel ban during the Ebola crisis because doing so would have been counterproductive. Instead, the government put in place protocols requiring that anyone traveling to the U.S. from Ebola-affected nations enter through one of five specific airports where enhanced screening would take place:
The Department of Homeland Security has announced that all passengers arriving from Ebola-affected countries in West Africa must go by way of a handful of U.S. airports as part of measures to control the spread of Ebola.
“Today, I am announcing that all passengers arriving in the United States whose travel originates in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea will be required to fly into one of the five airports that have the enhanced screening and additional resources in place,” Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said in a statement.
Starting on Wednesday, those passengers will then be subject to “secondary screening and added protocols, including having their temperature taken, before they can be admitted into the United States,” the statement said.
The airports are: New York’s JFK; Newark, N.J.; Washington, D.C.’s Dulles; Atlanta; and Chicago O’Hare.
Of course, we don’t expect Fischer to actually stop using his favorite analogy just because it happens to be totally false.
