Recently Palmer United Party Senator for Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie, shared an anti-burqa image first posted by a group called Britain First on her Facebook page. The widely reposted image showed a woman dressed in a burqa and pointing a gun. It was accompanied by the words "
Terror attack level: Severe - an attack is highly likely" and "
For security reasons it's now time to ban the burqa". The text clearly showed the intention behind posting the image
"Do you agree the burqa is a security risk?" Much attention has been given to Lambie's use of the image but not so much to the group who originally supplied it.
The Photo
The first problem, as reported by many outlets (
ABC,
SMH,
news.com.au), is that the woman dressed in a burka and pointing the gun, portrayed by the posted image as a terrorist security risk, was in fact a leading policewoman from Afghanistan, Malalai Kakar (1967-2008), who was assassinated by the Taliban. An image of a woman who fought for women's rights in a country that always desperately needs such people has been ripped off
without the original photographer's consent or even attribution of the source, to make an implied claim that burqa-wearing women are a security hazard to the west, a view that neither the photographer nor subject (whatever their views on the burqa) would have shared. To make matters worse, Lambie has since said
that she knew the back-story before reposting the image.
Jacqui Lambie is a former soldier who says that putting your life on the line for your country is a great thing. Here, in pursuit of an anti-burqa agenda, she demeans the memory of a very brave woman who died doing exactly that and was killed by much the same enemy Lambie rails against - the Taliban, a group whose attitudes are such a big part of the "burqa problem" in the first place. This is not about Lambie's view that the burqa should be banned, but is about her way of expressing it. It's hard to tell whether Lambie is too stubborn, too determined to create sensation at any cost, or too malignantly clueless to understand this.
