The U.S. should consider banning flights from West Africa in a bid to safeguard the continent from the Ebola virus, says conservative author and award-winning filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.
“If you make a simple balance sheet, what is the risk of excluding some West African flights from coming in?” D’Souza said Monday on The Steve Malzberg Show on Newsmax TV.
“That’s minimal, versus what is the risk of having a very serious health problem in the United States? That’s something that weighs heavily on behalf of looking out for the health of our own citizens.”
Three West Africa countries are desperately struggling to contain an outbreak of the deadly virus — and one American doctor and his aide, infected in Liberia, have been flown back to the U.S. for treatment.
D’Souza, whose new documentary is called America, said the seemingly lax attitude towards keeping Ebola out of the U.S. could be indicative of a wrongheaded ideology that is sweeping the nation.
“There’s sort of this ideology … that somehow it’s bad for a country to look out directly for its own survival and its own self-interest,” he said.
“A country should and must protect the self-interest and in fact, the survival of its own citizens. Now, there are a lot of problems in the rest of the world — poverty, disease, epidemics.”
“We should be compassionate toward those people, but that does not mean that we should not draw a tight cord around ourselves and it is the first duty of any government to protect its own citizens.”
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