What is is with George Galloway?

According to what I've read, he had a better-than-average reputation for his constituency work; although I don't know if any of the Glasgow ILXors who have been his constituents would have anything to add to that.

A once 'potential-Labour-leader who threw his considerable talents away becoming a maverick, a admittedly gifted demagogue, + a nasty piece of work. (careful what you say about him too, he rivals Robert Maxwell in his use of the libel laws).

--hahahaha what a fuckin dork

People are trying to portray him as being an apologist for the bombers, but in truth he denounced them in the most violent language I've heard from anyone. All he said was that in order to deal with such groups, you have to stop them being able to find new recruits. Invading Iraq, supporting Israel etc. make it much easier for al-qaeda etc. to find new members. Which seems entirely correct to me.

Ed, he won his seat in parliament because his opponent was a slavish supporter of the war in Iraq, which he consistently opposed. What evidence does anyone have to the contrary, other than a conviction that the muslim community is incapable of rational thought and uniformly anti-semitic? If that's the case, how the fuck did the Jewish Oona King win a majority of 10,000 the last time round?

"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."

i kinda have to like him. sorry.

The collapse of the USSR was also the worst event in the life of many Russians, who've seen their life expectancy plummet under the new capitalism, mainly due to drug use, alcoholism and STDs.

There may be a few people inclined to make a link between the deaths in London and the intervention in Iraq. This is utterly flawed thinking. .......... London was not targeted because British troops are in Iraq or because of Tony Blair’s alliance with the Bush White House. Rather, London was attacked because these extremists want to ignite a “holy war” between themselves and democratic societies.

So The Times, too, was able to identify what motivated the London bombers before anyone had even claimed responsibility and while blood was still fresh on the streets.

x-post

Are you saying "as likely"? Because we know that security has been ramped up a lot more since the Iraq war. From a purely practical point of view, the authorities have considered that the Iraq war made this kind of event significantly more likely. And I'm curious to see commentators failing to admit what we'd condemn security planners for failing to admit.

precisely. galloway's core beliefs are admirable; it's the way he goes about things - crass, opportunistic, self-aggrandising - that's so offensive. and, sadly, his modus operandi only serves to detract from the sense in some of what he's saying, and to make him an easy target for the right-wing press etc.

in short: he's a cock.

That's why Oona King Lost, it wasn't why Galloway won, what about the other, equally anti-war candidates. I have never made the suggestion that the muslim community are anti-semitic, I wouldn't dare try and speak for them.

There is no point dignifying the political aims of murderers by giving them the oxygen of recognition.

Total bollocks Momus, especially that last line. I suggest you visit Johann Hari’s blog and try answering some of his "15 questions to supporters of George Galloway”, I’ve yet to hear a convincing answer to any of them:

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=624

One can have opposed the war in Iraq and still find Galloway completely reprehensible.

Regarding the attacks as the result of British involvement in the war in Iraq, as GG suggests (and you seem to be suggesting) is naïve.

The first and the second attacks on the WTC; the embassy bombings in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi; the Bali bombings all predated the war in Iraq.

Were the Casablanca bombings in any way the fault of the Moroccan government for protecting its Jewish community and enjoying good relations with the US?

Were the attacks on the Riyadh compounds justifiable because non-Moslems have no right to reside in holy Islamic lands?

How far are you prepared to go in blaming Blair and co for psychopaths placing bombs in public transport Momus? I’d like to hear it.

BTW OBL’s response to the mass murder of predominantly Ozzie tourists in Bali : Australia deserved it for supporting independence for Catholic East Timor from Islamic Indonesia!

tariq ali on the cause of the bombings

x-post: oh, for a killfile on ILX.

Bin Laden, like most of the 9/11 hijackers, is a Saudi. He's known with some certainty to be hiding in Pakistan. But Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are US allies, so they invade Afghanistan and Iraq instead. Is that "fair nuff" or just really stupid and cynical?

Also an Al'Q supporting Sunni kid in the UK is not going to cry for Shia dead in Iraq, but will for the dead of Fallujah.

if the full-on civil war comes (which dear god i hope it does not), it will make the lebanese civil war look as simple and bloodless as a chess match

"Britain's involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to the terrorist attacks in London, a respected independent thinktank on foreign affairs, the Chatham House organisation, says today."

The US is the world's prime hegemon, a military-political-ideological prime mover. For this reason, whoever is killing whoever else, it won't be too much of a leap to pin the blame on the US if the US is involved in any way, or has an interest in the outcome of a dispute. The Guardian article says "Britain's ability to carry out counter-terrorism measures has also been hampered because the US is always in the driving seat in deciding policy." Whoever is involved, and isn't the US, is necessarily out of control.

And the battle of the Boyne has contributed to IRA attacks. Yes the Iraq war has a bearing on what these people did but it is not the route cause, it is not what started them on the road to terrorism and it's naive to think otherwise.

capital stuff, george. the iraqis are doing for "all the people of the world" now.

When at Thy call my weary feet I turn
The gates of paradise are opened wide
At Goodison I know a man can learn
Rapture more rich than Anfield can provide.

In Coulter's skill and Geldard's subtle speed
I see displayed in all its matchless bounty
The power of which the heavens decreed
The fall of Sunderland and Derby County.

The hands of Sagar, Dixie's priceless head
Made smooth the path to Wembley till that day
When Bolton came. Now hopes are fled
And all is sunk in bottomless dismay.

And so I watch with heart and temper* cool
God's lesser breed of men at Liverpool.

(Or temple, as some have it.)

Now on with regular programming.

Er....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/jul/08/george-galloway-dusty-springfield

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19323783

Galloway - Assange is only guilty of "bad sexual etiquette".

Types of bad sexual etiquette
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bad sexual etiquette can be categorized in different ways: for example, by reference to the situation in which it occurs, by the identity or characteristics of the victim, and/or by the identity or characteristics of the perpetrator. These categories are referred to as types of bad sexual etiquette.

Contents

1 Groth typology
2 Date bad sexual etiquette
3 Gang bad sexual etiquette
4 Spousal bad sexual etiquette
5 bad sexual etiquette of children
6 Statutory bad sexual etiquette
7 Prison bad sexual etiquette
8 War bad sexual etiquette
9 bad sexual etiquette by deception
10 Corrective bad sexual etiquette
11 See also
12 References

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/feb/21/george-galloway-debate-israeli-oxford

anti-semitic Stalinist does something anti-semitic, film at 11

that makes it ok then

glad thats settled

nah, i'm just saying Galloway is a reprehensible human being, what else is there to add?

doesnt stop us all moaning about the daily mail

I suppose the american ilxors wont see it in here but maybe its best theyre unaware of george

George Galloway ‏@georgegalloway
@thomasmessenger an Israeli citizen could not by definition be my constituent.

o_0

i think he means he doesn't understand how electoral law works there, as well as being an anti-semite obviously

Was brian cox playing him for laughs on bbc4 last night

https://i.ibb.co/Wz4y0Xs/Screenshot-2023-04-12-at-09-47-33.png

George has uncovered a possible US regime change operation against Netanyahu

He should be all 'Simpsons characters betting on a monkey fight' about this, yeah?

George Galloway voted Tory in the last Scottish parliament elections and he should never be allowed to forget it.

The #Russian people are one, indivisible and unbeatable. The sooner western leaders accept that the better it will be for all of us. @MoatsTV https://t.co/r5jNgcGrKv

— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) June 26, 2023

George has discovered that the Russian people are one, indivisible and unbeatable., via his source Kim Dotcom

good to see the big man back saluting strength, courage and indefatigability once more

2/1 to win in Rochdale

me laughing my face off if he wins does not mean a personal endorsement

Labour is focusing resources elsewhere, after its candidate, the Lancashire county councillor Azhar Ali, was repeatedly abused by Deeplish locals. A video doing the rounds online shows him in a takeaway being called “Keir Starmer’s bum chum” while diners shout “free Palestine”.

The Labour candidate made some remarks about 7/10 being a Netanyahu inside job, it's surprising he hasn't been suspended. Grifter George has got the Nick Griffin endorsement. It's as ugly as it gets really, but still hope Labour lose.

the Green candidate has suspended his campaign after some islamophobic tweets resurfaced (but it's too late to take him off the ballot), plus Simon Danczuk is running for Reform UK so Rochdale voters who want to vote for a terrible candidate are spoiled for choice. There's a reverend running as independent focussing on environmental stuff who seems ok? (haven't done any detailed research, so don't hold me to that if he turns out to be an axe murderer or something)

This by-election is giving huge "microcosm of the state of politics in England" vibes

The Rochdale election was stolen. JD Vance is sane