George Galloway: The Next Anti-War Crackpot Icon?

Now that the media are getting a bit bored with Cindy Sheehan, just who will be the next hero of the anti-war movement?

One candidate is British MP George Galloway, a strident critic of the war who got himself thrown out of the British Labour Party.

Galloway will speak in Madison on September 18th, and one of the organizations sponsoring his speech is the Capital Times newspaper! Some indication of his extremist rhetoric can be gotten by looking at interviews he has given to Al-Jazeera and Abu-Dhabi TV.

First, Al-Jazeera:

I am speaking for tens of millions, and maybe more, around the world, who know the truth about Iraq. Who know that the real criminals are in Washington. Not in the United Nations. The real criminals are in the White House, not in the Elysee Palace. The real criminals are in the Congress, not in the anti-war movement. So I have no respect for this...

This is one of the reasons why we need Al-Jazeera in English, so that we can reach the people who, if you can reach them, you can win their hearts. They are not bad people. The American people are not bad or evil people. But they are ruled by bad people.

Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolph Hitler. It has killed far more people than George Bush. The economic system which these people support, which leaves most of the people in the world hungry, and without clean water to drink. So we’re going to put them on trial, the leaders, when they come. They think they’re coming for a holiday in a beautiful country called Scotland; in fact, they’re coming to their trial.

And in an Abu-Dhabi TV interview:

The people who invaded and destroyed Iraq and have murdered more than a million Iraqi people by sanctions and war will burn in Hell in the hell-fires, and their name in history will be branded as killers and war criminals for all time. Fallujah is a Guernica, Falluaja is a Stalingrad, and Iraq is in flames as a result of the actions of these criminals. Not the resistance, not anybody else but these criminals who invaded and fell like wolves upon the people of Iraq. And by the way, those Arab regimes which helped them to do it will burn in the same hell-fires.

One would at least expect the media to chide Galloway for mixing religion and politics!

But our guess is that, as was the case with Cindy Sheehan, they will overlook his extremist comments and sanitize his message.