George Galloway: Pro-Terrorist & Pro-Saddam

We have blogged on British M.P. George Galloway, leftist anti-Iraq War activist who will be speaking in Madison this Sunday.

Among the organizations sponsoring his speech is the Capital Times newspaper, which appears not to even care about projecting an image of sober neutrality.

Galloway has made no secret of the fact that he’s on the side of the terrorists who are killing American and British soldiers. Indeed, they are killing far more Iraqis, a fact that Galloway doesn’t seem to mind. On Al-Jazeera TV, July 31, 2005, Galloway described the terrorists as:

These poor Iraqis - ragged people, with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest and most basic of weapons - are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day, which has made the country ungovernable by the people who occupy it. We don’t know who they are, we don’t know their names, we never saw their faces, they don’t put up photographs of their martyrs, we don’t know the names of their leaders. . . . They are the base of this society. They are the young men and the young women who decided, whatever their feelings about the former regime - some are with, some are against. But they decided, when the foreign invaders came, to defend their country, to defend their honor, to defend their families, their religion, their way of life from a military superpower, which landed amongst them. And they are winning the war. America is losing the war in Iraq, and even the Americans now admit it. Even the puppet ministers and regime in Baghdad know it.

But Galloway has a long history of vicious anti-American and anti-British opinions. In 1994 he spoke on Baghdad radio, addressing the following to Saddam Hussein:

Your excellency, Mr President. I greet you, in the name of the many thousands of people in Britain who stood against the tide and opposed the war and aggression against Iraq and continued to oppose the war by economic means which is aimed to strangle the life out of the great people of Iraq.

I greet you, too, in the name of the Palestinian people. (He then spoke at length about his visit to the Palestinians).

I thought the President would appreciate knowing that even today, three years after the war, I still met families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam. . . .

I wish to say, Sir, that I believe that we are turning the tide in Europe, that the scale of the humanitarian disaster which has been imposed upon the Iraqi people is now becoming more and more widely known and accepted. . . .

So, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you hatta al-nasr, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-Quds (until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem).” (The Times, January 20, 1994)

As one letter to The Guardian put it:

In 1994, Saddam was already well known (inter alia) for having gassed the Kurds, murdered thousands of his political opponents, practised brutal ethnic cleansing on the Marsh Arabs, attempted to expunge a member of the UN and kidnapped hundreds of Kuwaiti citizens (all later found to be murdered).

Saddam killed more Muslims than any other leader alive. Yet for years Galloway lobbied for Saddam. And now he has the effrontery to pose as a defender of Muslims.

And who, again, is sponsoring the speech? The Capital Times. The Progressive magazine -- a leftist journal to be sure, but at one time a fairly reputable one.

And the Havens Center, an organization run out of the Sociology Department of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Their sponsorship of Galloway isn’t morally distinguishable from sponsorship of a Klan rally. That they don’t see that is a damning commentary on the contemporary American left.

And the way the local media treats Galloway will be a test of their objectivity. If they treat him as credible, they will have flunked.