Galloway on tour

George Galloway ("a hero for our time" - James Wolcott) is making the rounds of the Arab TV news channels, and his rhetoric grows ever more inflammatory, hateful and, yes, anti-Semitic with each fawning interview:

Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it.
[...]
It's not the Muslims who are the terrorists. The biggest terrorists are Bush, and Blair, and Berlusconi, and Aznar, but it is definitely not a clash of civilizations. George Bush doesn't have any civilization, he doesn't represent any civilization. We believe in the Prophets, peace be upon them. He believes in the profits, and how to get a piece of them. That's his god. That's his god. George Bush worships money. That's his god - Mammon.

I could only watch a few minutes of the video before shutting it off in disgust, but I did make it far enough to notice his little Ariel Sharon imitation during the Al-Jazeera segment. David Hirsh, commenting at Harry's Place, has Galloway's number:

Galloway is consciously doing his best to be inflamatory. In his racist imagination, the most effective way to inflame an Arab audience is to compare the Jewish presence in Jerusalem to a rape. Not a rape of his audience, you understand; he is not talking to women. It is a rape of their daughters. Their beautiful daughters.

"The daughters are crying for help," he says "and the Arab world is silent." And some of them are collaborating with the rape. Who does he have in mind? Perhaps he has in mind the Egyptian state, that has a peace agreement with Israel? Perhaps he has in mind people like Sari Nusseibeh, the President of Al Quds University in Jerusalem who signed an agreement to do joint work with the Hebrew University? Perhaps he has in mind the President of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, who wants to make a peace deal with israel? These are the people who collaborate with the rape of Jerusalem, that is in the hands of foreigners?

Israelis are foreigners in Jerusalem? What is their home Country, George Galloway? To where do you think these foreigners ought to return? What would be a just punishment for raping the beautiful daughter of all Arabs?

But, says Galloway, the Arab world is too weak and corrupt to do anything about this abuse of the property, the daughters, of the men to whom he is talking.

The only possible interpretation of this speech is that it is a call to arms, a call to Arab armies to invade Jerusalem and expel the foreigners.

So it is not only Egypt or Nusseibeh or Abbas that Galloway thinks are collaborators. It is also Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia. They are too weak and corrupt to organise a military invasion to expel Jews from the Middle East.

Galloway is now an open antisemite. He wants to see Israel militarily defeated and he wants to see the foreign invaders, the Israelis, sent 'home'. He also thinks that Muslims who work towards Palestinians and Jews living together in peace are collaborators; he thus compares them to people in Nazi occupied Europe who helped the Third Reich.

Now, nobody on the left, nobody in the Labour movement, nobody in Parliament, no liberal, no Guardian columnist, no Muslim, no SWPer, can be in any doubt what Galloway is.

Not that they give a damn. Speaking of British fascists, now we know where the Muslim Public Affairs Council-UK (MPACUK) - whose spokespeople sometimes appear on the BBC - gets its material. (Screenshot here.)

Posted by damian at August 2, 2005 11:10 PM | TrackBack